Behold, this is my first standard-sized cartridge! I coded this in one sitting in only an hour and a third! I just developed it to a point where I feel ready to distribute this, so it may be unpolished or unbalanced!
The premise of this game is to try and make out text scattered over pigsties of backgrounds. Not only that, the text is also styled peculiarly. Use your keyboard (sorry controller users!). Obviously inspired by real captchas that work identically. Good luck! I hope robots will not be able to surmount such a thing any time soon and long live human race!!!
If you have any feedback or suggestions, I will be exuberantly more than happy to tweak this cartridge! This is a prototype cartridge after all, so there can be a lot of flaws!
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I am a pico-8 education edition user, and while optimizing my project, I noticed that the text representation of my sprite data and cartridge label contained a ridiculous amount of trailing whitespace in the .p8 file.
I removed the whitespace manually, and reduced the file size of my project from 46KB to 35KB, which is a substantial 11KB reduction, and the file still loaded successfully.
Would it be possible for PICO-8 to avoid writing unnecessary trailing whitespace when saving .p8 files and maybe apply run-length encoding for more compact files? I understand the current implementation may be convenient for editing and parsing, so perhaps this could be an optional compact-save mode rather than changing the default format.
That would be really useful for projects where every bit of cartridge source size matters, and it could also remain compatible with the existing format with the right implementation.
Thank you for your time!
Edit: Added the detail about the file loading successfully.
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Play in fullscreen mode for the best experience!
You are alone on this ship.
Use pipe shafts to explore abandoned structures, avoid the machines of their former occupants and find your way back to your kin.
Don't let what happened to them happen to you.
About
A short adventure game made for Halloween 2026.
This is my first foray into PICO-8, as I wanted to make something spooky for October. It took a little over two weeks to make and ended up being more about the vibes of an abandoned spaceship than anything particularly horrifying, but I had a lot of fun making it!
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PRONTO!
A fast pizza game for PICO-8 by Milena Sorokina
Enzo owns a sleepy little pizzeria by the sea.
The paint is peeling, the table wobbles, and the pizza has been awful lately.
Now Enzo is off to the beach for ten days.
Now you run the place.
Read the tickets, count the salami, catch the pizza at the right second,
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Helloo
This is a new version of my last project "Still Life" which is an implementation of "Conway's game of life" in Pico8, with a couple added features like (larger grid size) , (UI for cursor coordinates) and (mouse controls)
i did this because increasing the grid size means more interesting patterns can be used like the glider gun shown in the GIF, which weren’t possible in my last version
the downsides of this version is it doesn’t look or run as good as my last version but they were necessary sacrifices i made for having playable performance while being 2x larger.
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Infected Pixels
an infinite zombie shooter
It's my first pico-8 game I've finished (kind of) - and so I like to share it with you.
Hope you have fun - I had to develop it ;)
There will be some updates in the future for balacing and bug-fixing,
but the game is feature-complete so far.
I still have plenty of ideas, but I’ve also learned to actually finish a project—rather than letting it remain forever incomplete.
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GHOST THIEF SURVIVOR
15 minutes to survive endless waves of monsters!
A retro arcade game inspired by the awesome Vampire Survivors, with a spooky atmosphere perfect for Halloween!
Play as Ghost Thief and face endless waves of bats, skeletons, vampires, spiders, and other terrifying creatures in a frantic pixel-art survival game.
Armed with magical projectiles and powerful abilities, fight your way through hordes of enemies, collect experience, unlock new weapons, and grow stronger with every level.
The longer you survive, the deadlier the night becomes!
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Hello.
After some updates of windows 11 pico-8 started with WARNING : NO PERMANENT STORAGE
My app data folder, that contain data remains intact. I tried to move it, tried to install pico-8 on disc d with copy of app data folder and corrected paths if config.txt
Nothing helped.
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Warm hello PICO-8 community! I am an amateur PICO-8 programmer who has an obsession with PICO-8 and has been programming there for a month or two. I discovered PICO-8 from another website years ago but all I did back then was draw some sprites in the sprite editor and lay them out in the map editor, and that's it. I didn't write a single program because Lua looked intimidating. I suddenly remembered this gem exists a few month ago and this was where I got into a mania with PICO-8 :). I began by looking at demo cartridges and assimilating info from help pages from the help command. I got the hang of PICO-8 over time, and learned a decent amount of facts and parlance about the console.
I didn't feel like creating an account until a few days ago. I cannot wait to unveil my own programming style and the cartridges I have been working on!
I have a tweetcart that I restlessly tried hard to sardine to meet the 280-character limit. I don't know it was just me not being a professional tweetcart engineer or it is a hard thing to make into a tweetcart, but I am proud to present what I had done to complement my very first post. Unfortunately, I do not use Twitter so this is forced to be a postcart, but I do like that I managed to compress it to be under the 280-character limit. Hope you enjoy my very first tweetcart (which doubles as the first project I shared on this website)! If you want to know the thoughts and musings (and shivers) I had while I developed this, feel free to ask!
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Back when I was about 6-8 years old, I had a magnificent video game handheld console made by none other than RADIO SHACK in 1987! It had only one game built into the LCD screen, and I've kept it all these years.
You can see the real device here: retrohandheldgames
One day, I discovered this website where the game is fully playable in an almost perfect way: Javascript version
I dug a bit further and found the github javascript code of the web version! Having the source code and the sprite sheet inspired me to do a PICO-8 port. Why not? Let's go!
So here we are. It was a quick and fun mini project. The gameplay is... something. We have to internalize the clock's tick speed and move the car before the next tick. You have to go pick up the lady when she appears on the left; the left-most lane unlocks when she's there. Then, you have to move to the far right and drop her next to a mailbox. After 3 round trips like that, there's a small casino. The game will increase its tick speed based on your actions. There is no other goal than to achieve the highest score possible.
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Hello,
I am trying to capture the x,y coordinates that Pico8's line() method generates.
I tried using Bresenham's algorithm, but that doesn't produce the same pixels.
Does anyone know how to produce the exact same lines as Pico8?
Thanks,
UEc80X53
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Grändrs – A new 1v1 & Cup arcade game for PICO-8 is out now!
Hey everyone!
I've spent some time cooking up a retro-flavored arcade game for PICO-8 that I'm finally ready to release. The game is called grändrs, and it's a platform brawler inspired by BaraBariBall (from Sportsfriends).
The goal is simple: throw the ball, tackle your opponents, avoid glowing lava and deep water – and above all, humiliate your rival!
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Good day to you! This is Ruva, as always.
"打開 (Dakai) : Maze Break" is my 2nd stealth game, and this time it's even roguelike!
In this game, you are in the maze, followed by an enemy.
To escape, you need to collect all 7 Power Orbs to make an exit in the maze.
Enemy becomes gradually faster when you get Power Orbs, and even faster than you in the end.
But there are plenty of useful items as below, to avoid enemy.
- Dash : Accelerate with using Stamina meter.
- Rice Ball (50% / 100%) : Recover Stamina meter. Automatically used when Stamina meter runs out.
- Map : Shows the whole map, and also where player, enemy and Power Orbs are.
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Ive been wanting to make "Conway's game of life" for a while as Ive always been fascinated with cellular automata and "artificial/digital life", so Ive finally made it.
Below are some well known patterns to try, you can experiment and find more online.
(I used rrect & rrectfill for drawing the grid and cells to not hit limits with sprites)
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Hi everyone,
Here's my latest game, Kazamaru's Quest. It's a demake of one of my favorite Master System games, The Ninja. It wasn't the best-looking game, and it was really difficult (I never managed to beat it as a kid), but for me, it was one of my most fun games.
Because of the token limit, I couldn't include everything I would have liked from the original. But maybe I'll make a sequel with more levels (the one with the logs floating down the river is the one I regret leaving out the most...). I also couldn't include the mechanic that lets you disappear by pressing both buttons at the same time...
For anyone who hasn't played the original, one button throws ninja stars in the direction you're facing, while the other always throws them upwards. There are three types of scrolls: red scrolls let you throw a more powerful ninja star, while blue scrolls increase your character's movement speed. And then there are the green scrolls, which are hidden and only appear when you hit a specific rock or object. There are five of them in total, scattered across the game's seven levels.
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Beggining
A Work made by a brazilian group of students for the National Science and Tecnology week. We spended time and almost our lives to make this playable testing version, if you are able to play please leave a feedback. Stay in mind that it is just a showcase version.
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Chibi Train
How to Play
- Move the Cursor with the D-Pad
- Use selected tool with X
- Cycle tools with O
So What Is This?
It's a little train set! You can build trains in it. Think less a game and more a fun software toy. It's pretty rudimentary since I did this for a jam, but it's still fun to just watch them go.
So what jam?
Weeeellll. I wanted to do Ludum Dare 60, but I had work on Saturday. So I had to just host my own just for me! This was made over the course of 51 hours (So I wouldn't have finished Compo but oh well, there's always April).
How do you feel about it?
It's barebones. I knew it would be, but there's just a bunch of little bits of visual polish I wanted to add, like animated water, more environment art, following train cars, and most egregiously missed, smoke coming out of their smokestacks. I didn't want a game loop or objectives and for this to mostly be a toy to look at, but it's still egregious that there's so little visual interest.
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BITTER REMEDY
A potion shop game with consequences for PICO-8 by Milena Sorokina
You work in a little potion shop at the edge of town with a black cat.
Every day three townsfolk come in with their troubles.
Read their words, mix the right potion, and watch what happens.
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