Hey everyone!
I bought pico-8 as both a fun hobby for myself, but also to get my 6-year-old daughter into game development. We had a blast creating this, and it is our first game! It is a short adventure-platformer with a day/night mechanic that changes the levels a bit.
We have collaborated on everything from music, to art, level design, and even some code. She has proudly drawn pixel art, and decided on the main mechanics of the game, as well as the levels (and boss!).
She wanted me to release this game "to the world" π so obviously it's going on here. It's incredibly short, and more of both me and her learning the pico-8 platform.
We hope you enjoy this brief little platformer!




-Tumbleweeds you miss will pile up to the left, filling the screen and cutting of your space to move. The game ends when tumbleweeds fill all the way to the right.
-Hit shots without missing to fill your combo meter and get score multipliers.
-Shooting quickly will lower your accuracy. Let the recoil go down to stay accurate.
This game was created as part of Lazy Devs Academy's Basic Shmup Showcase.
I made this game to try and break some of the conventions I often see in the shmup genre. The combo system rewards accuracy over holding down fire the entire time. The low visual clutter aids comprehension, and the theme and setting offer a bit of variety to a genre full of ships shooting other ships.
Consider supporting my game on






I have finally released my first game/demo for pico-8! It's and endless runner that it's main concept is that you can flip or invert the world. The idea came about after reading through the Playdate SDK and seeing there was a way to flip the colours on the 1bit display. I thought I'd prototype on pico-8 first and then port to the Playdate console. The port is going well and I hope to have it released by the weekend. I will attach a link to an itch.io page when it is ready.
The code is not the most efficient but if I do decide to extend this then I will work on not loading in and inverting the whole map on each Z button press.
CONTROLS
-- UP or X to jump
-- Z to invert the world




[UPDATE#3]
I found a better solution for the bullet issue thanks to an fellow anonymous gamedev. Turns out I did not need to use "poke" at all. So, yeah. Also, I hope to make this is the final update. Let me know how it goes though. For now, I need a break.
[UPDATE#2]
Realized how too easy this game is, so I changed these:
-
Score system from by 10 to by 1
This makes sure that the score doesn't overflow into the negative. - How bullets behave:
Bullets now won't appear as much. Also, bullets will now disappear after you hit enemy.
Happy shooting.
[UPDATE] Fixed bullet hitbox.
My first Pico-8 game that actually is cool. <3
An endless shmup where you shoot down enemies in the night sky and score points. How high can you go?


Hello, everyone! This is my first PICO-8 game, started on an airplane with no wifi and finished as a fun little shmup toy while I was out of steam working on my main project.
Spiffy Spaceguy is an endless 80's-style side-scrolling shooter. Powerups will either switch your weapon type, power-up your current weapon (if you choose the same powerup style as the weapon you currently have,) or heal you. Different weapons have different strengths and weaknesses; play with all four to find your favorite!
While this is technically a work in progress, it's pretty complete. Have fun!
(PICO-8 is a delight to work with. I could see never going back to making larger games...)





Here is my Pico-8 version of Linjat.
Original game idea, levels from Juho Snellman
396 levels in 4 packs:
- easy (6x9) --> 99 levels
- medium (7x10) --> 99 levels
- hard (8x11) --> 99 levels
- expert (9x13) --> 99 levels
Have fun!


This is an exercise in whether I could and not whether I should try and write a primitive 3D engine within 1024 compressed bytes. Turns out I could but visually it would've been better to fake it. Nevertheless, I thought I would upload it here anyway. As it's pretty rough I won't enter it officially into the jam. It would be interesting to see how people from the community who are more proficient go about the same challenge.
It lacks any depth ordering so I put some dithering in there which I wanted anyway and helps mask the problem. Similarly I thought it would be cool to have a street light effect on the "road" so dithering was used there. It also has some really ghetto hacks to prevent clipping.



Fulmosago
A bright yellow ship is launched at full speed across the universe.
Mission code is Fulmosago. The objective : a small and well-guarded planet.
Based on Basic Shmup Tutorial by Lazy Devs Academy.
Controls
In menus, press X or C to confirm.
In game, use arrow keys to move your ship.
The ship will shoot automatically when there are enemies. Hold C to force shoot. Hold X to prevent autoshooting.
Pickups
- pink pickup restores health (or add one extra heart if health is full)
- orange pickup activates double front canons
- blue pickup activates side canons (auto-guided orbs)




Picoi-Koi
Picoi-Koi is a PICO-8 implementation of koi-koi, a game played with hanafuda cards.
Gameplay

β to select/confirm
π
ΎοΈ to display all captured cards
Knowledge of koi-koi is obviously highly recommended to enjoy the game, but here a quick rundown of the rules :
Rules
An hanaduda deck contains 48 cards, 4 cards for each month :

Each round, you try to capture card by matching a card from your hand with a card from the table with the corresponding month, then you reveal the top card of the deck and try to match it in the same way.
This is an entry for PICO-1K Jam 2022. The whole game fits in exactly 1024 bytes of compressed PICO-8 code.
Hold Z to charge laser. When laser charged, release Z to shoot rock.
When you shoot rock, gem fall out. Get gem. More gem got without shoot = more combo point.
Get 10000 point to become master of shoot rock.

I had a bit of time to tinker yesterday. I'm not sure what made me think of the old Infocom text adventures but here we are.
If you're familiar with Text Adventures (or Interactive Fiction) you may know that one of—maybe the—most popular tool for creating them has been the Inform language. The current version is Inform 7 but waaaaay back when I was first learning, it is was Inform 6.
Anyway, I decided to throw together a quick little IF authoring API loosely based on Inform 6. It is by no means complete or particularly advanced. Basically, I followed the first tutorial for the game Heidi from The Inform Beginner's Guide and implemented just enough to make it work. But work it does! Mostly. I think...




Hey guys.
Yeah, I'm actually back again after 2 years or less...and I've been busy. Like super busy. I've had several projects, most of which aren't even related to Pico-8, but nevertheless hard work. Also, IRL has been a rollercoaster too, but I have little time to explain everything.
Anyway, I do have a Pico-8 shmup game in the work. I can't really post it here yet until I'm actually satisfied with it. I can give one thing though: I think I finally got the problem-solving part of programming down somewhat.
In case if you haven't noticed by the change of profile settings, I have an itch.io account now. It's cheez26. Check it out sometime. I even released a non-Pico8 project on there. Also, I've pretty much abandoned Twitter at this point, so don't bother with that tbh.
To put it simply, keep an eye out for a new Pico-8 game on here and maybe itch.io.
If you've been following me here, good job. You're more patient than me. Thanks for that.
Anyway, see y'all later.
Sincerely,