
PICO-8 Fantasy Console - sephoric
https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
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sephoric
We bought this and have been having non-stop fun with it for months. It's an
incredible piece of software that I only wish I knew about sooner. It gives a
retro 70s-80s feel to making video games that gives kids today a hint of what
it was like to learn how to program back then, without being overwhelmingly
difficult or giving up modern conveniences (built-in spite and code editors,
lexical scoping, first-class functions and hash-maps, etc).

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kinleyd
Thanks for sharing. It looks like just the platform to get my daughter
started.

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kinleyd
And bought a copy... ran it and the accompanying sample game, and it looks
perfect for the job!

We had tried Lua and Love before but find pico-8 sets a better environment.

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sephoric
We had the same experience, much easier to use since it has a built in sprite
and map editor and easier functions. Don't forget to read the manual
(accompanying txt file) because it is extremely instructive and you'll miss
out on a lot of basic functionality if you don't! It explains not only the
API, but how to use the various editors, and even the very helpful differences
in PICO-8's own Lua compared to PUC-Rio's Lua.

As a word of caution from one parent to another, I know it's common lately to
encourage children to software careers, and even push them toward it, but I've
found it's far better to encourage them to cultivate whatever interests and
skills they have a natural inclination for. My daughter told me she doesn't
want to learn PICO-8 or Scratch, so immediately I backed off and let her
cultivate the crafts and crocheting interests and she seems far happier than
many young people I've met.

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RodgerTheGreat
If you like this sort of thing but you want something lower-level, based on an
assembly language and targeting a historical platform, you might enjoy my
CHIP-8 IDE, Octo. Like PICO-8, it provides an all-in-one toolkit for preparing
code/graphics/sound, and easy ways to share your creations:

[http://johnearnest.github.io/Octo/](http://johnearnest.github.io/Octo/)

