PICO-8 is a wonderful little thing. Kind of like a modern day Commodore 64 with a brilliantly intuitive IDE. My fourth grader has spent many a weekend tinkering with sound effects and sprites and animations and all the like. The whole space is nicely constrained (128x128px 4-bit color) while still being expressive enough to capture the imagination...
Yep. although my son isn't really into coding, PICO-8 was the only thing we tried where we actually made a mostly functional platform game.
He got really into defining the sprites, levels and sounds, and that took him into coding movement and enemies and different bullets for the character.
> So can confirm basic sounds effects add a LOT to the experience. A lot more than I was expecting.
Good insight. Some folks trip over themselves to say “you gotta prototype something to see if it’s fun” but the reality is that a lot of stuff is not fun without the juicy bits
As someone who has prototyped games, no. This just isn’t true. When stuff happens without sound it feels plain and empty and lifeless and demotivating.
Further, the “is it fun question” is honestly a nonsense question. That’s usually a question about the larger game loop. A lot of games’ gameplay that people like is in fact not actively “fun” but is perhaps engaging or immersive. Which is not something you deduce easily from barebones prototypes.
This advice works ok if it’s just an arcade style game that you play and that’s it, but that’s not really common
More like try watching a comedy where nobody cared about getting the room tone to blend things right, no foley and sound effects work was done, and there was no provision in the budget for fixing things in ADR. See if you make it through the first 10 minutes before feeling the full ticket price was a scam.
Some kind of immersion is a prerequisite to a worthwhile experience. Sound is a pretty cheap and effective feedback medium for player actions, it quickly helps to define and telegraph changes in environments and settings (¿is this a safe encounter or the prelude to a boss fight?) and is crucial in helping to keep engagement during non-playable segments (in the earlier days, sometimes even printing dialogue text to screen was accompanied by sound effects to avoid alienating the player).
That's not a great analogy. Soundtracks are often in the top ~5 most important parts of making a game special.
A laugh track doesn't really change the narrative or the experience that much, except on comedies which are only barely funny to begin with. You could remove the laugh tracks of any of my favorite comedies and I'd enjoy them maybe 1% less.
But games like Fallout NV, Doom, the GBA-era Pokemon games, would be a whole lot less immersive (and less fun) without their amazing soundtracks.
Game looks fun, I will give it a try. If anyone wants to try writing PICO-8 games in TypeScript instead of Lua, I made a project to make it easy to get started.
Does anyone know of an open-source version of PICO-8? I don't even care about any of the features, as long as there's an active community around the project.
You should checkout WASM4⁽¹⁾, an Open Source WebAssembly-based fantasy console with 4 colors and a 160x160 screen.
One of its advantages over TIC-80 is that you can program games in any language that compiles to WebAssembly. The games are tiny pure Wasm "carts" that can run on any Wasm runtime, from the browser to Nintendo 3DS.
To all the sibling repliers:
PICO-8, TIC-80, Load81 and probably others are somewhat Lua oriented.
What is it about Lua that makes it so popular in this area?
That's not really a fantasy console though -- it's just a framework for making games. What makes a "fantasy console" like Pico-8 or Tic-80 is that it is an entire environment that you develop and run your code in, as if it were an emulator of a system, albeit one that never actually existed.
Very nice! Would love to find time to build a PICO-8 game some day. I’m a bit confused as to whether it took the OP 3 years or about a week to build the game, though:
> September 18th 20203 - I think im actually going to commit...
PICO-8 is really fun! I've released two games with it and I'm working on my third. For the third one I'm trying to push the edge of what the limitations permit, which adds quite a bit of complexity to an otherwise straightforward engine. You are only allowed a certain amount of tokens (~2k lines of code), characters, and compressed cart space. Maximizing the use of these limits requires a lot of tricks!
One of these weekends I need to just sit down and finish my Pico-8 game. The gameplay is working fully (minus a couple nice to haves I wanted to add), I was just stuck on menu and logo design and sound/music when I drifted off.
It's a pretty nice system and fun to play with. I recommend it.
It is a pretty fun game! It is also encouraging to read your sharing.
Have been a game player since my childhood. Thinking about create my own games but haven't completed one yet, sinceI found it a bit overwhelming to architect all resources into a game.
Creating the first game with constrains would help a lot to start. BTW really love pixel games!
This game is super fun! I've never really gotten into one of these games before but this one sucked me in. Made me want to get a handheld or something :).
How do the different opponents work? Are they using some sort of known strategies? Seems like they would follow a pattern and once you figured it out you could defeat them. How far does it go?
