PICO-8 is a fantasy console and a game development environment. It comes with a code, pixel art, sfx and map editor. It has a very limited resolution, 128×128, and even a maximum number of tokens you can use. It’s all about constraints and doing less and while that can sound scary, it’s actually quite liberating.
From a programming perspective, you are given an init, an update function and a draw function and that mostly it. You also have an API for drawing things, playing sounds, but its all very bare-bones when compared to what you get from a Unity or a Godot.
This means that you have to implement your own collision detection, path finding, animation, etc. And again, this can sound quite scary, but once you get going, it’s actually quite nice. Mainly because it’s all under your control and there is no black box that you have to poke. When you run into unexpected behavior in Godot, and you don’t get help from the docs, you’re mostly out of luck. In PICO-8, since you wrote the collision detection (or, let’s be honest, found it on the internet) you can dive into debugging and hopefully eventually come to a solution.
Also, since it’s all code, it plays nice with version control and thanks to the restrictions you don’t have to worry about dealing with huge assets.
There really are too many good things to say about PICO-8. It uses Lua which is both powerful, but also very friendly towards beginners, there is a set 16 color palette so there is no fear that you will get stuck choosing the right shade of blue for your pixel art, and so on.
I highly recommend you check it out. The official site is PICO-8 Fantasy Console. It’s paid software, but there is also a free web version, PICO-8 Education Edition, that comes with some restrictions, but still gives you the full experience of using PICO-8.
I am currently using PICO-8 to do the impossible: finish a game. Join me on my journey!
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