Learning PICO-8

// 2022-11-14, 3 min read, #programming #pico-8 #game design

Past

I have two very early stand out memories of computers. Once when I was really really young, in our first house in Hazel Park, my dad sat me on his lap and let me plonk away on the keyboard of his computer. He had a whole office set up directly across the upstairs hall from the bedroom I shared with my little (later to be middle) sister. I don't know when this was, but it was definitely earlier than 1993. The computer may have been his Commodore PET, a machine that I would end up playing on quite a bit as I got older.

The second memory is the first time he taught us to program. Basic DOS games made in, well, BASIC. GW-BASIC, I believe. This was on his 486DX. This was my first introduction to making my own programs.

As I moved through elementary school, I found myself pulled in by web design. I had a silly little website in 4th grade, it was just a playground, hosted on webspace provided by our cable internet provider @Home. By 6th grade, I ran a Pokemon fansite and was part of a couple webrings. I even wrote some Pokemon fanfic (a fact I only recently have been comfortable sharing) on that site. This one existed on some old geocities-like website centered around WB cartoons called ACME City. Both sites have been lost because neither service exists anymore. Part of me is a bit sad, it'd be fun to look back I think! But mostly I think I would be embarrassed.

I decided, at my father's pushing, to go into software engineering at university. Learned a lot of good stuff, but my favorite classes were absolutely our misguided Assembly course which had us making video games on the Gameboy Advance in C, and our Mobile App Development class where my ex and I made a small little video game on Android. I did also super enjoy some of the networked applications we made in the Operating Systems class, but to me video games have always had a tangibility nothing else has. I did poke around on the DS a bit too using PAlib (I believe the same library we used for the GBA).

After college I moved into IT where my programming skills didn't really get used a ton. A little powershell here, some bash there, some Mikrotik RSC elsewhere. I did some perl and bash for personal projects, but mostly my application development skills went unused.

Present

Which brings us to a month ago, when I purchased a PICO-8 license because I was feeling nostalgic for making silly little games. The limited nature of the platform both sounded like a nice way to ease myself back in while also providing some interesting and fun challenges.

So far I haven't released anything yet. I started trying to make a Puyo-Puyo clone, but struggled a lot with the logic for dropping a piece to the bottom in one move. Someone on Twitter validated me quite a bit saying that is always a big struggle for Tetris and Puyo-Puyo clones. I decided to set it aside for a while instead of bash my head into the wall over it. I played around with some top down collision detection and ran into some issues with changing maps/camera position and keeping the collision detection lined up. I set that aside when I had an idea for a mostly complete, single screen game which I've been progressing on quite well.

There was an old Dexter's Lab game on the Gameboy Color I played as a kid, though it frustrated me greatly. What I can recall is that Dexter went up and down various floors to collect lab equipment and sometimes shoot robots. Turns out the robots were a bigger part of the game than the lab equipment, but I'm sticking with my initial vision of: collect lab equipment (treasure), and fend off baddies as you try to get a highscore.

While it isn't finished yet, this is the most progress I've put into a game idea. I've been learning a lot and really enjoying working with PICO-8 (and I can definitely see why I might want to use another platform like löve2d for certain game ideas in the future). I'm still figuring out what features I want to implement, what works with the game, and how to tune difficulty. I'm really keen to get something released, no matter how simple it is. This has been a lot of fun and I would love to tackle some more complex concepts soon.

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