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Comment by cableshaft | Hacker News Reader

It's better than others, I just got frustrated with it for what I was making. And I think for a learning program it's excellent (I mean, I learned how to program initially from making text games on my TI-Calculator in TI-BASIC, talk about limited :)

I think the Pico-8 system does a pretty good job of being open to pretty much whatever you throw at it for game logic (it's just lua scripting), while having a bunch of other things built in to allow for sprites, music, etc. You're limited in colors, graphics, and music, but the actual programming process feels a lot smoother to me (in fact I was able to port the logic of a game of mine with only converting it into lua code). If I were just getting started nowadays, I'd probably be making games in Pico-8.

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>I learned how to program initially from making text games on my TI-Calculator in TI-BASIC, talk about limited :)

Me too! Ti 83-Plus! I always say the day I became a programmer was the day I accidentally hit PGRM twice (opening the PGRM catalog).

The thing is when I started on the Ti-83 I was still in grade school, so I was limited to things I had access to (the only reason I even had the calculator was because my dad had one and I..."requisitioned" it :D).

So even if there was something like Pico-8 (And iirc there was, Uzebox) I couldn't get access to it until much later, after the point I had started with Game Maker too. I think stuff like Game Maker and RPG Maker was great because there was no cost or barrier to entry other than a PC (Even if it meant carrying around Game Maker files on USB sticks and using library computers like I did)

Edit: Totally confused Pico 8 with something else! (Pocketchip), I think the younger me would probably have been vastly confused by the idea of programming a "virtual console" but it'd definitely have been an interesting route to start programming with

Pocketchip was the portable hardware device they made so you can play Pico-8 games. I picked one up and unfortunately I don't recommend it.

I think they screwed up the design and feel of the buttons, and it's actually very difficult to play the games (especially the D-Pad) or program directly on the device as a result.

They needed something closer to keys on a graphic calculator, actually, and a proper d-pad, and I might have used it more than the two times since I got it a year ago. I was actually hoping it'd be like a TI calculator but dedicated for gaming, but alas, I had a better device for ultra portable game development 23 years ago.

I still play the Pico-8 games on the computer though and there's some really cool ones out there. I have a game that's almost complete myself (basically just a demake of my most popular game that I often use as an exercise to learn a new system), but I got distracted by other shiny things. Maybe I'll get back to finishing it sometime in the next six months.

I bought Pico-8 and forgot about it, after your glowing recommendation I think I need to give it a try :)

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