A Pico-8 story: How the fantasy console unlocked Frédéric Souchu’s dreams
nanark.medium.com
nanark.medium.com
Also, as a software engineer, I wasn't afraid of the development part of the game, but I was very skeptical of my capacities to draw characters or levels. Pico-8 helped me to achieve something without feeling ashamed. Because I knew that I was, by nature, limited in my sprites, it helped me releasing my inhibitions and drawing as if I was a 5 years-old boy proud of his drawings. Same thing for the music and sounds.
Another cool thing is that even when writing code, I didn't feel like I was doing the same thing as during the day. Just writing code, in a closed and stable environment, with a very modest API, and finally the ability to release and convert your game into a JS file in just one command is infinitely satisfying. After a day spent struggling with CloudFormation on AWS, it was a blessing!
Getting back to the article, I was familiar with Fred's games, and I personally think he's one of the most talented developers in the community, I'm very excited for the upcoming Poom game, which frankly is beginning to border on Dark Magic.
Working at 16x16 _only_ has greatly increased by skill since I have to be creative and work around the size limitations. Additionally, a small color palette does the same, but I'm not there yet..
That's a great achievement. "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child." (Picasso)
As someone who cut my teeth on the first 3D generation of games I'd personally love to see a Pico-64, or whatever, that targets the N64/PS1 experience; 2D games aren't really nostalgic for me. It would be harder - who knows how you'd go about creating a 3D asset tool on the same level of simplicity as the Pico-8's sprite editor (and a texturing tool to match) - but I can dream.
I would also absolutely love a very simple N64/Saturn/PS1 era 3D modelling / game engine in such a lovely simple package.
Low-poly, low-res textures, with an option for that wonderful grainy kinda PS1 dithering if we'd want. :)
Unity shader asset: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/psxeffects...
Godot shader example: https://github.com/MenacingMecha/godot-psx-style-demo
You can use modern modeling tools with self-imposed limits on model complexity and texture sizes. (Blender is even era-appropriate — its first public release was in 1998.)
In the context of a PS1-era demake: https://www.gamesradar.com/heres-how-to-create-a-ps1-demake-...
Alternatively, see Crocotile3D, which approaches that era's aesthetic from a different angle of simplified tile-based modeling: http://www.crocotile3d.com/
Polygonal 3D is a huge step compared to 2D engines. You can't just create assets with a simple bitmap editor, you need to learn 3D modeling and it's a huge can of worm. And then you need to learn to animate your models...
With voxels you can just sculpt your models minecraft-style, it's a lot more intuitive I think. And animations could be done like for sprites: you just key your animations with different 3D voxel models.
Pico-8 also has a basic music synthesizer so you find many pico-8 songs online if you're into 8-bit music.
* Pico-8 "cartridges" are PNG images with the source code hidden inside the low-order bits using steganography. If you see a picture of the cartridge that picture is also the game! https://pico-8.fandom.com/wiki/P8PNGFileFormat
* The main limit on how large the program can be is the number of tokens. An earlier version just had a character limit but that encouraged the game developers to use unreadable minified code with terrible variable names.
https://liko-12.github.io/ (lua, open source, I haven't used this much, but it seems nice)
https://github.com/ftsf/nico (nim, open source. Not quite the same as the others, there's no IDE, etc. But it's a library with an API similar to PICO)
I am 100% ok with Pico-8 being closed. It's a fucking game engine, not a crypto library. I am a fan of FOSS, but I often see people demand and feel entitled for free stuff. This is wrong.
Once in a while, sit back and enjoy what people create without a slightest bit of dissapointment, entitlement, itch to make mods and hack it, etc. It will bring happiness and peace. Look at it from a different way - it's someone's unadulterated, unbikeshedded vision of what a tiny game engine should be. No PR drama, he doesn't need to answer hundreds of angry assholes on Github, ... I think its beautiful.
Hopefully if the author ever decides to stop working on the project they'll release the source code for the community to keep it alive.
There are a lot of game engine like projects on Github with full code available that are anything but easily runnable on modern operating systems.
this has nothing to do with feeling entitled to get things for free, it's more an internal feeling that computing has divided itself into an interesting and vibrant ecosystem of open source software, and proprietary products that are in some sense the equivalent of a neighbourhood diner - they might actually be very nice, and are surely of interest to people who live in said neighbourhood, but they are never going to be relevant to me in any real way. being closed just sucks all the excitement out of things - i can, as you say, sit back and enjoy it the way i would a piece of art, but i can't summon up any enthusiasm about using it.
(if there were a book about it i would totally buy and read that, though; i do enjoy the fact of its existence and the community around it, and stories about its development and growth continue to be fascinating.)
Except if the book wasn't open source then it "suck all the excitement out of things?
Do you refuse to play all games that aren't open source? Don't watch movies unless they are open source?
There isn't much to Pico-8 in terms of runtime. The LUA you write is yours and I'm confident if you really wanted to use it somewhere else it wouldn't take more then a few days to repo the features. There just isn't that much there. A few draw commands, some input, and audio functions. What's to lose?
The entire package, loaders, editors, exporters, etc is a lot of work but you're no losing anything by writing games in it.
If it were open source, and community-driven then by now Pico8 would just be a regular old game framework: features would get added and added until it was just like any other game library.
As it stands, the secret-ness of the code is a big part of the fun. Figuring out how to push the limitations and looking for sneaky ways to do new things. It feels like exploring and trying to master the early 8bit computers back in the day. That's the "fantasy" part!
That's why I call Pico-8 a fantasy console, and the knock-offs are just "feature-limited game libraries"!
Personally, I'd both like to see and open-source way to play back pico-8 cartridges and lexaloffle continuing to be financially rewarded for building a pretty cool (and cheap!) platform, so I hope the graphics and sound editors won't be included in free clones anytime soon.