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Comment by mikepurvis | Hacker News Reader

I had the same hopes for my kids with PICO-8, but it didn't really pan out— the things they were excited to do (make a platformer!!) all require a ton of boilerplate around movement, gravity, collisions, sprite animation, and so on. The high profile projects on the platform are all super polished and based on endless hacks and tricks that push the boundaries of the system, and it can be hard to get away from those expectations.

GameMaker has gotten pretty professionalized at this point, but back in the day I think it was a good entry point, with decent non-code workflows to get the basics going and a smooth on-ramp to adding behaviour code as needed.

I don't know what fills the hole that used to be platforms like ZZT and MegaZeux, though. Maybe it's Minecraft and Roblox that are the modern outlets for that kind of creativity.

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Pico-8 isn't super accessible as a game making platform, although it is a very accessible programming introduction platform.

HN tends to over use "boilerplate" as Pico-8 has zero boilerplate and is super minimal. Your post is no exception. Core gameplay code is not boilerplate and Pico-8 is not a game engine in that sense.

Playdate has Pulp, which does include built in collision, dialog systems etc and is inspired by Bitsy. Pulp has it's own (optional) scripting language and is specifically designed as an accessible game making tool. Even the Playdate Lua and C SDKs have more gameplay functionality than pico-8 though, including a simple game object model, collisions, animation, etc

I think he meant that Pico-8 is so stripped down you have to spend a lot time writing lower level game engine stuff before you get to the fun, moving things around, stuff. Not boilerplate in that you are repeating code within your Pico-8 game, but that you have to rewrite basic functions that come built in to typical game frameworks.

Exactly. And it's not that PICO-8 is bad for it; in fact PICO-8 is marvelously flexible since it imposes so little on you in terms of structure, so the games are a lot more variable than, say, something like rpgmaker, where the results can end up feeling a bit samey (until you have something really exceptional on the art and writing side, like Rakuen).

But yeah, as far an introductory programming platform, it's much better of think of PICO-8 as an upgrade from QBasic than an upgrade from ZZT.

I would always start with Scratch

https://scratch.mit.edu/

It has build-in collision detection etc. but to me turle graphics is the way to properly understand programming. Most other environments help with getting people interested in tech (and perhaps game development), but visual configuring event handlers is not programming. When I taught programming I often got people from other courses with an visual environment. They knew how to build forms and save data, but they could not programm: (to me) Think about a problem, make the problem into smaller problems until you can write code for them. Many were happy when we did switch to turle graphics and said "We should have started with that".

Scratch helps transition from the event handler configuration (which is fine if you want to write games, many environments don't make you write code) to coding (write code in a programming language) via turtle graphics.

My daughter uses a couple of block-programming browsers environments. One is Frozen-themed where you direct the characters to draw by skating as directed. Modern turtle graphics.

Or Snap!

https://snap.berkeley.edu/

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