Hacker News Reader

PICO-8 is a wonderful little thing. Kind of like a modern day Commodore 64 with a brilliantly intuitive IDE. My fourth grader has spent many a weekend tinkering with sound effects and sprites and animations and all the like. The whole space is nicely constrained (128x128px 4-bit color) while still being expressive enough to capture the imagination...

View on HN

Yep. although my son isn't really into coding, PICO-8 was the only thing we tried where we actually made a mostly functional platform game.

He got really into defining the sprites, levels and sounds, and that took him into coding movement and enemies and different bullets for the character.

> The whole space is nicely constrained (128x128px 4-bit color) while still being expressive enough to capture the imagination...

It's pretty cool but I get overly annoyed that it has strict source code limits.

Hopefully the token limit is what dominates coding most of the time, since it's significantly more realistic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com