Hi, complete noob here trying to work on my first game. Sorry if this has been asked before!

A friend of mine offered to do the soundtrack and handle all the sfx, but he lives in another state.

How do I go about letting him collab with me? I need him to he able to get into the code editor and all that.

Thank you (:

there are multiple ways!

during development, you save your cart as P8, which is a text file;
PNG carts are made at the end, to upload to the bbs or share with other people.

so if you work on the main game cart and your friend only makes music, it’s easy to copy all sfx and music from their cart to yours using any text editor, or even with some tool written in pico-8 (a cart can read and write other carts, so we have some music players, renoiser to move sfx around without breaking music tracks, respriter to move sprites without breaking the maps, etc). this is probably the easiest as you’re not both working on code or sprites.

you can also have your cart shared using dropbox or something similar, and an understanding that you only change the code, sprites and map, and they only change sfx and music. I’m not sure how dropbox (etc) show diverging versions though; developers have this problem all the time and use version control systems (mercurial or git) that really help to merge multiple changes to the same file, but if you don’t already know them they can be too much to learn just to make a little game.

let us know if that sounds good, or if it wouldn’t work for your situation (I didn’t understand why your friend would need to get into the code editor if they’re only doing sfx and music).