Hello, since you seem to be making a game in 64x64 resolution, how about making it 32 colors instead of 16 ?

@RealShadowCaster Pico-8 only supports 16 colors at once...?

@ooooggll
There is at least 3 video modes that allow more than 16 onscreen colors on the same frame.
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=78518
The one I was suggesting is the least used one : 128x64 with horizontal wide pixels.
This mode has a lot of drawbacks : non square pixels, half resolution, incompatible with pico8 draw instructions, and horizontal scrolling is painful to implement due to the way the memory is organised in this mode.
Despite all that, this game seems to be a rare case where it might be worth it : No resolution loss, plenty of cpu to spare so the draw primitives can be rewritten with pokes, and 32 Instead of 16

I like this idea, but I'm confused how it works. (Experimenting with memory is not my expertise.)

The simplest way would be to make The game in 64x64 16 colors as you’ve started, but be sure to have plenty of spare cpu. At the same time, make a 32 colors version of the sprite sheet, and I’ll take care of the rest. The idea is that every function like spr or map will be replaced in the init by slower lua functions that handle 32 colors.
There’s also a big string containing the 32 colors sprite data that will need to be parsed to prepare for the calls to the spr sspr etc that need sprite data.
Ideally you should be able to just make the game in 16 colors and then prepare the sprite sheet.
What might save 33% of cpu for map() is to only use 29 colors out of 32, so that might be an optimisation worth keeping in mind.
I’ll post a small demo here next week end.

Ah yes, this reminds me of college.. being unable to approach strangers.. the professor's writing, unreadable.. the computers, barely functioning.. excellent simulacrum

@kozm0naut If this game was a charade, you are the winner. :)