I'm serious! Everything is so gorgeous and animated, sounds fantastic, and I'm all... "I have 64 tiles/frames and sfx/sequences to make THAT happen!?" :o
/curls into fetal position with all my jellybeans
...and here I'm butting my head against a wall, trying to figure out how to correctly phrase "make a sceneID, make a doorway.sceneID table, cross-reference sceneIDs in the appropriate doorway tables."
Like, I'm browsing the code shortcuts at the end of Fanzine #3, and I see mockups of Golden Axe, right? I'm thinking "this must be a mockup." No, there's actually a fecking thing of it. WAT?
I second that! ;P It's frustrating but encouraging at the same time. I don't have sprite chops like a lot do around here, but it's great to see what can be done with Pico-8...so I know the vision in my head can be created, just gotta figure out how.
Not that it has anything to do with sprite work, but I often forget that Pico8 has been around a while and many here have been using it a long time. Me, I'm new, so I'm still in the "how do I get the damn background to scroll" - hopefully it'll all click in time.
So my plan is to make a bunch of boilerplates for different styles of games that I can then start from and then drop in sprites later. Music...well...that's another story entirely. For now I just gotta be happy with being able to make a square move around and shoot bullets :)
It won't explain everyone, but some of us spent half of our lives doing this professionally. It's really common for game programmers to play with retro platforms.
Plus the hobbyist scene in embedded hardware has gone nuts the past five years with raspberry pi and so on, so there's a big enough fanbase now that you're bound to find some real savants in the group.
But don't be discouraged, for most of us it's been a matter of time spent learning. Get enough info in your head, enough ideas stolen from people you see doing things right, and it'll start to come to you as if by second nature. :)
not pico8 specific but this is an old but good pixel art tutorial that explores classics and decomposes them.
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