I put together a page for my favorite PICO-8 games, and figured you'd all enjoy it! https://www.playpico.com/. At the time of this posting, there are currently 113 games - let's see how it grows!
Big update Jul 27th, 2017
The website has been completely rebuilt from scratch. I'm still working on some more features for it, but it's at a point now where I wanted to push the progress live. It's now built on top of my PHP MVC framework, Lightning, available here: https://github.com/clowerweb/Lightning.
- UI facelift. It's still fairly similar to the old UI, but has many improvements in both aesthetics and usability.
- Better performance; it should be snappier than ever now.
- Featured games! The front page is now a list of 24 featured games, chosen randomly each week. You can still go to the full games list by clicking "All Games" in the navigation, but this is no longer the index page.
- Every Tuesday, it'll choose 24 random games to feature on the front page. Once a game has been featured, it cannot be featured again for 90 days, to keep the rotation fair.
- Registration and login! You can now register for the site and login. There aren't any profiles or anything yet, but there are many things coming that registered users will be able to do.
- There's now a fully interactive volume control, where you can set the game volumes to whatever you like. This preference will be remembered in a cookie and persist through page reloads and from game to game.
- Searching and sorting now "remember" your search term and sorting preference when clicking the back button to go back to the games list (by appending variables to the URL). This of course isn't a cookie and doesn't persist the same way as volume, it's just so that when you go back to the main list with the browser back button, you don't lose your search/sort.
- Games now have their titles as the URL (previously, it was the game's ID in the database, for example "Barrier Blast" was at /play/316 -- it's now at /play/barrier-blast. Don't worry about your bookmarks - the old URLs now redirect to the new ones.)
That's about it for now. More to come!
I'm going to preemptively address a few things.
Why isn't my cart there?!
Please don't get offended - it could be one of several innocuous reasons:
- Your cart isn't a game. If it's a demo or something like that, while I do love and enjoy them, this page is just for games.
- Your game isn't complete or is a WiP that doesn't have enough completeness to provide a lot of gameplay.
- Your game is very similar to other games that are already on there. As much as I probably loved your SHMUP, I've already got like 3 or 4 of them on there, and I wanted the page to feature diversity. I didn't pick the SHMUPS that are there because I liked them more than yours (necessarily), I may have just come across yours after the others were already there.
- Your game is 2-player only. I don't have anything against games like this, but I personally don't have anyone to play them with to see if they're good.
- Your game has a game breaking bug. Fix it and let me know!
- Your game is too basic. Get creative, add some flavor and make it juicy, and let me know and I'll take another gander at it!
- If your game is new-ish, I don't update the page on daily intervals or anything, so give it time. If it's unique, complete, an actual game, and I see it, then it'll probably make its way on there eventually.
- I may not have seen your game - tell me about it! I haven't gone through literally every cart on the BBS, so it's entirely possible that I missed it.
I told you about my game X days ago and it isn't up there yet. Why?
If it fits any of points 1 through 6 above, that could be why, but it's probably because of point #7. I also might not even look at this thread every day.
Why is such-and-such incomplete/WiP/duplicate style/broken game on there when mine isn't?
Because it's my list and I'll do what I want :P I'm not necessarily going to adhere to every single above point 100% of the time. If I thought there was something especially awesome about a game that's not perfect, then I put it up there.
Will you provide a way to submit games to your site, similar to the BBS?
No. I like to keep this as a fairly diverse and quality controlled list. You are welcome to post here and bring my attention to your game, though - there's always the chance that it's not already on there because I haven't seen it yet.
Will you add a comments section to each game, similar to the BBS?
Probably not. The reason is because authors have already published their games to the BBS, and many also post them to itch.io and other sites. I don't want them to feel obligated to check yet another site for comments on their titles. Instead, there's a link from the game pages to the cart thread on the BBS, so players can jump to the BBS thread at any time to comment.
I don't want my game on there. Please remove it.
No problem. Just post something here asking me to remove it. Once I see your post and verify that the game is yours, it will be removed.
Changelog:
I'm glad you liked my game. My only suggestion would be to display the games' author more prominently.
Zatyka, that is actually a limitation of the PICO cartridge, it's a tiny little thing (actual cart .PNG image). Now it might be possible for Scathe to have one ZOOM in when it's highlighted or hovered over by the mouse, and then the author could be clearly seen.
He's doing some real web wizardry there to get it to shimmer and all as it is. :)
... you know, I did something like this in Writer's Cafe, but not nearly as fancy.
http://www.writerscafe.org/writing/dw817/1234184/
The main reason I did this is WC only allows 10-links per post. So I had to get clever and come up with this crazy thing that actually uses a very old method of transferring web data to servers, usually EMail.
Trying out one of your games in full-screen, it left-justifies it, not centers it.
@zatyka Yeah, I've had plans to put a little more info in the modal, underneath the web player, with author info and instructions. I just haven't gotten around to doing it yet because I'll have to dig up all the carts on the BBS to find all the info (and I'll be damned if I don't have to severely strain my eyes trying to read anything on the PNG, as DW pointed out, plus a lot of them don't have info on them anyway). Might be a good project for tomorrow.
@stefstef I don't even know how that one's not in there! I played it when zep released it, must have forgot to download it! Fixing.
I hope in the future to write a game worthy of your list, Scathe ... Lemme build some utilities first. Gotta have those.
@dw I hope that even I have a game worthy of being in there one day! I've made a few, but nothing worth putting in there yet.
I'm looking at some of your programs ...
The Knight w the Dragon, you might consider this. I've only seen it in one RPG, Lunar Silver Star, and it's a marvel. You can run headlong into an object. If you try to CONTINUE to move in that direction, it will scan LEFT or RIGHT from its position and see which is the quicker way to get around.
Then it will face in that direction and even if you hold down the direction contrary, it continues to move towards the shortest end and returns back to facing the right way once it's cleared the obstacle.
This is not as difficult as it sounds. Lemme show you a pic.
The knight with the dragon is indeed a game I've been working on for the better part of a year (well, I haven't worked on it in months because I've been distracted with other projects like Picoder, but...)
It will get done though! I'll add a demo of it to the WiP section real quick.
A year ? Omy ... Umm ... Can I suggest, you check out the marvelous and majestic power of STRINGS ?
I know I saw a FERN making program, and it seemed kinna slow to me.
Without looking at the source, since we are limited to 16-colors, it would be a simple matter to read the pixels of what you wish to "replace" and stuff that in a string.
Doodle what you like, then plot the colors all back out from your string. It's really fast and integral to the PICO keyboard editor I'm working on. I highly recommend it.
Really cool collection of games, thanks for sharing! There are definitely some excellent games on here that I missed until now.
Hey, you implemented the idea I was talking about ! Looks AWESOME !! First time I've ever seen any other game do that kind of intelligent mapping.
Music is perfect !
@dw817 My suggestion was more so to display the author beneath the cartridge, next to the game's name. I think that's a reasonable expectation when using another person's IP in this way.
Truetype Font, bold, pica size 18, you name it, would be easier to read below the cart. I think that's what Scathe is gonna do anyways. No worries, Zatyka. :)
Ideally it's going to have the author's name, a brief excerpt from their BBS post detailing the instructions, and their name will be a link to their BBS profile. I've also thought about having some metadata included with it, such as the date that the cart (or whatever version I have) was posted/updated, and then have real-time searching, sorting and filtering by author, title, date, etc.
It's probably going to go in baby steps though and just have an author name and instructions to start out though. Right now I haven't posted the link to this anywhere else (and most likely won't), so it's just for the PICO community. It also won't be monetized in any way (not even ads), so there's no incentive for me to go around telling the world about it (in fact more traffic would just be bandwidth), which means that it's likely to remain relatively basic since it's only going to be a handful of us from the community here using it.
Ok, I got the first 30 games done with author, author BBS link, dates, and brief descriptions. The games that are done are "194-8" through "Earth Was a Bad Choice". It's quite time consuming to do, so I wanted to get feedback on it before proceeding any further.
@TheTomster thanks! Yes, a big part of the reason for doing this was basically to have a curated list of games. The BBS is great and everything, but stuff tends to just get lost in the shuffle (and there are a handful that I don't even think are on the BBS, which I found on Itch.io or other places).
I've been following the progress on The Remains of El Dorado for a while now, and am looking forward to adding it to the site as well when it's ready :)
I'm trying the link, "http://clowerweb.com/games/pico/"; and not getting any info on authors to appear - just the titles - even in hovering over the cart.
Firefox v49.0.1, Windows 8.1
Ohh ... I didn't know if you could do it like a HOVER thing like I have on my buttons page (link above) ?
Trying out that game you have in the screenshot ... Okay, getting the same display you have. Has author listed now and quick instrux.
Clicking on author brings up their posts ... hrmm ... I don't suppose Lexaloffle will let us create a profile page so we can explain a bit about ourselves.
While in Writer's Cafe, it's all in a right-justified frame, you can still have a bit of creativity and write information about yourself in there if you like.
http://www.writerscafe.org/dw817
And buttons you can hover over for further author profile.
I really like all the great games neatly put together like this.
If there only also was controls for mobile devices (something like this: http://onom.pupu.jp/pico8/don.html), that would be even greater!
nicely done!
now if you could add gamepad support that would be awesome.
(https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=4100)
too bad there isn't something like this right here on the bbs.
you can get a list of cartridges rated by stars:
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?mode=carts&cat=7&sub=2&orderby=rating
but that's only a list of threads, which is far less practical.
@Offler and @ultrabrite thanks, I'll look into mobile and gamepad controls support.
I had thought about scraping the BBS to get the star ratings for games and implementing that into it, but I kinda think it would be unfair to do that. I personally like all of the games in there (which is why they're there), so to me personally, the ratings don't matter. There are a lot of really good ones in there that are very underrated on the BBS, largely due to ratings being almost directly proportional to exposure (and exposure often being directly proportional to ratings as well, so it's a double edged sword). Also, because of how the BBS is set up, new posts tend to get buried in the shuffle quickly, so a lot of people simply don't even see a lot of the stuff that goes up here.
This way, all the games are treated as equal, rather than being judged by a rating system which I would consider to be flawed due to "the rich getting richer" principle. Notice how almost all of the highest rated games are old, for example, due to having more exposure just from being here longer, and EVEN MORE exposure from users sorting games by ratings. I don't want people to go to my page and do the same thing, playing the top rated ones and assuming the lower rated ones are less worthy of trying. Some of my absolute favorites on there have less than 10 or 15 stars on here because they most likely just got lost in the shuffle, which is a real shame (there are probably a bunch I haven't even found due to the same issue). That's part of what I'm trying to alleviate with my page.
@Scathe: fair enough, really, that's the very reason why there's curator lists on steam or gogmixes on gog.com. I was more about a quick way to list and play right here on the bbs. hell, we could even browse the hearted lists of other people right here (and play with a gamepad!). you filled a HUGE gap, that's for sure.
side note: I notice you have tempest by impbox on your list, which is not properly working since 0.1.8. I've exported a 0.1.6 version here: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?page=2&tid=2186&pid=30765. not sure if you could use it ?
@ultrabrite Thanks for pointing that out, I actually hadn't noticed that Tempest was broken (some of those games were collected on my hard drive a long time ago). Unfortunately, the player on my website doesn't play .js files, it plays the .png files directly, so I have no way of reverting to 0.1.6 just for one game. Hopefully the author will fix it. In the meantime, I may have to just remove it.
Sorry I've been quiet on finishing this for a while, although I have been quietly adding new games periodically. Here is a list of changes since my last update.
Changelog:
- 42 games added; some are newly released, some have been around a while and I've just come across them.
- A couple of duplicate games were removed (some were the same game under different names)
- Many games that were already on the page have been updated to their latest versions
- Fixed an issue where some games weren't in the correct alphabetical order (there was a bug in my sorting function)
- Renamed some games that I had listed incorrectly (mostly typos)
- Finished adding all game authors with BBS profile links, release dates, and game instructions (if they were included with the game on the BBS)
There are some fairly major changes coming soon. I have a new system for it under development. A few highlights of the upcoming changes:
- Lazy loading the cart images to save bandwidth and make the page load faster (there are almost 5MB of carts there)
- Source code for all games will be available to view in a separate tab within the game window
- Move all game metadata from JSON format into a database (it's really just a pain to add/edit games in a giant JSON object, so I need to build a back end for doing this)
- HTML in game descriptions to make them more similar to the BBS (bold, underline, italic, etc.)
- Authors listed additionally underneath the game cart on the main page instead of only in the game windows
- Sorting and searching/filtering games by name, release date, last updated date, author
- Mobile gamepad support
Any other suggestions welcome!
This is a cool idea! I was actually thinking the same thing recently, i.e. it would be cool to have a curated list of carts, because it is often hard to find the exact sorts of carts I am looking for, which is often "games".
You actually went and did something about it, instead of just thinking about it. Nice job! :)
It might also be cool if the BBS itself someday allowed for each user to have a curated list of their favorite carts or something.
P.S.
oh yeah, also thanks for including a game of mine on there :)
@kittenm4ster Thanks! I LOVE your Video Poker game!! It's one of the first games I played on the PICO-8, and I still play it all the time.
@dw817 > I hope in the future to write a game worthy of your list, Scathe ...
Well, you made it! The Haunted House game is great!
@kittenm4ster: actually you can have your own hearted list (plus in cart mode):
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?mode=carts&cat=7&orderby=favourites
for your eyes only, though.
@Scathe: by 'Mobile gamepad support' I guess you mean on-screen buttons ?
basic (usb) gamepad support would be great too !
hey, just wanted to jump in and say thank you for putting my game (pod3x3) on the list. i know it's a weird one, but i wanted to make something unique and it was a great fit for my first ever videogame :)
pod3x3 is awesome, and I followed the development of it on Twitter back in the day, so it was also one that I looked forward to for a while :)
New update:
I've nearly finished the back end of the site. There's now an admin section along with an interface for managing games and authors, and I can add/edit/delete games and authors.
That's the game list in the admin.
Here's adding a new game:
This allows selecting a .png file for the cart, the game title, author, author's BBS id, pubish date (on BBS), updated date (on BBS, not when I update them), the cart ID (this corresponds with the cart ID on the BBS), and the description which is using the tinyMCE WYSIWYG editor. This will allow actual HTML in the game descriptions.
Editing a game uses the exact same form except all of the data is pre-populated for that game.
Since adding BBS IDs for authors was getting tedious due to having to look up the author's ID on the BBS repeatedly, I added a function for autocomplete/typeahead on the author field - if the author already exists in my database, they'll show up as soon as I start typing the name, and their BBS ID will be auto-filled:
I'm also maintaining a linking table in the db which tracks author_id and game_id, so it'll be possible to list games by author.
It's not live yet, just on my localhost, but it should be going live before the end of the week with some of the front-end features we talked about before.
Finished the back end and made some changes to the front end. There's still a lot of work left on the front, but I figured I'd upload the progress so far since it's still an improvement over the old version. Let me know what you guys think! games.clowerweb.com
@adrian09_01 Mountains of Demise seems promising, but I want to take this opportunity to push you a little bit. Hopefully you'll take the criticism as constructive! The game has the potential to make the list, but I'd like to see you add some animations and juice it up a little. Maybe some more sound effects, too. The music really needs a lot of work. Fix these things up a little and I'll be happy to add it!
Alrighty, so some more progress today:
- Game titles are displayed more prominently
- Authors are now listed on the main page
- Publish date and latest updated date are now displayed
- Games now track view count for each game
- The page should be much more mobile-friendly (though I haven't added mobile controls to the games yet)
- Descriptions are now much more robust and feature HTML
- The source code of the games is now viewable, along with syntax highlighting. This shows the entire source, not just the code (it's like opening a .p8 file in a text editor)
- Each game now has its own page, rather than popping up in a modal. This makes it so that users can link directly to games. It's also a lot less clunky for displaying the descriptions
- Lazy loading of the cart images is now implemented. This should make the page load faster
- 13 games have been added to the library
- Added sorting by title, author, publish date, updated date, and view count
- Added search filtering by title/author
Happy holidays everyone!
Mountains of Demise II, please!
it's better than the first one
Wow, awesome selection of games here! I like how they're displayed as well, nice job ;)
@adrian09_01 Added!
@PixelCod Thanks man! I'm glad you posted because I looked at your profile and found Shuriken Toss, which somehow I'd never seen before, so it's been added to the collection!
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