Hello all!
Finally purchase Pico-8 and quite excited to get started, I have limited coding experience to be honest but I've dabbled in many languages (Mainly Python, BASIC and a little C#) and read several books on computer architecture so hoping this might be a 'not too big' jump into the video gaming world.
I have read a variety of posts about Pico-8 now and am excited to get started however a few questions have cropped up if anyone thinks they could help!
1) I love the idea of limitations with the console however I like the idea of being able to start small and watch it grow, how tight are the limitations in practise and are there any work arounds if I get going?
2) The game I want to design at some point down the line is basically a small version of The Sims...my thoughts are it will be set in one house or maybe a very small town where you go to work, buy furniture and gradually upgrade a few skils. Ofcourse naturally I would scale down on each aspect to include what hopefully sums up the franchise. I'm thinking game length and interest would be held by keeping the map/world small but adding features to a small base. The question here really is do you think this kind of project would be doable with the tools/limitations of Pico-8.
Well I think that sums it up, thanks for reading! :)
Nytician.
Only advice is really to start doing something - each game can hit different limits with different ways of handling them.
Welcome onboard.
A really good starting point for me was the "Game Development with PICO-8" zine linked from the Resources page - beyond that, I've been referencing PICO-8's manual, the PICO-8 wiki, and the Lua reference manual (I think PICO-8 currently uses 5.2 and not 5.3).
I will say that going into my current big PICO-8 project with a mindset of "make it feel like an alternate-universe NES cartridge" put me pretty much exactly on track for how big I should be dreaming. On more than one occasion, I made a decision because I thought it would feel more NES-ish and then discovered that I needed to make that exact decision to fit within PICO-8's limits.
But yeah, generally, I agree with freds72's advice - get stuck into making the thing, see what troubles you run into, and find your way back out of them.
Good luck~! Sounds like a fun project. :D
Yeah great thanks! I spent about 8 hours setting up a game yesterday which was fun! Random new question: I’ve been reading about multi cart features, what can I do with multiple carts say if I export as binary? Do I still have the same limits or are the limits per card? Like token, sprite, music etc? Thanks!
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