Just letting you know that it dies if you leave it running for a while :)

@stilvoid if you mean just the text, that's intended. if it's the whole cart, then... we'll say that's... intended too, i guess. thanks for the heads up, though.

Wow, the graphical effect is amazing! Impressive use of color to give it that distorted, warm, intense look.

What would someone study to learn the theory behind your code?

@zlg well, let's see.

the mess in the middle is my own little particle system, based on pico-ps. instead of names like "emitters" and "particles", i decided to be cute and use "throwers" and "stones".

i also use a procedural dithering technique derived from @TRASEVOL_DOG (here)

the circle is a polygon with a little renderer that also modifies each point before drawing, like a vertex shader, but inefficient.

the text-drawing is similar... before custom font support, i made a text renderer with a sort of shader, too: a function called per-character to modify its position.

this is one of the more complex things i've made; the result is built on concepts i've used before in isolation. i've got like 200 of these suckers in the vault. I get a lot of inspiration from other pico-8 creators, as well as #tweetcart on twitter, and are.na.

hope that helps :)