Can anyone suggest some resources for a rank newcomer to game coding? I've got enough understanding from playing with c++ in college to understand most of the syntax when I read Pico-8 carts, but it's tough for me to understand what's going in in the more complex parts of the carts. Even jelpi is over my head.

I was hoping I'd learn how to do some basic game mechanics like collision detection, but I'm just going in circles here!

to be honest, coding is pretty rough to start and PICO-8 can be a bit like jumping into the deep end! im working on an intro coding tutorial right now and you should check out the 'zine that comes out soon, I wrote a tutorial on how to made a particle effects engine that should be of help

I'm looking forward to reading that zine! In some ways, Pico-8 seems like a good place to start (I got a sprite moving around with acceleration and friction in just a couple of hours!) but at the same time it's not a system that's well documented. I looked at a couple of Lua books, but it seems that would be overkill with P8 having a small subset of that language.

i think pico8 is a perfect place to learn to code.

collision detection is a tricky subject though and there are so many different methods.

comparing if two rectangles overlap is a good start

function are_rectangles_overlapping(r1,r2)
return r1.x1 < r2.x2 and r1.x2 > r2.x1 and
r1.y1 < r2.y2 and r1.y2 > r2.y1
end

and once you've detected a collision, you need to figure out how to respond, which is even more troublesome =)

Thanks for the comments @lmpbox, your carts are among my favorites! I spent the better part of an hour playing Tempest tonight.

you're welcome! oh wow! thanks! haha I didn't think there was quite that much gameplay in it yet =)

look forward to seeing what you come up with, feel free to ask in IRC if you need any help.

The fanzine is going very well!
I plan to release probably 2 of them, one next week, the other at the end of the month.

I would like to start a special " Pico-8 programming from scratch"
fanzine. @bitmOO is also interested to ne part of it.

Would you like to write to basic "how to learn lua for pico-8" tutorial ? Especially focus on people who don't know nothing about programming? ( adult and children) ?

Here's the official documentation on Lua (the programming language PICO-8 uses): http://www.lua.org/docs.html

@IvoahThanks ! My idea it's to make something more friendly to people who don't have any previous knowledge in programming, for real newbie.

Honestly Lua is pretty easy to understand. I think what would be most helpful are tutorials on common tasks specific to coding games. This YouTube video is a good example.

He shows how to draw a sprite, move it around with the buttons, and animate it. (It's a little rough because he didn't know he could just save a blank cart in P8 to get the headers, and he does his editing in vim and doesn't explain why, which is a little distracting for a newbie)

@ victorsmonster I'm agree with you, tutorial on common talk are probably the best to learn.

If you have some time and C++/C skills you might get a lot out of the Handmade Hero stream where the streamer is coding a game from scratch in C with very minimal use of libraries.

Obviously a lot of it is down in the nitty gritty. But for example here's a playlist of just the episodes dealing with collision detection that might be more useful for a pico-8 programmer.

@cheepicus, exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for. Thanks!