Geek dad, aesthetic programmer, writer, mentor, creator of Waterbearlang.com visual programming tool.
I teach a Pico-8 workshop at the Richmond Public Library (in Richmond, BC, Canada), and this is a simple game that I use for it. I've also ported the game to Scratch, JavaScript, and Python for use in our Code Clubs. It's not fancy, but it is challenging to play and has most of what you need in a game. It's also very easy to expand on to add more depth and complexity.
You are in an arena. There's a wolf chasing you. You have 3 lives. If you can collect 10 coins you can buy your way out of the arena and win. Good luck!
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This is a port of Daniel Shiffman's Reaction Diffusion coded in P5 (JavaScript): https://github.com/CodingTrain/Rainbow-Code/blob/master/CodingChallenges/CC_13_ReactionDiffusion_p5.js/sketch.js
Runs on my laptop at about 2-3 seconds per frame, so it takes an hour or more to get going. You can tweak the feed rate (FEED) and kill rate (K) to get radically different emergent patterns.
I may try to optimize it further (believe it or not, I have done some speedups to get it here) and maybe add a menu with some interesting pre-sets, but it is working, albeit very slowly.
Reaction Diffusion is similar to cellular automata like the Game of Life, but can create really amazing organic emergent patterns over time.
Try to catch as many coins as you can while avoiding the beast. Now with somewhat less flaky collisions!
My entry for Ludum Dare #33. My first Ludum Dare and my first game with PICO-8.
I may still work on improving it, but this is how it stands for the contest.
