jack0088 [Lexaloffle Blog Feed]

First baby-steps with PICO-8

Sun, 31 Jan 2016 13:34:46 UTC

First baby-steps with PICO-8 0.1

by jack0088

[Click to Play]

Hello guys,

I'm new to Pico-8, but not new to programming in general. Before, I used Codea, Love2D, Corona, Gideros, Polycode and tried some other frameworks. I managed to code some, more or less, simple apps (mostly for drawing/animating stuff) but no games at all. I want to change that, because I love games and the good ol' days! Pico seems to be quite accessible. - With all its constraints it might be even the right tool and should be able to hold me back from overestimate myself. It might also help me to understand the hardware side of things a little better. (Which is very important to me.)

As of right now, I have a hard time to wrap my head around everything, since I was used to have a handful of helpful little functions, like tweens, meshes, etc. Also the lack of math knowledge seems to fight me also, as I now have to write all these function myself. But I think I get there slowly...

Since ever I dreamed to make a small rpg. Something like Pokemon or a some sort of a survival game. Yesterday I booted Pico-8 the first time and my journey began! :)

I've drawn a few crappy animation frames and managed to play them during movement. I also added a cursor to the 'game', to be able to interact with objects later on. Now I want to design my open world level. Not an easy task as it seems! I don't plan to make it overambitious, but the map should be bigger than Pico's limits of 256x64 (even when counting the shared space).

How do people make big maps with Pico-8? Is there any particular trick to this?
My only idea would be, to store the map in a table. However, this would steal a lot of tokens and I should run out of space pretty quick. Any suggestions?

I would also be super nice, if someone could look over my code and give me some tips on how to improve it. Programming techniques, which work better in Pico-8, are also warmly welcome! ;)

First baby-steps with PICO-8

Sun, 31 Jan 2016 12:54:44 UTC

First baby-steps with PICO-8 0.1

by jack0088

[Click to Play]

Hello guys,

Since ever I dreamed to make a small rpg. Something like Pokemon or a some sort of a survival game. Yesterday I booted Pico-8 the first time and my journey began! :)

I would also be super nice, if someone could look over my code and give me some tips on how to improve it. Programming techniques, which work better in Pico-8, are also warmly welcome! ;)