Hello!

First time poster here :)
I recently recreated Age of Empires 2 in pixelart using the Pico8 palette.
It just started as an excercise in downscaling, recreating a few of the buildings, but I ended up adding more and more stuff

I would really like to make this playable but I have no clue about programming :..(
So I´m asking is anyone willing to join me on this!?

Don´t really know how the mechanics could work but I imagine something turn based

Heres what it looks like so far:

and a quick mockup how the GUI could look in 128x128px

Cheers everybody!

That recreation is fantastic! Great picture.

The pico-8 version is really great too, good job fitting all that on the screen. You could even have a toggle for small vs full HUD in order to see more of the map.

I’ll watch this thread!

nice

Aww that's adorable.

Age of Adorable Empires

hi @oNek

First off: that's an absolutely gorgeous mockup of AoE using the pico8 palette 😍

Secondly: I've been yearning to make a strategy title for pico8 for a while. Something like AoE would be really cool to collaborate on, but it comes with a few caveats:

• the screen size for pico8 is very small. Once you have a sizable empire, navigating it could be annoying for the player
• test descriptions for buildings/units/etc can be quite lengthy in the original game, but pico8 doesn't allow for a lot of text
• no save state in pico8 :(

I'd be tempted to collaborate on a much smaller, stripped down version of AoE - or maybe a different smaller strategy game completely. But then again, I like a challenge haha

What do you think? Keen to hear your (and others') thoughts

oh there is save data in pico8, it’s just limited to 256 bytes: https://www.lexaloffle.com/dl/docs/pico-8_manual.html#CARTDATA

(some carts use or abuse cstore to save much more data, but that could be considered cheating)

I think this project could look great on picotron!

I didn't know about DSET/DGET! That's cool :)

holding on to this post until it potentially comes out

have you heard about picotron?

https://www.lexaloffle.com/picotron.php

hey! first off, wowow that's an incredible AOE pixel art rendition!

if anyone's interested in trying out what an AOE-style RTS could feel like on pico-8, i tried my best with Age of Ants. it's not nearly as pretty as the mockup above (and also not isometric, otherwise i might consider reaching out to try to port those sprites over...) but it does try to copy AOE2 as faithfully as possible. hope you enjoy :)

Did anyone actually start this?

Impressive work! Really will wait for someone to implement it :D

Hi! I did start to make an AoE demake and I'd love to collab, does anybody know how to reach the OP? They just came, dropped this absolute banger, and left again :D

hi @taxicomics !!
im still here :D
if u want i can send u the assets !
im still up for a collab ofc

@oNek that'd be great! You can use discord,bluesky,itch or mastodon to send them or I'll post the current version here and you paste your stuff in there

@taxicomics i dont use any of those ^^
probably best to do it on here
do u need anything specific for the image? size, file type etc?