Surprisingly with all the updates PICO-8 has received, it has one gross error in it that took me hours to debug and later find out and break it into the exact components giving the error alone. It was definitely a case of "it's not my fault." Could cause problems later in other carts and programs.
This will not run:
if (key=="(") print"open"
|
This will also not run:
if (key==")") print"close" |
This will run:
if (key=="[") print"open" |
Wow. And no-one's discovered this till now ??
15 comments
Update: Added GRAY, bars, text, Hopalong Cassidy
Hello.
As you know, a new palette method was discovered. Now while you can't use all 32-colors in one screen (which is what I had hoped), you CAN tweak individual palettes of the 16 to use the new set.
This means for those of you who want to make games that use only one HUE, then you might find this program useful.
It shows 6-squares going from darkest but not black to each color of purple, red, orange, yellow, green, and blue, using the (O) key to change between, and the coding involved to produce it.
I have since added a picture of Hopalong Cassidy. This was not easy. First I converted a square picture of him to 128x128 B&W. Then manually created a palette based on the 7-colors that comprise of (Gray). Then reissue the image using that palette.
Then manually modify the palette only to default PICO-8 standard. Import. Re-hue, done. He looks best in the GRAY hue because that is the picture he was originally, B&W.
Would be keen to have optional 16-shades of B&W. :D Maybe next PICO-8 release.
6 comments
So this is my first time working with PICO-8 and really my first time making a game from scratch in general.
The entire movement system is my own creation, I didn't look to see how other people did movement so it may not be perfect but I'm rather proud of it. A lot of it just came naturally as little things I added as I discovered the different capabilities I had. Some things, such as the glitchy title intro and the hp bar jolting in the direction you're hit, were actually just pure mistakes or stupid coding on my part that gave me an idea for a cool effect. It may not be much of a game yet as there are no objectives, but it means a lot to me as the joy that coding it brought me has solidified my desire to be an indie game dev and make a career of that.
3 comments
Hey guys,
There's an Alakajam! event scheduled for the 20-22th September week-end!
The event is an online gamedev competition where people make a game from scratch over 48 hours. Start/end times are suited to European timezones (7pm UTC), also both the theme and the winners are decided by the community! As I write the theme submission phase is about to start, and you will be able to suggest ideas for one week. The full jam works this way:
You can discover the winners from the last jams here</a>. For the record the very first jam was actually won by a PICO-8 entry :) The achievement has not been renewed yet, it's up to you guys!
More than the thrill of the competition, a cool thing is that all games are getting valuable feedback their games thanks to our voting/comment system.
0 comments
Hey everyone, with the new colors being discovered recently, I decided to package them all up into an aseprite palette file/extension. Hope they are useful to someone!
pico8.zip modifies the default pico8 extension that comes with aseprite. Replace the contents of the directory with the contents of the zip. You can find the directory by opening aseprite, opening the list of palletes, selecting pico8, and clicking "open folder".
pico-8-secret.aseprite is just the standalone version which you can load by selecting the "load palette" option.
1 comment
Hello there, after a positng a sketch variation I did on Twitter earlier today, I was asked how one would do such a similar result.
So instead of a badly written Twitter thread, let me post you a badly written BBS post with a badly written (but well commented) breakdown on how I did it.
The spiral is a cylinder sliced in a few circles I offset on X and Y based on a formula. This formula varies with time and on which circle it'll yield the offset to (here, the index).
So, I progressively iterated from nothing to the spiral. Here's how I broke it down:
First I generate circles made by vertices I'd store aside. Drawing circles this way will allow me to the other steps. Each circle is drawn by drawing a segment between two consecutive vertices in the circle and by linking the same vertex between two consecutives circles. Here, it looks like a colored spider web.
Then, I made the circles' center move based on the time. But it still doesn't look like a spiral. We can do better.
3 comments
Hey folks,
Been toying around slightly with Pico-8 as a break from bigger projects, and I'm wondering if there will ever be an increase to the possible resolution of pico-8?
I dig the limits being used to force creativity, though I do feel 128x128p only gets you so far and no amount of memory-banking between carts can get around that for game-scale, it was the same thing I took issue with on both Gamebuino consoles.
To note I'm not saying like "hey we should have mega-complex 240p with 3x more sprites and 90 more colours so we're basically just on a snes", but I do think even just an upscale to 160x144 would help so much. I'd looked at alternatives but clearly the community and scale of potential support and resources is here in pico-8. As much as I'd like something like the C64 res of 320x200, I think even just the Gameboy 160x144 on some kind of Pico-8+ with the necessary memory increase, maybe a tiny bit more for graphical allocation, would be great.
22 comments
While playing around with poke/peek, I discovered theres a new palette to choose from.
Poking the address 0x5f11 and setting it to a value of 0xf1 [the 1 being the color in the palette, in this case dark blue] you'll notice something strange. The blue seems to be even darker! this goes from 0xf0 to 0xff and corresponds to the color palette available naturally. It seems to darken/add a warm filter to the colors, allowing us to provide sprites with more specific details. You can see this in action via Neil Popham's post on twitter. To return the color to normal, replace the f before the color ID with 0. for example, 0x01 would be normal dark blue where as 0xf1 is the darker dark blue.
https://twitter.com/ntpopham/status/1169166881607077888
Address range is 0x5f10 to 0x5f1f from what I can tell, and there is no other hidden colors yet discovered but knowing zep... there probably is. :)
Have fun with this discovery.
1 comment
respriter is a tool that you run in PICO-8 that let you edit other p8 cartridges
With this tool you can move sprites around and have the map updated to point to the new location of your sprites, so it isn't ruined. Sprite flags are moved along with the sprite pixels.
It is useful for when you want to move sprites around in the sprite bank so related sprites are next to each other, for example.
So you can turn an unplanned and unorganized bank into a more organized one
And your map will still look like this:
Respriter will also move the sprite flags when you move the sprites.
You can write protect parts of the sprite bank if that memory is used for the map, or you can work unprotected if you really want to
6 comments
New version
I made a new version of Painto-8 that is easier to use and can change the palette during gameplay. I'm keeping the old version here in case someone still likes to use this one.
New cart: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=82916
Legacy cart
--Version 02--
-
Right-click on any color on the palette to open a menu with the 2 palettes. Swap between them with the tab on top.
- This version has poke(0x5f2e,1), so you can run the cart just when changing palette or drawing on the map area, otherwise, press ESC to resume to drawing on pico-8's sprite editor. (SHIFT+S to save changes so you don't lose what you've drawn while running the cart. Also saves the palette).
11 comments
Hello everyone, today I stumbled on a undocumented feature I didn't know existed: 16 extra colors.!
I searched on the wiki and the forums and I didn't see it mentioned anywhere (except this thread, but it was a differnt thing and that feature was removed by zep at that time).
If you change the screen palette via poke (0x5f10 to 0x5f1f) to a value above 0x80, the color will change as shown below:
Here's world 2 of Jack of Spades with all colors swapped, except black and yellow:
Original colors for comparison:
You can't have more than 16 colors in a single frame though, since poking (0x5f00 to 0x5f0f) will just make the color transparent, as documented in the wiki. Still it's good for fades, and can be used for someting like stage-specific palettes like in the NES and other old consoles.
Pretty cool!
8 comments
