I do say, Pico-8 is in fact hard to use. But besides the coding, I’ve gotten some stuff done.
Things done are:
- 2 Player Sprites
- 3 Ground Sprites
- Bikk Sprite
- 6 Sword Sprites
- 3 Spear Sprites
- 1 Shield Sprite
- 1 Gauntlet Sprite
- 20 VERY Satisfying Sounds
- TheKawGames Logo
- 9 Dialogue Box Sprites
- 28 Sprites in Total (58 if you include the 4x4 sprites of the TKH logo)
The programming part is ABSOLUTELY BIG BRAIN tho... Making video games with script coding turned out to be harder than I thought...
My current plans are:
- Make the controls easy to use
- Try to limit to just 7 (8 in multiplayer) actions
- Make the gameplay and visuals satisfying
- NOT SUCK
- Try to fit most sprites in an 8 by 8 space (which helps keep the sprite space from running out)
Current control ideas are:
Left: Move Left
Right: Move Right
Up: Jump
Down: Nothing
X: Attack
O: Nothing on it’s own
O + Up: Interact
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0.1.0 Beta is here, so what’s next? Well I’m going to finish up the sound design. Also add a couple of changes stemming from beta testers' suggestions. then I’ll have some porklike play testers give me some feedback. From there I’ll rollout any issues they might find. After that I’m going to sell the finished version for $5 on maybe itch.io. I’m very happy with how it’s turning out! It’s almost done!
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Making PICO Space
This is a rambling description of some of what went into making PICO Space. I've tried to write it for most readers to follow - there's some basic stuff and nothing very advanced. Hopefully it's not too dull and might help someone.
When You Wish Upon a Starfield
Coming up to Christmas of 2020 I had been spending most of my dev time trying to squeeze image data into PICO-8 to make a Dungeon Master clone (I promise I will return to this at some point). I'd got a bit tired of writing compression and encoding routines and feeling like I was fighting PICO-8 rather than playing nicely with it. I'd seen some other nice star-fields and particles in other peoples' games and wondered how much it would take to do my own.
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The reasoning behind this is rather simplistic. I have only published games for Windows and Mac (and these days I struggle with even getting out for windows) and so I inherently don't get many plays on any of my games. HOWEVER, Pico-8 allows for easy export to Windows, Mac, Linux, and best of all, Web! So my jam games will get max exposure. I also find it hard to work on a blank canvas with no constraints, but Pico-8 has a lot of constraints that could help get my creative juices flowing. It is also a far more code based creation platform than anything I've ever used before, so it'll teach me some ins and outs of how a language works than a standard engine, and maybe with the few inbuilt tools and easy to learn language it provides (Lua) I could use as a stepping stone to use frameworks and code engines like HaxeFlixel or Pygame. I never intend to use it outside of game jams, as my engine (GMS2) is very much good, and not the reason I am thinking of picking up this tool, other than when learning the engine (or maybe I will learn it for a game jam, who knows , not me, that's for certain) Anyway thanks for reading my ramble, I'll post more here when I start actually using Pico-8! Peace out for now :)
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My son had some trouble with the controls so I made it only need the arrows. I also slowed the ship down, it was too fast for his little fingers.
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I am working on a Pico game with some Backyard Baseball-esque mechanics. However, I would like to work in Twine for some more advanced dialogue options.
So the question: Is it possible for a Pico game to communicate with other embedded HTML games in the same webpage. Specifically, I am hoping to embed a Twine game, side by side with the Pico game and have the gameplay switch back and forth.
Would I be able to accomplish this via GPIO? I have found the documentation to be confusing and a little thin, focused mainly Raspberry Pi implementation. I think I would need to send a message to the embedding website (a page on my own website) and then send it to the other game? Is that even possible in HTML5.
Alternatively, I have considered the games to somehow "call" each other from inside their respective HTML/JS code, replacing the other game temporarily. Again, I am not quite familiar enough with HTML/JS/CSS to know where to begin here. Thanks in advance for any help
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It's a joke.
KUMAMINE(https://twitter.com/kumamine) created the original character Denwa Neko (電話猫)/Shigoto Neko (仕事猫).
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I made this in a week starting with 0 coding knowledge. It's not great. but it works... sort of.
At some point I may revisit it. Or I'll just start something new... who knows.
PICO's pretty cool.
Some youtube folks that I learned from:
bridgs
NerdyTeachers
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Ok so this is extremely minor, but it's weird.
The pico-8 homepage always pulls up some random starred games on the left and right of a main little screen right? ok, so without selecting a game, when you press play it goes to SlipWays. I have no idea why.
Just thought I'd say something. Hoping for an explanation maybe?
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I have created a marching line of invaders that move and animate left and right, dropping down a few rows each time they reach the opposite edge of the screen, It's working great!
So then I added a function that will fire a shot from one of the aliens but when I iterate through the table I always get the last one in the table for my x, y starting position of the invaders shot.
Is there a way to iterate through a table picking a random entry to generate some variables from? I have tried several things but can't seem to figure out how to do this as we only have: add, all, count, del, foreach and pairs.
Thanks,
Brian
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I just installed PICO-8 on my Mac, and I'm not sure how to right click. When I try, the result is the same as a left click. I've tried holding down Ctrl, Option, Cmd, Shift, but none of those works. Is there a system setting I need to change somewhere?
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