Pong! The early days of gaming. Before my time, for sure. Pico-8 feels like the right platform to channel creativity with all things retro. I'm glad I picked up a copy of it.
This is the first of my retro game remakes. To help me improve my skills as a coder, artist, musician, and game designer, I started a little personal challenge to recreate these old games of the past.
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Freestyle Chess == Chess960 == Fischer Random
NICE: Nice Is Camp39's Engine
The Good
- pass n play and board flip option
- clean interface & themes
- play against computer
- opening book for standard chess
- endless openings with Freestyle Chess (press up while on chess960 to view positions)
- all rules, including 50 move and 3-fold repetition
The Bad
- my first engine ever... its a little slow
- my first engine ever... its a little dumb
- maybe 2.0 will be better!
About NICE
[hidden]
This was a real accomplishment for me and is my first engine. The move generation follows the tutorial of Bluefever Software video series on Youtube: Programming a Chess Engine in Pure Javascript.
When it came to the search functions I learned a ton by following the book: Chess Algorithms by Noah Caplinger.
The limitations of Pico-8 though make for a challenging adaptation of these types of tutorials. (translating from zero-based arrays can give some crazy nasty bugs). The speed limitations make some variation strategies useless e.g. "killer moves" only make sense with a depth of at least 4. It was a really cool experience and gave me more insight into the game.
I liked the board layout from cart #quickchessyness-4 by @Adam_Howell so much that I copied it :)
This cart will need some updates however. I was unable to get quiesence to work without a move taking FOREVER. Maybe due to my move ordering, maybe due to the evaluation function, maybe due to lots of things. Its all very complicated and hurts my brain since it is recursive at iterative depths. Hard to pinpoint problems like that. If any kind soul wants to offer tips, I'm all ears!
@Krystman of course released the fabulous Pico Checkmate, cart #54038 6 years ago. I definitely looked through his code for clues but couldn't manage to find a way to cut off a search if time got too long. But I did follow his lead and purge illegal moves right off the bat instead of making and taking them. Without a full quiesence search though, I don't think NICE will stand a chance against Pico Checkmate.
This cart, while not having the best engine still has some nice features. Chess960 is chess but with almost random starting positions. Its just like standard chess with the exception that castling can be a little weird. Just remember that king and rook end up in the same ending positions as in regular chess, regardless of where they started. Otherwise, same rules apply. This eliminates the same opening every time you play against the computer. Also, to prevent that from happening in standard chess, I coded in a small opening book with response options being chosen randomly so that you can get different responses even if you play the same.
I hope this cart is popular with hand-held users (I don't personally own one). The pass n play is not something I've seen on other chess carts and I imagine a game of chess on a long flight or bus ride would be cool, but playing upside down is a bit awkward.
Crazy idea: what if there was a cart with the move generation and graphics already on it (and optimized to the max) and then two different users could put in a tiny engine each and let them battle. Maybe more realistic on picotron?
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How to use:
Arrow keys to move mouse
X to select. Will also open directory tree if not on a file
Z to close a file or return up a directory
Information on the project:
[hidden]This is my attempt at making a file explorer within Pico 8! It was made as a test to see if I could make something functional with minimal research prior or during. I spent about a month on this project, with the bulk of that in the last week or so after finals. Currently this program reads data from a table and takes the fields of each item on the list to determine how to handle the data. My goal for this point was to get most basic functions working and to have a decent user experience. Currently working are folders (return and directory), text files, and images. Images have an issue with lag depending on the "file", although that is when used at 2x scale or above.
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I made this 'game' as a little thought experiment about the nature of Quantum Mechanics.
The idea here was to make a version of Conway's game of life that incorporates some 'quantum-esque' probabilistic behaviour.
Here is how the 'Game of quantum life' works:
The playing field is 64x64 cells and wraps around the edges both horizontally and vertically. Each cell can have one of 16 values, displayed as different colours. Cells that are alive have colour 15, cells that are dead have colour 0. Cells that are in superposition cycle through colours 1-14.
The seed is always created with a random number generator, according to the weighting you select on the start screen. The rules depend on the mode.
Classical rules (standard Conway game of life):
- All cells can be alive or dead
- Live cells stay alive if they have either two or three live neighbours, otherwise they die
- Dead cells turn alive if they have exactly three live neighbours, otherwise they stay dead
Additional quantum rules:
- Cells can also be in a superposition of alive and dead
- Superposed cells with 2 or more live neighbours will be ‘measured’ and will turn either alive or dead, each with probability 1/2
- Dead cells with exactly 2 live neighbours may turn alive with probability 1/8192.
- Dead cells with less than 2 living neighbours may go into superposition with probability 1/4096.
- Superposed cells with less than 2 living neighbours may turn dead or alive, each with probability 1/16384.
The “Copenhagen” and “Multiverse” modes both use the quantum ruleset, they only differ in whether a measurement is counted as a collapse or as a branching. The branch counter displays an estimate of how many branches were created in total from the seed, this is given as 2^
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As the title suggests, having "str" in your clipboard causes multiple problems with Picotron.
Pasting "str" into the code editor hard crashes Picotron. It either completely shuts down the program on my pc, or gives a "System error 1".
Trying to open Picotron while having "str" in the clipboard either makes it shut down on boot, or give an "Out of memory" error.
It's relatively easy to avoid once you know about it by just not ever copying "str", but it feels like something that should ideally be fixed.
Thank you!
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Help Jargon grow flowers on her daily commute.
Music:
Get it Together- Go Team
Laundry Machine Heart- Mitski
Red Room- Hiatus Kaiyote
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Hello there! :p
My name is That One Entertainer, also known as T_O_E.
One day I got bored, browsed the internet and found this cool website, so I though why not give it a try?
My goal is to learn about programming and make my own simple games in the process. I started with scratch and even though I'm also currently a studying Java, I want to try something else entirely. That's when I found this website, played other peoples games and got inspired to try and create something of my own. Whether I'll stay or leave I'm not too sure about, but hopefully I'll learn something in the process, so we'll see.
I'm also keen to try and create my own music, pixel art and other things here, as those are also my interests I'd like to get better at.
Thank you for reading this introductory post :p
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Coroutines are weird, they don't update properly sometimes, and I haven't found the issue as to why. I'm making a game that does heavy use of it, and it doesn't work properly. sometimes functions return nils when they shouldn't, or sometimes functions just ignore values they received. I don't think it's an issue in my part, I debugged everything and I simply didn't find an issue in my part. I tried to test if it was the CPU going above 100% that was the issue, so I did this test
function _init()
func=function()
cls()
if key"a" then
for i=0,1000000 do end
end
print(stat"1",0,0,7)
end
routine=coroutine.create(func)
end
function _update()
-- func()
coroutine.resume(routine)
end
function _draw()
end |
yet it didn't detect my keypresses, or button presses if I changed it to btn(0/1/2/3/4/5). if I swapped the coroutine.resume(routine) to func() it worked.
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This application is a sophisticated timer manager, designed to enable users to create and monitor multiple timers simultaneously. Each timer can be started, stopped, or deleted effortlessly, and offers precise time customization, allowing users to set hours, minutes, and seconds through a clear and intuitive interface.
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SantaMania
SantaMania is a rhythm based arcade game that started as a shmup and later turned into a boss rush. The goal is to finish the game with as much life as possible. All feedback is appreciated. Have fun!
The code runs on duct tape and wishful thinking, but if you have any questions about it, feel free to ask.
Special thanks to @Krystman for all the tutorials.
@Krystman Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyDevs
How to Play
Use the Left and Right arrow keys to control Santa.
Press X or O in rhythm to shoot "Ho Ho Ho."
Credits
Design/Art/Code: ArenaLlanura
Music: A variation of "Jingle Bells" by James Lord Pierpont
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Merry Christmas everyone! This winter, don't forget to spend quality time with your snowman friend. You can collect stars too if you like, but the real treasure is memories of whooshing through the snowy landscape together.
Use DPAD/cursors to fly around, and fly downwards for extra speed. After unlocking star mode, tab (or the pause menu) can be used to toggle it on -- press [O] (Z/C) to add a star and [x] to remove the last placed star. Toggle edit mode back off to return to collecting them.
Created for the 2024 PICO-8 Advent Calendar, which also comes as an itch collection. There are 25 great games in there, along with a lovely calendar cart by @SmellyFishstiks to explore them ~ check it out!
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Ever wish you could just export a sprite sheet from Aseprite like you always do and import it into your Picotron sprite editor? Me, too! So I threw this together.
How does it work?
Prepare your sprite sheet and export it
Export your sprite sheet from Aseprite. Make sure you tick the box to include the JSON Data! The Trim Sprite, Trim Cells, and By Grid are optional, but they will correctly import! NOTE The PNG and JSON must have the same name! Also, make sure you tick the box to split layers, and make sure the Item Filename matches what's shown here. Here's an example of how I export my sprite sheets:
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how do i test for big numbers that print different than their true value?
function _init() srand(39) a=rnd(-1) --prints -20954.2428 b=-20954.2428 end function draw() if b==a then ?"true" else ?"false" end --prints false end |
I have some big numbers that would be nice to know their true value.
thanks and merry Christmas!
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Dash to the flag! Made in roughly a week for the Celeste Classic Advent Calendar.
Controls
Left-click + Drag - Dash
Right-click + Arrows/ESDF - Free cam mode
P/Enter - Pause menu
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A simple Christmas themed game with elements of humor. This game was created for the PICO-8 Advent Calendar Jam 2024. Use the ⬅️, ➡️, ⬆️ and ⬇️ arrow keys as quickly as you can to ease the anger of the fellow kids. Unfortunately I had no enough time to work on the sound effects, but I had a very fun time creating the characters' pixel art.
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Happy holidays! Png2Gfx can take a folder of PNG files and automatically import them to a new GFX file! Please keep in mind it's expected that the PNG images are already using the default Picotron palette. See the gif below for an example!
My recommended workflow is to create your sprites in Aseprite, and when it's time to export, export all frames as png to produce individual images from the frames! Then place them in your Picotron drive somewhere, fire up png2gfx, fill in the source path, output path, and name, and hit Go! The app will create the full path if it doesn't exist, as well.
CHANGELOG
26/12/2024
-Added index 32 to palette map to allow for importing sprites that use #202020 for opaque blacks just as Picotron's default palette uses in-app.
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