Skip to navigation
Logo Penaz's Area

cat /dev/random > penaz

Pico8: A tiny fantasy console to challenge yourself in developing games


Let's take a look at Pico8: A fantasy console where you can develop games like it's the 80's (Kind of).

I'm not someone to talk about commercial products, and I will admit this: when I first heard of Pico8, I snubbed it. Until I got it with a bundle on Itch.io .

After taking a look at it, I was forced to change my mind.

What is Pico8?

Pico8 is a "fantasy virtual console", it is made with arbitrary limitations to its "power" so that the coder is forced to work around (or with) such limitations to be able to get a working product.

Limitations are a really important part of any game development process: they help keeping you focused. If you had "unlimited power", you would probably have so many ideas that you either:

  • develop none of them to their fullest;
  • get stuck trying to decide what is best.

The Code Editor

The choice language for Pico8 is Lua , the software includes a built-in editor with syntax highlighting: obviously in an 80's style.

Image of the Lua editor in Pico8

The code has an arbitrary limitation of 8192 Lua tokens and 65535 characters, which can result in some "cartridges" making use of very interesting algorithms.

The Graphics

The software includes a sprite editor, as well as a tile editor, which have their strong limitations too.

Image of the tile editor in Pico8

Each game can have only a 128x128 pixel resolution, and the editor features 4 sprite sheets that can contain up to 64 tiles each. The sprites can choose between 16 pre-defined colors.

The sound

This software features some really comprehensive tools for sound design and music editing. The sound editor features 4 octaves, 8 volumes and 8 waveforms.

Image of Sound editor in Pico8

Here we can find the most used waveforms, like triangle, square and sawtooth, along with some different ones that may make the games richer. To this we can add 8 effects, making the sound more engaging.

Pico8 also features a built-in music sequencer/tracker.

Images of the Music Sequencer in Pico8

This sequencer supports at most 4 channels and 64 patterns, this allows for scores that can go from really simple to complex.

"Splore"

Pico8 starts showing a command line, but if we type the splore command we will be taken to a GUI that will allow us to explore all the published "cartridges" by other people.

Among my favourites we can find "Pico de Pon" by Stevelavietes which i featured in some screenshots.

Another notable name we can find is "Celeste", a game which went on to become a (great) game of its own. The original version was made in Pico8.

I know what your next question is:

Can it run Doom?

Well, I think the answer you're looking for is Poom , which is probably the most amazing thing done with Pico8 so far.

Conclusions

With the possibility to share your creations, as well as export in standalone formats on:

  • Linux
  • Windows
  • Mac OS
  • Raspi
  • HTML5

And considering the amount of tools you already have at your disposal, without being too overbearing, Pico8 may initially seem a small novelty and nothing more.

What I actually see is a system that can be a good introduction to small-scale game development, as well as a platform ready to challenge who wants to code with strict limitations.

Pico8 has been a nice surprise for me, and if you want to challenge yourself and know a bit of Lua, you should try it.

Here's the link to Pico8 on Itch.io

See you in the next post!

Penaz.