Topic: Little PICO-8 pixel art

[idolminds]

PICO-8

PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs. When you turn it on, the machine greets you with a shell for typing in Lua programs straight away and provides simple built-in tools for creating sprites, maps and sound.

The harsh limitations of PICO-8 are carefully chosen to be fun to work with, encourage small but expressive designs and hopefully to give PICO-8 cartridges their own particular look and feel.

Specs

   Display: 128x128, fixed 16 colour palette
   Input: 6 buttons x 2 players
   Cartridge size: 32k
   Sound: 4 channel, 64 definable chip blerps
   Code: Lua (max 15400 bytes of source code)
   Sprites: Single bank of 128 8x8 sprites (+128 shared)
   Map: Single 128x32 (+128x32 shared)

I only know what some of that means. I don't know LUA so so far I haven't made anything fun, but I did make something with PICO-8 tools today. BEHOLD!



Yes, it is super original. Making Pac-Man (Pico-Man?) fit in 128x128 was a fun little challenge. Obviously I could get more space out of it if I made narrower blocks but then building the map and sprites get all kinds of more complex so whatever this is what I made deal with it.

If you want to see what people have actually made with this little "system", check out Hug Arena. It's cute and fun.

So one really neat thing about PICO-8 that I like is the "cartridge" format. Here it is:


Yes, its a .PNG file. All the game data is stored in it. You can literally save the image and then load it into PICO-8 to play. So cool.

[idolminds]

So Pac-Mans stage isn't green, it's blue. There isn't really a bright blue color in PICO-8 so I went with the kind of teal. Then I could use the darker blue to make a "drop shadow" kind of thing, or maybe just give depth to the walls.



That looks cool. Hmm, I wonder what it would look like filled in?



Ok, I like that. But the "endcaps" are different sizes to make room for that shadow. So I'll drop them and keep the filled-in look. While I was at it I rounded all the corners just a bit.



There we go! I like it. Now I need to learn some LUA and see if I can actually make the characters move.

[Quemaqua]

Haha, neato!

Hug Arena was cute and fun, as advertised.

[idolminds]

I haven't played with PICO-8 for a little while but I wanted to share these. I saw an article about a PICO-8 game called Dusk Child thats worth checking out. You can beat it fairly quickly but its neat.

Also if you want to learn more about PICO-8 you should totally read the fanzine. It has some history of its development, some tutorials and sample games to get you started, and a nice selection of games other have made that you should check out.