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I upvoted this but I need to reiterate my support. When I was a kid, I was heavily into video games and had a burning desire to create my own. However, the opt
by nicolashahn 8y ago
I upvoted this but I need to reiterate my support.
When I was a kid, I was heavily into video games and had a burning desire to create my own. However, the options for doing so were not great. One of my middle school teachers tried to introduce us to programming via creating Space Invaders in perl, which went as well as you might imagine. There were a few GUI game making applications that were all terrible and extremely limited. I eventually managed to make a game using Flash, but all the overhead of arcane Actionscript APIs was overwhelming and discouraging. I stopped programming and for several years thought I was going to go into media, creating films and animation. I eventually picked up programming again in college, but there were many years of programming experience I could have had if I had stuck with game dev.
I'm convinced that if PICO-8 existed when I was originally interested in making games, I never would have stopped programming. PICO-8 is the perfect balance of easy-to-learn and powerful. Lua is a good first language because it's so small, and encourages you to build your own solutions rather than rely on magical libraries. For example, I never knew how a list-shuffling algorithm (Fisher-Yates) worked until I needed to write my own because Lua and PICO-8 don't provide one.
The limited sprite and sound options encourage you to spend time not on the assets but on the gameplay (the code). It's quick to get things on screen and working because the PICO-8 API is simple, logical, and not arcane (cough Actionscript cough).
Basically, it introduces programming in an instant-gratification way that's able to grab and hold a child's attention, while still being powerful enough to produce games that aren't hamstrung by toy programming languages.
- jchw 8y agoAnd the great thing about today is, there's a metric ton of free software you can move on to. Like, I would've killed for Godot when I was a teenager.
- codebolt 8y agoYou think you had it rough, at 15 I taught myself C/C++ Win32 programming with COM and early DirectX versions from textbooks and online tutorials. I'm thankful now though, as most modern frameworks are a breeze to learn by comparison. Looking back it was a bit like learning to swim by jumping in the deep end of the pool. It certainly gave me the confidence that I can figure stuff out, even in a new domain. And it's given me some valuable lessons in what makes a good vs bad API design.
- andrepd 8y agoMine was Pascal in Turbo Pascal (6?) for DOS, circa 2004. It speaks volumes to the outstanding quality of Turbo Pascal and the Pascal language that it still holds up, more than 20 years later.
- matt_the_bass 8y agoI feel old. Mine was commador64 basic in 1988
- dwd 8y agoDon't feel old. My first Basic experience was on a VIC-20, and I later got my own C64 in 85. Great computer to learn on but I don't think I would have got far without the Programmers Reference Guide.
- wiz21c 8y agoI started with AppleSoft basic around 10 years old. It was fairly simple to achieve "stuff". But if your dream was videogames (and when you're 10 years old, well, you see :-)), then you ended up in front of the assembler/machine code wall. And there your dreams vanished (or you were crazy enough to learn by yourself and books). So I think Pico8 or Scratch are cool in the sense that they give you an environment to start programming. But OTOH, if what you look after is AAA games, then you'll soon be confronted to a brand new wall, ie : DirectX, GPU, C++ whatever. Now I rememeber of Processing which is cool too.
- miesman 8y agoI started with Cosmac ELF 1802 with 256 bytes of memory 128x64 graphics. I would have thought I'd died and gone to heaven if I had something that ran pico-8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COSMAC_ELF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COSMAC_ELF
- User23 8y agoI hope I never have to look at another line of MIDL.
- romwell 8y agoThis sounds really good! Also of note: it was made by the creator of Voxatron (the only game I know of that really explored voxels), and is available as a $5 add-on to that. Wikipedia page told me of a pocket computer preloaded with PICO-8: Pocket CHIP[1]. It seems to be exactly what the OP was asking for. Alas, the Kickstarted company went belly up, failing to deliver all the preorders. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP_(computer)#Pocket_CHIP_and_Pockulus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP_(computer)#Pocket_CHIP_an...
- armadsen 8y agoI have a Pocket CHIP. It’s really cool. Comes preloaded with PICO-8, some other software (a synth, etc.), and a dead simple graphical launcher. But under the hood it’s running full on Linux. I got the Swift compiler installed and running on mine, for example. Really too bad that the company went under.
- romwell 8y agoIt's a pity indeed! I'm going to snatch one on eBay before this thread really picks up.