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That's pretty cool! How did they port it to new architectures?
by jpm_sd 8y ago
That's pretty cool! How did they port it to new architectures?
- tmountain 8y agoThey prototyped it in pico8 and rewrote it for the commercial release. Pico8 is wonderful, but it’s designed for proof of concepts, not commercial game dev.
- xyzzy_plugh 8y agoIt's almost assembly -- far from designed for proof of concepts. It's a toy for folks who enjoy challenging technical limitations such as low resolution, limited storage and processor power (not to mention palette). Tight constraints tend to breed innovation, however.
- yoklov 8y agoIt’s lua, just with restrictions. Nothing you’d ship with, but a far cry from almost assembly.
- meheleventyone 8y agoI mean it’s definitely a way to enjoy things. But the intent of zep who made it was to create a cozy design space. He gave a talk about it last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87jfTIWosBw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87jfTIWosBw
- sbergot 8y agoThanks for the link. The presentation is great!
- tmountain 8y agoHrm, guess it depends on your notion of what proof of concepts are. Celeste on pico8 is essentially the same game as the commercial release from a gameplay perspective but with lower res artwork (as pico8 dictates) and far less content (again a pico8 constraint). Also, I have tooled around with writing homebrew NES games in 6502 asm, and pico8 is nothing like that. It’s a stripped down lua interpreter, which makes it light years easier than asm. I’ve proved out quite a few concepts in pico8 (pendulum motion, an entity component system, 2d physics models), so for me, that’s exactly what it’s for. The constraints of the platform are there to act as guard rails which prevent you from going “too big” with your idea and focus on creating smaller programs that actually work, and I think this is where the beauty lies since a lot of games die during the “let me create a bunch of scaffolding” phase which pico8 discourages.