Hrm, 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 pers

Hrm, 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.