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It would be so awesome if this worked with Pico 8 or a similar fantasy console. I will be much more interested if the barrier to entry for making my own games i

It would be so awesome if this worked with Pico 8 or a similar fantasy console. I will be much more interested if the barrier to entry for making my own games is as close to zero as possible. I want to make my own games for fun, but also to expose my son to the creativity and exploration of programming. A physical console would make this experience so much more real. https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
Go on ebay and dig up a PocketCHIP; it's as close to a first-class mass-produced physical Pico-8 as anyone is likely to see.
darzu 7y ago
Have you seen https://arcade.makecode.com https://arcade.makecode.com ? It's a free, open source, web-based editor for making games, and you can download games to a number of hardware boards, or play on your phone or any web browser. The cheapest hardware right now is $25 from Adafruit [0], but more hardware is coming out all the time. Also this audience might be interested to know that soon there'll be Python support in MakeCode. More details on our language toolchain here [1] Disclosure: I work for MakeCode :) [0] https://www.adafruit.com/product/3939 https://www.adafruit.com/product/3939 [1] https://makecode.com/language https://makecode.com/language
- tyleo 7y ago
  This is awesome! Is MakeCode a subsidiary of Microsoft? It looks like it’s based on some Microsoft tech similar to Google’s Blockly I hadn’t seen before. I’m curious because I’m working on a product in this space.
  - darzu 7y ago
    Yeah, we're a team at MSFT (same org as VS Code). All* our code is open source. We use Google Blockly, and we've made a number of contributions upstream to them. What's your product? * Our server code isn't open source, but it's basically just a node app serving a SPA. Everything is client side. Works offline too.
    - dlp211 7y ago
      Are you hiring?
      - darzu 7y ago
        Not at the moment.
    - tyleo 7y ago
      My product is called Devev. I moonlit the product for the past few years while working at Microsoft. I quit about a month ago to get it over the finish line. I'm still pre-launch but here are some images: https://imgur.com/a/zLS1g0t https://imgur.com/a/zLS1g0t I worked on video games for the past few years and saw many less technical colleagues empowered by tools like Unreal Engine's Blueprint (https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/Blueprints https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/Blueprints). I thought that the same paradigm may apply more widely but the visual languages used outside of games weren't really hitting the mark. Devev is a framework for creating visual programming languages. They are supported through extensions. For launch I'm working on an extension which parses TS types and allows you to use the existing code in nodes. That's what you'll see in my image above. This will allow early users to tap into existing libraries published on NPM. I don't expect much traction with the launch version and plan to target a specific domain shortly after that. I'm leaning towards a build system where you can capture your dependencies in a visual graph. One of the applications I'd been thinking about was allowing users to build and share games or other applications in a web-editor similar to Scratch. Devev is also a JS SPA and the client editor uses Electron. The client editor supports more features like multiple windows, editors panes and plugins. Additionally the client can parse new Typescript files but not the SPA. For the SPA to parse TS I'd need to deliver TSC over the web which I won't figure out for V1.
      - darzu 7y ago
        This is really cool! I've often wondered if a Blueprint-like editting experiences could be used more broadly. Looking forward to seeing this grow. I think there is also great potential for a very approachable debugging experience. Targeting build systems seems like a great fit as well, since as you pointed out the build DAG is naturally a graph. When you mentioned games programming, I thought of Dream's visual programming: https://youtu.be/eMRp3QMAkz8?t=773 https://youtu.be/eMRp3QMAkz8?t=773 I love the idea of using typescript types to define visual code atoms. We do a very simple version of that to create our Blockly blocks, e.g. block definition: https://github.com/microsoft/pxt-microbit/blob/master/libs/radio/radio.ts#L88 https://github.com/microsoft/pxt-microbit/blob/master/libs/r... although I'm sure you could take that much farther. We run TSC in the browser in a worker thread, here's an example, in case that helps: https://github.com/microsoft/pxt/blob/master/pxtcompiler/emitter/driver.ts#L245 https://github.com/microsoft/pxt/blob/master/pxtcompiler/emi... We use TSC for typechecking and our own typescript compiler for compiling down to ARM assembly.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- fit2rule 7y ago
  Another great online game resource: http://labs.phaser.io/ http://labs.phaser.io/ Not affiliated, just also interested in new and emerging easy to use game systems, and this is just the latest in a long line of them I've been playing with ..
  - tshanmu 7y ago
    tried phaser a year back - it was not very dev friendly - you had to be phaser expert to make sense of it
    - RaycatRakittra 7y ago
      Strange. I've found the opposite to be true. They do a pretty decent job explaining why you need a web server and how to make a basic one. Once it's set up, there are tons of examples and resources to look at.
    - ioulian 7y ago
      We built a few small web games with phaser. It was very easy to start and also easy to finish. You can prototype with it very quickly and there are a lot of resources explaining things to you. Recommend. I don't know about changes in the last 2 years, haven't used it since then, maybe it's changed for worse but can't imagine
    - hombre_fatal 7y ago
      Same. I tried it a few months ago. Navigating Phaser2 vs Phaser3 alone was so bad that it radicalized me to believe that you should just rename a project after a full rewrite. Everything I googled would give me results in the Phaser forums and the exercise was on me to figure out which version they were using, which was 100% Phaser 2. And the API definitely wasn't written for Typescript support. For example, just changing the physics string completely changes the API available which felt like an exercise in obfuscation. Also found the API so unintuitive that I was trying to repurpose examples to get what I wanted which is always a bad sign to me, like hoping your question appears in an FAQ because the code is too hard to read. Ended up using https://excaliburjs.com/ https://excaliburjs.com/ which is written in Typescript thus much less guesswork. I really didn't like my experience with Phaser.
- lostphilosopher 7y ago
  Very cool! Any plans for making it possible to create Android apps with this?
  - darzu 7y ago
    Games for Android and iOS are a real possibility, but general Android apps aren't on our radar. Our focus is CS education, and I'm not sure general Android apps would be a good fit for that. That being said, our platform is fairly extensible so someone could create an Android Apps target. They'd need to create a new backend to target the JVM probably and some work to link with whatever pre-built Android binaries.
- mikecaron 7y ago
  I played with arcade.makecode.com at MS Build this year and made a Taco vs. Burgers side scroller on the MeowBit. My kids love it! My daughters and I are coding up something with a duck right now and it's uber fun! Thanks for making that platform!!
  - darzu 7y ago
    Awesome! :) We're really happy to hear that. If you have any suggestions or bugs, please feel free to comment on https://forum.makecode.com/ https://forum.makecode.com/ or https://github.com/microsoft/pxt https://github.com/microsoft/pxt. We're still in the early stages with Arcade so feedback is especially useful.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
myhf 7y ago
Recent versions of PICO-8 support full controller operation (browsing cartridge PNGs, launching, and quitting) through EmulationStation. https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=3935 https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=3935 So you could use any Raspberry Pi enclosure as a physical PICO-8 platform.
larsiusprime 7y ago
Heard of Pixel Vision 8? https://twitter.com/pixelvision8/status/1131370536477581313 https://twitter.com/pixelvision8/status/1131370536477581313
- bullfightonmars 7y ago
  Wow. This is very cool. It has a whole virtual desktop. Neat.
  - larsiusprime 7y ago
    What's really cool about PixelVision8 is it's a meta-fantasy console. IE, you can define your own spec/constraints and then code up a little game prototype in C# or Lua. Looks like the PlayDate will support lua and apparently isn't a complete potato according to their presskit page, so it's not out of the question that platforms like PixelVision8 could port its runner to the platform and then you could author for actual hardware using the editing tool.
- whywhywhywhy 7y ago
  Anyone into this sort of stuff should check out https://androidarts.com/ https://androidarts.com/ there are a whole ton of fantasy console concepts on it.
disqard 7y ago
Check out BlockStudio [0] (disclaimer: I'm the creator) -- it lets you make simple retro-like games with a text-free program specification method (Programming By Demonstration). [0] www.blockstudio.app
pedrogpimenta 7y ago
There is this thing: https://www.clockworkpi.com/ https://www.clockworkpi.com/ It's awesome and it comes with PICO-8 pre-installed (you only need to add the license key). It can also run lots of emulators.
mntmoss 7y ago
It can be coded with Lua. Graphics performance still required considerable optimization. No info on whether development will be open to the public. Source: know one of the lauch game developers, have cranked the prototype hardware
gadgetoid 7y ago
What we're doing with 32blit is effectively Pico 8 with hardware. I'd be happy if we saw a tenth of the success that Pico 8 has achieved- some of the titles written for it are truly remarkable and seeing how people push the artificial limits is genuinely interesting and something I'd be honoured to foster more of. I think Dank Tomb's lighting is by far one of my favourite examples - https://hackernoon.com/pico-8-lighting-part-1-thin-dark-line-8ea15d21fed7 https://hackernoon.com/pico-8-lighting-part-1-thin-dark-line...

RodgerTheGreat 7y ago

Go on ebay and dig up a PocketCHIP; it's as close to a first-class mass-produced physical Pico-8 as anyone is likely to see.

darzu 7y ago

Have you seen https://arcade.makecode.com https://arcade.makecode.com ? It's a free, open source, web-based editor for making games, and you can download games to a number of hardware boards, or play on your phone or any web browser. The cheapest hardware right now is $25 from Adafruit [0], but more hardware is coming out all the time. Also this audience might be interested to know that soon there'll be Python support in MakeCode. More details on our language toolchain here [1] Disclosure: I work for MakeCode :) [0] https://www.adafruit.com/product/3939 https://www.adafruit.com/product/3939 [1] https://makecode.com/language https://makecode.com/language

tyleo 7y ago
This is awesome! Is MakeCode a subsidiary of Microsoft? It looks like it’s based on some Microsoft tech similar to Google’s Blockly I hadn’t seen before. I’m curious because I’m working on a product in this space.
- darzu 7y ago
  Yeah, we're a team at MSFT (same org as VS Code). All* our code is open source. We use Google Blockly, and we've made a number of contributions upstream to them. What's your product? * Our server code isn't open source, but it's basically just a node app serving a SPA. Everything is client side. Works offline too.
  - dlp211 7y ago
    Are you hiring?
    - darzu 7y ago
      Not at the moment.
  - tyleo 7y ago
    My product is called Devev. I moonlit the product for the past few years while working at Microsoft. I quit about a month ago to get it over the finish line. I'm still pre-launch but here are some images: https://imgur.com/a/zLS1g0t https://imgur.com/a/zLS1g0t I worked on video games for the past few years and saw many less technical colleagues empowered by tools like Unreal Engine's Blueprint (https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/Blueprints https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/Blueprints). I thought that the same paradigm may apply more widely but the visual languages used outside of games weren't really hitting the mark. Devev is a framework for creating visual programming languages. They are supported through extensions. For launch I'm working on an extension which parses TS types and allows you to use the existing code in nodes. That's what you'll see in my image above. This will allow early users to tap into existing libraries published on NPM. I don't expect much traction with the launch version and plan to target a specific domain shortly after that. I'm leaning towards a build system where you can capture your dependencies in a visual graph. One of the applications I'd been thinking about was allowing users to build and share games or other applications in a web-editor similar to Scratch. Devev is also a JS SPA and the client editor uses Electron. The client editor supports more features like multiple windows, editors panes and plugins. Additionally the client can parse new Typescript files but not the SPA. For the SPA to parse TS I'd need to deliver TSC over the web which I won't figure out for V1.
    - darzu 7y ago
      This is really cool! I've often wondered if a Blueprint-like editting experiences could be used more broadly. Looking forward to seeing this grow. I think there is also great potential for a very approachable debugging experience. Targeting build systems seems like a great fit as well, since as you pointed out the build DAG is naturally a graph. When you mentioned games programming, I thought of Dream's visual programming: https://youtu.be/eMRp3QMAkz8?t=773 https://youtu.be/eMRp3QMAkz8?t=773 I love the idea of using typescript types to define visual code atoms. We do a very simple version of that to create our Blockly blocks, e.g. block definition: https://github.com/microsoft/pxt-microbit/blob/master/libs/radio/radio.ts#L88 https://github.com/microsoft/pxt-microbit/blob/master/libs/r... although I'm sure you could take that much farther. We run TSC in the browser in a worker thread, here's an example, in case that helps: https://github.com/microsoft/pxt/blob/master/pxtcompiler/emitter/driver.ts#L245 https://github.com/microsoft/pxt/blob/master/pxtcompiler/emi... We use TSC for typechecking and our own typescript compiler for compiling down to ARM assembly.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
fit2rule 7y ago
Another great online game resource: http://labs.phaser.io/ http://labs.phaser.io/ Not affiliated, just also interested in new and emerging easy to use game systems, and this is just the latest in a long line of them I've been playing with ..
- tshanmu 7y ago
  tried phaser a year back - it was not very dev friendly - you had to be phaser expert to make sense of it
  - RaycatRakittra 7y ago
    Strange. I've found the opposite to be true. They do a pretty decent job explaining why you need a web server and how to make a basic one. Once it's set up, there are tons of examples and resources to look at.
  - ioulian 7y ago
    We built a few small web games with phaser. It was very easy to start and also easy to finish. You can prototype with it very quickly and there are a lot of resources explaining things to you. Recommend. I don't know about changes in the last 2 years, haven't used it since then, maybe it's changed for worse but can't imagine
  - hombre_fatal 7y ago
    Same. I tried it a few months ago. Navigating Phaser2 vs Phaser3 alone was so bad that it radicalized me to believe that you should just rename a project after a full rewrite. Everything I googled would give me results in the Phaser forums and the exercise was on me to figure out which version they were using, which was 100% Phaser 2. And the API definitely wasn't written for Typescript support. For example, just changing the physics string completely changes the API available which felt like an exercise in obfuscation. Also found the API so unintuitive that I was trying to repurpose examples to get what I wanted which is always a bad sign to me, like hoping your question appears in an FAQ because the code is too hard to read. Ended up using https://excaliburjs.com/ https://excaliburjs.com/ which is written in Typescript thus much less guesswork. I really didn't like my experience with Phaser.
lostphilosopher 7y ago
Very cool! Any plans for making it possible to create Android apps with this?
- darzu 7y ago
  Games for Android and iOS are a real possibility, but general Android apps aren't on our radar. Our focus is CS education, and I'm not sure general Android apps would be a good fit for that. That being said, our platform is fairly extensible so someone could create an Android Apps target. They'd need to create a new backend to target the JVM probably and some work to link with whatever pre-built Android binaries.
mikecaron 7y ago
I played with arcade.makecode.com at MS Build this year and made a Taco vs. Burgers side scroller on the MeowBit. My kids love it! My daughters and I are coding up something with a duck right now and it's uber fun! Thanks for making that platform!!
- darzu 7y ago
  Awesome! :) We're really happy to hear that. If you have any suggestions or bugs, please feel free to comment on https://forum.makecode.com/ https://forum.makecode.com/ or https://github.com/microsoft/pxt https://github.com/microsoft/pxt. We're still in the early stages with Arcade so feedback is especially useful.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

myhf 7y ago

Recent versions of PICO-8 support full controller operation (browsing cartridge PNGs, launching, and quitting) through EmulationStation. https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=3935 https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=3935 So you could use any Raspberry Pi enclosure as a physical PICO-8 platform.

larsiusprime 7y ago

Heard of Pixel Vision 8? https://twitter.com/pixelvision8/status/1131370536477581313 https://twitter.com/pixelvision8/status/1131370536477581313

bullfightonmars 7y ago
Wow. This is very cool. It has a whole virtual desktop. Neat.
- larsiusprime 7y ago
  What's really cool about PixelVision8 is it's a meta-fantasy console. IE, you can define your own spec/constraints and then code up a little game prototype in C# or Lua. Looks like the PlayDate will support lua and apparently isn't a complete potato according to their presskit page, so it's not out of the question that platforms like PixelVision8 could port its runner to the platform and then you could author for actual hardware using the editing tool.
whywhywhywhy 7y ago
Anyone into this sort of stuff should check out https://androidarts.com/ https://androidarts.com/ there are a whole ton of fantasy console concepts on it.

disqard 7y ago

Check out BlockStudio [0] (disclaimer: I'm the creator) -- it lets you make simple retro-like games with a text-free program specification method (Programming By Demonstration). [0] www.blockstudio.app

pedrogpimenta 7y ago

There is this thing: https://www.clockworkpi.com/ https://www.clockworkpi.com/ It's awesome and it comes with PICO-8 pre-installed (you only need to add the license key). It can also run lots of emulators.

mntmoss 7y ago

It can be coded with Lua. Graphics performance still required considerable optimization. No info on whether development will be open to the public. Source: know one of the lauch game developers, have cranked the prototype hardware

gadgetoid 7y ago

What we're doing with 32blit is effectively Pico 8 with hardware. I'd be happy if we saw a tenth of the success that Pico 8 has achieved- some of the titles written for it are truly remarkable and seeing how people push the artificial limits is genuinely interesting and something I'd be honoured to foster more of. I think Dank Tomb's lighting is by far one of my favourite examples - https://hackernoon.com/pico-8-lighting-part-1-thin-dark-line-8ea15d21fed7 https://hackernoon.com/pico-8-lighting-part-1-thin-dark-line...