7 ms·

A Pico-8 story: How the fantasy console unlocked Frédéric Souchu’s dreams

151 points by pmarin 6y ago

sxp 6y ago
My favorite Pico-8 game is a Factorio demake that can be played in an hour https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=30631 https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=30631 Pico-8 also has a basic music synthesizer so you find many pico-8 songs online if you're into 8-bit music.
th0ma5 6y ago
I wish the platform would've been more open, but I know there are many other similar platforms now.
- Teever 6y ago
  Can you list some of these other platforms so that I can check them out?
  - badjeans 6y ago
    https://tic80.com/ https://tic80.com/ (lua, open source - you can pay for the binaries or build it yourself) https://liko-12.github.io/ https://liko-12.github.io/ (lua, open source, I haven't used this much, but it seems nice) https://github.com/ftsf/nico https://github.com/ftsf/nico (nim, open source. Not quite the same as the others, there's no IDE, etc. But it's a library with an API similar to PICO)
    - harryvederci 6y ago
      Nice thing about TIC-80: it has built-in support for Fennel[0], so you can develop games for it in a lisp-like language. [0] https://fennel-lang.org/ https://fennel-lang.org/
      - boogies 6y ago
        (and Moonscript (coffee-script inspired whitespace-significant Lua variant, https://moonscript.org/ https://moonscript.org/), Wren (https://wren.io/ https://wren.io/), and JavaScript (unfortunately): https://tic80.com/learn https://tic80.com/learn §Specification)
  - tonetheman 6y ago
    Another one in Python. Also cool: https://github.com/kitao/pyxel https://github.com/kitao/pyxel
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  Sometimes I feel like... I am glad the developer is getting paid to do what he does best. Earning a living wage from it. Please appreciate what they've done. Not everything closed is evil oracle megacorp endeavor. I am 100% ok with Pico-8 being closed. It's a fucking game engine, not a crypto library. I am a fan of FOSS, but I often see people demand and feel entitled for free stuff. This is wrong. Once in a while, sit back and enjoy what people create without a slightest bit of dissapointment, entitlement, itch to make mods and hack it, etc. It will bring happiness and peace. Look at it from a different way - it's someone's unadulterated, unbikeshedded vision of what a tiny game engine should be. No PR drama, he doesn't need to answer hundreds of angry assholes on Github, ... I think its beautiful.
  - simias 6y ago
    I do find the closed nature of the project problematic, but not for the reason you list: if I invest many hours into making games on the platform I want to be sure that I'll still be able to run them easily 10 years from now. Hopefully if the author ever decides to stop working on the project they'll release the source code for the community to keep it alive.
    - bzzzt 6y ago
      Even if the author released sources you would not get any guarantee the games can run easily. There needs to be a community that is familiar with the source and keeps maintaining it. There are a lot of game engine like projects on Github with full code available that are anything but easily runnable on modern operating systems.
      - simias 6y ago
        It wouldn't be a silver bullet but it would at least make it possible. See Flash for instance: I'm sure there would be enough interest to maintain a FLOSS fork of the Flash player but it's not possible without reverse-engineering it and reimplementing it from scratch.
  - zem 6y ago
- mrspeaker 6y ago
  For Pico-8, closed-ness is a feature: the author is known to hide secret easter-egg features in updates eventually get discovered and unearthed over time. Parts of the memory map are still unknown, and people will figure out new "pokes" that will save you some tokens or cycles... then someone takes that and does something nuts with the undocumented features. If it were open source, and community-driven then by now Pico8 would just be a regular old game framework: features would get added and added until it was just like any other game library. As it stands, the secret-ness of the code is a big part of the fun. Figuring out how to push the limitations and looking for sneaky ways to do new things. It feels like exploring and trying to master the early 8bit computers back in the day. That's the "fantasy" part! That's why I call Pico-8 a fantasy console, and the knock-offs are just "feature-limited game libraries"!
- patrec 6y ago
  If you'd like the platform to be more open, it's pretty easy to do something about it, just contribute missing bits to existing open source implementations like https://github.com/picolove/picolove https://github.com/picolove/picolove. The overall system is pretty simple, so completing a decent open emulator should be be doable in a reasonable time frame. Personally, I'd both like to see and open-source way to play back pico-8 cartridges and lexaloffle continuing to be financially rewarded for building a pretty cool (and cheap!) platform, so I hope the graphics and sound editors won't be included in free clones anytime soon.
brundolf 6y ago
Fun fact, the indie darling Celeste started out as a Pico-8 game As someone who cut my teeth on the first 3D generation of games I'd personally love to see a Pico-64, or whatever, that targets the N64/PS1 experience; 2D games aren't really nostalgic for me. It would be harder - who knows how you'd go about creating a 3D asset tool on the same level of simplicity as the Pico-8's sprite editor (and a texturing tool to match) - but I can dream.
- gizmogwai 6y ago
  You might want to have a look at Voxatron[1], the 3D version of Pico-8, that you get as a bonus when you buy a license of Pico-8. [1]: https://www.lexaloffle.com/voxatron.php https://www.lexaloffle.com/voxatron.php
  - f00zz 6y ago
    That looks cool, but I think what GP wants is a PS1-like virtual console with limited palette, 32x32 textures, and unlit, unfiltered, non-projective texture mapping.
    - simias 6y ago
      PS1 can support 256x256 truecolor (or 4bpp/8bpp paletted) textures, dithering and gouraud shading! It also has a very weird graphic pipeline that I don't think would be very friendly to a novice: the 3D projections are done on the CPU and the depth buffering is handled by... the DMA. The GPU is purely 2D, hence the lack of perspective correction in the texture mapping.
      - brundolf 6y ago
        The Pico-8, in both its aesthetic and its imposed constraints, creates a "fantasy version" of the experience of working on actual 8-bit consoles. It presents that era as people remember it, instead of as it actually was. I think a similar thing could be done for the N64 generation.
  - 6y ago
megalomanu 6y ago
I've developed my first video game ever in 2020 thanks to Pico-8 (and thanks to the COVID and the lockdown, too) I was impressed by how it was easy to learn. Once you understood that everything revolves around a big gameplay loop, you can really just focus on what matters (gameplay, art). I like that it encourages trade-offs and workarounds. I've never felt blocked or stuck too long. Also, as a software engineer, I wasn't afraid of the development part of the game, but I was very skeptical of my capacities to draw characters or levels. Pico-8 helped me to achieve something without feeling ashamed. Because I knew that I was, by nature, limited in my sprites, it helped me releasing my inhibitions and drawing as if I was a 5 years-old boy proud of his drawings. Same thing for the music and sounds. Another cool thing is that even when writing code, I didn't feel like I was doing the same thing as during the day. Just writing code, in a closed and stable environment, with a very modest API, and finally the ability to release and convert your game into a JS file in just one command is infinitely satisfying. After a day spent struggling with CloudFormation on AWS, it was a blessing!
- aquova 6y ago
  I feel the same way about it. I was a student when I first heard about it, and I definitely feel that making my own (terrible) Pico-8 games made me a much better programmer than I would've been otherwise, and also helped me grasp concepts that I found difficult to understand from lectures. Even an artistic simpleton like myself can make an 8x8 sprite look good, and the other self-imposed limitations of the system actually do a great deal of reducing the burden of too many choices. By holding you back in certain areas, it actually makes the end goal of finishing a game easier to reach. If anyone is debating picking it up, I strongly recommend it. Getting back to the article, I was familiar with Fred's games, and I personally think he's one of the most talented developers in the community, I'm very excited for the upcoming Poom game, which frankly is beginning to border on Dark Magic.
- lewsid 6y ago
  I had the exact same experience (even down to releasing my first game during lockdown)! The whole process of developing in Pico 8 is like digital therapy for me. It reminds me what excited me about coding all those years ago before it became a career.
Xavdidtheshadow 6y ago
My favorite quirk of Pico-8 is that the games "cartridges" are image files. As a result, they're easy to share on social media and it's visually interesting to do so.
rashidujang 6y ago
I just started on my journey to create my first game with PICO-8. Fred is an absolute genius and is unmissable if you frequent the BBS (Bulletin Board system, PICO-8's official forum)
scottyelich 6y ago
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=28402 https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=28402
ufo 6y ago
Two fun facts about Pico-8: * Pico-8 "cartridges" are PNG images with the source code hidden inside the low-order bits using steganography. If you see a picture of the cartridge that picture is also the game! https://pico-8.fandom.com/wiki/P8PNGFileFormat https://pico-8.fandom.com/wiki/P8PNGFileFormat * The main limit on how large the program can be is the number of tokens. An earlier version just had a character limit but that encouraged the game developers to use unreadable minified code with terrible variable names.

151 points by pmarin 6y ago

sxp 6y ago

My favorite Pico-8 game is a Factorio demake that can be played in an hour https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=30631 https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=30631 Pico-8 also has a basic music synthesizer so you find many pico-8 songs online if you're into 8-bit music.

th0ma5 6y ago

I wish the platform would've been more open, but I know there are many other similar platforms now.

Teever 6y ago
Can you list some of these other platforms so that I can check them out?
- badjeans 6y ago
  https://tic80.com/ https://tic80.com/ (lua, open source - you can pay for the binaries or build it yourself) https://liko-12.github.io/ https://liko-12.github.io/ (lua, open source, I haven't used this much, but it seems nice) https://github.com/ftsf/nico https://github.com/ftsf/nico (nim, open source. Not quite the same as the others, there's no IDE, etc. But it's a library with an API similar to PICO)
  - harryvederci 6y ago
    Nice thing about TIC-80: it has built-in support for Fennel[0], so you can develop games for it in a lisp-like language. [0] https://fennel-lang.org/ https://fennel-lang.org/
    - boogies 6y ago
      (and Moonscript (coffee-script inspired whitespace-significant Lua variant, https://moonscript.org/ https://moonscript.org/), Wren (https://wren.io/ https://wren.io/), and JavaScript (unfortunately): https://tic80.com/learn https://tic80.com/learn §Specification)
- tonetheman 6y ago
  Another one in Python. Also cool: https://github.com/kitao/pyxel https://github.com/kitao/pyxel
systemvoltage 6y ago
Sometimes I feel like... I am glad the developer is getting paid to do what he does best. Earning a living wage from it. Please appreciate what they've done. Not everything closed is evil oracle megacorp endeavor. I am 100% ok with Pico-8 being closed. It's a fucking game engine, not a crypto library. I am a fan of FOSS, but I often see people demand and feel entitled for free stuff. This is wrong. Once in a while, sit back and enjoy what people create without a slightest bit of dissapointment, entitlement, itch to make mods and hack it, etc. It will bring happiness and peace. Look at it from a different way - it's someone's unadulterated, unbikeshedded vision of what a tiny game engine should be. No PR drama, he doesn't need to answer hundreds of angry assholes on Github, ... I think its beautiful.
- simias 6y ago
  I do find the closed nature of the project problematic, but not for the reason you list: if I invest many hours into making games on the platform I want to be sure that I'll still be able to run them easily 10 years from now. Hopefully if the author ever decides to stop working on the project they'll release the source code for the community to keep it alive.
  - bzzzt 6y ago
    Even if the author released sources you would not get any guarantee the games can run easily. There needs to be a community that is familiar with the source and keeps maintaining it. There are a lot of game engine like projects on Github with full code available that are anything but easily runnable on modern operating systems.
    - simias 6y ago
      It wouldn't be a silver bullet but it would at least make it possible. See Flash for instance: I'm sure there would be enough interest to maintain a FLOSS fork of the Flash player but it's not possible without reverse-engineering it and reimplementing it from scratch.
- zem 6y ago
mrspeaker 6y ago
For Pico-8, closed-ness is a feature: the author is known to hide secret easter-egg features in updates eventually get discovered and unearthed over time. Parts of the memory map are still unknown, and people will figure out new "pokes" that will save you some tokens or cycles... then someone takes that and does something nuts with the undocumented features. If it were open source, and community-driven then by now Pico8 would just be a regular old game framework: features would get added and added until it was just like any other game library. As it stands, the secret-ness of the code is a big part of the fun. Figuring out how to push the limitations and looking for sneaky ways to do new things. It feels like exploring and trying to master the early 8bit computers back in the day. That's the "fantasy" part! That's why I call Pico-8 a fantasy console, and the knock-offs are just "feature-limited game libraries"!
patrec 6y ago
If you'd like the platform to be more open, it's pretty easy to do something about it, just contribute missing bits to existing open source implementations like https://github.com/picolove/picolove https://github.com/picolove/picolove. The overall system is pretty simple, so completing a decent open emulator should be be doable in a reasonable time frame. Personally, I'd both like to see and open-source way to play back pico-8 cartridges and lexaloffle continuing to be financially rewarded for building a pretty cool (and cheap!) platform, so I hope the graphics and sound editors won't be included in free clones anytime soon.

brundolf 6y ago

Fun fact, the indie darling Celeste started out as a Pico-8 game As someone who cut my teeth on the first 3D generation of games I'd personally love to see a Pico-64, or whatever, that targets the N64/PS1 experience; 2D games aren't really nostalgic for me. It would be harder - who knows how you'd go about creating a 3D asset tool on the same level of simplicity as the Pico-8's sprite editor (and a texturing tool to match) - but I can dream.

gizmogwai 6y ago
You might want to have a look at Voxatron[1], the 3D version of Pico-8, that you get as a bonus when you buy a license of Pico-8. [1]: https://www.lexaloffle.com/voxatron.php https://www.lexaloffle.com/voxatron.php
- f00zz 6y ago
  That looks cool, but I think what GP wants is a PS1-like virtual console with limited palette, 32x32 textures, and unlit, unfiltered, non-projective texture mapping.
  - simias 6y ago
    PS1 can support 256x256 truecolor (or 4bpp/8bpp paletted) textures, dithering and gouraud shading! It also has a very weird graphic pipeline that I don't think would be very friendly to a novice: the 3D projections are done on the CPU and the depth buffering is handled by... the DMA. The GPU is purely 2D, hence the lack of perspective correction in the texture mapping.
    - brundolf 6y ago
      The Pico-8, in both its aesthetic and its imposed constraints, creates a "fantasy version" of the experience of working on actual 8-bit consoles. It presents that era as people remember it, instead of as it actually was. I think a similar thing could be done for the N64 generation.
- 6y ago

megalomanu 6y ago

I've developed my first video game ever in 2020 thanks to Pico-8 (and thanks to the COVID and the lockdown, too) I was impressed by how it was easy to learn. Once you understood that everything revolves around a big gameplay loop, you can really just focus on what matters (gameplay, art). I like that it encourages trade-offs and workarounds. I've never felt blocked or stuck too long. Also, as a software engineer, I wasn't afraid of the development part of the game, but I was very skeptical of my capacities to draw characters or levels. Pico-8 helped me to achieve something without feeling ashamed. Because I knew that I was, by nature, limited in my sprites, it helped me releasing my inhibitions and drawing as if I was a 5 years-old boy proud of his drawings. Same thing for the music and sounds. Another cool thing is that even when writing code, I didn't feel like I was doing the same thing as during the day. Just writing code, in a closed and stable environment, with a very modest API, and finally the ability to release and convert your game into a JS file in just one command is infinitely satisfying. After a day spent struggling with CloudFormation on AWS, it was a blessing!

aquova 6y ago
I feel the same way about it. I was a student when I first heard about it, and I definitely feel that making my own (terrible) Pico-8 games made me a much better programmer than I would've been otherwise, and also helped me grasp concepts that I found difficult to understand from lectures. Even an artistic simpleton like myself can make an 8x8 sprite look good, and the other self-imposed limitations of the system actually do a great deal of reducing the burden of too many choices. By holding you back in certain areas, it actually makes the end goal of finishing a game easier to reach. If anyone is debating picking it up, I strongly recommend it. Getting back to the article, I was familiar with Fred's games, and I personally think he's one of the most talented developers in the community, I'm very excited for the upcoming Poom game, which frankly is beginning to border on Dark Magic.
lewsid 6y ago
I had the exact same experience (even down to releasing my first game during lockdown)! The whole process of developing in Pico 8 is like digital therapy for me. It reminds me what excited me about coding all those years ago before it became a career.

Xavdidtheshadow 6y ago

My favorite quirk of Pico-8 is that the games "cartridges" are image files. As a result, they're easy to share on social media and it's visually interesting to do so.

rashidujang 6y ago

I just started on my journey to create my first game with PICO-8. Fred is an absolute genius and is unmissable if you frequent the BBS (Bulletin Board system, PICO-8's official forum)

scottyelich 6y ago

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=28402 https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=28402

ufo 6y ago

Two fun facts about Pico-8: * Pico-8 "cartridges" are PNG images with the source code hidden inside the low-order bits using steganography. If you see a picture of the cartridge that picture is also the game! https://pico-8.fandom.com/wiki/P8PNGFileFormat https://pico-8.fandom.com/wiki/P8PNGFileFormat * The main limit on how large the program can be is the number of tokens. An earlier version just had a character limit but that encouraged the game developers to use unreadable minified code with terrible variable names.