3 ms·

Am I really the first one to mention pico8 in this thread? Anyway, pico8 is another option that has a bit different spin, but you also implement the games in Lu

by nout 6mo ago

Am I really the first one to mention pico8 in this thread? Anyway, pico8 is another option that has a bit different spin, but you also implement the games in Lua :)

opan 6mo ago
TIC-80 is a nice free as in freedom alternative to PICO-8, and it allows more inputs, which makes for better Tetris games (gotta have that hold piece).
- tertle950 6mo ago
  Is this about Master of Blocks? There are a lot of free-as-in-freedom alternatives to (and clones of) PICO-8, but TIC-80 is indeed the most popular one, by far. And popularity is important for any software ecosystem. I really like that it supports other languages, even if that kinda inhibits its ability to be embedded into small hardware. Apparently the nightly release supports DCPM samples now. Dunno why.
- nout 6mo ago
  It's just that pico8 has much larger ecosystem. There's a new great game almost every day. It is sort of annoying that it's not FOSS, but on the other hand the team/author has sustainable business.
- emptybits 6mo ago
  TIC-80 is wonderful to play in. Besides being free/open, another advantage over PICO-8 is TIC-80 has native support for Fennel. i.e. you can code within the system editor in Lua OR Fennel (or half a dozen other languages!) You don't have to edit and transpile to Lua on the desktop as you would with PICO-8. This has some value in debugging with error messages and line numbers. It's also just plain cool to rock the TIC-80 editor fullscreen with narrow font, coding natively in Lisp and publishing the result to a webpage you can share. I wish the iOS (app) deployment story was a little smoother for TIC-80.
  - 0x3444ac53 6mo ago
    Wait really? I looked into tic80 a while ago and I know it had native support for moon script, but I had to play with it to get fennel to work
- Vedor 6mo ago
  TIC-80 is great indeed, I had even ore fu with it than with PICO-8 and that's a high bar. But there is one gripe -- when packaging apps into executable, TIC-80 pulls templates from the Internet. On one hand, it's not that big deal, we are online basically all time nowadays. But on the other hand, I would expect that kind of software to be self-contained. I found a quite simple (but definitely not frictionless) workaround though - you can build the templates yourself, edit source code to work with localhost instead of TIC website, and host the templates on local webserver. As I said, it's not a frictionless solution, but I don't know C well enough to make more substantial changes to this behaviour.
- mghackerlady 6mo ago
  I'm planning on doing a TIC-80 implementation as one of the first major pieces of software on an OS I plan on working on (I've already designed the OS on paper, I just need to actually do the hard part (actually implementing it))
rigonkulous 6mo ago
antirez' LOAD81 never gets enough love in these discussions even though it is simply awesome: https://github.com/antirez/load81 https://github.com/antirez/load81 Anyone looking at Lua/SDL/game engines would learn a lot from antirez' fun little afternoon project ..
- jamesgeck0 6mo ago
  People talk about the stuff they use, and there are _a lot_ of fantasy consoles. https://github.com/paladin-t/fantasy https://github.com/paladin-t/fantasy
- krapp 6mo ago
  With all due respect to antirez, this is too obsolete and most of it is too low-level to be of much interest to anyone using SDL for game development. People would be better off looking at the examples page and repo for SDL itself. https://examples.libsdl.org/SDL3/ https://examples.libsdl.org/SDL3/ https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/tree/main/examples https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/tree/main/examples
dizhn 6mo ago
As long as we're doing mentions, here's a reminder. If you bought the racial equality bundle in itch.io you already own pico8. You can download the latest version right now on itch.io. (It is neither open source nor free)

by nout 6mo ago

Am I really the first one to mention pico8 in this thread? Anyway, pico8 is another option that has a bit different spin, but you also implement the games in Lua :)

opan 6mo ago

TIC-80 is a nice free as in freedom alternative to PICO-8, and it allows more inputs, which makes for better Tetris games (gotta have that hold piece).

tertle950 6mo ago
Is this about Master of Blocks? There are a lot of free-as-in-freedom alternatives to (and clones of) PICO-8, but TIC-80 is indeed the most popular one, by far. And popularity is important for any software ecosystem. I really like that it supports other languages, even if that kinda inhibits its ability to be embedded into small hardware. Apparently the nightly release supports DCPM samples now. Dunno why.
nout 6mo ago
It's just that pico8 has much larger ecosystem. There's a new great game almost every day. It is sort of annoying that it's not FOSS, but on the other hand the team/author has sustainable business.
emptybits 6mo ago
TIC-80 is wonderful to play in. Besides being free/open, another advantage over PICO-8 is TIC-80 has native support for Fennel. i.e. you can code within the system editor in Lua OR Fennel (or half a dozen other languages!) You don't have to edit and transpile to Lua on the desktop as you would with PICO-8. This has some value in debugging with error messages and line numbers. It's also just plain cool to rock the TIC-80 editor fullscreen with narrow font, coding natively in Lisp and publishing the result to a webpage you can share. I wish the iOS (app) deployment story was a little smoother for TIC-80.
- 0x3444ac53 6mo ago
  Wait really? I looked into tic80 a while ago and I know it had native support for moon script, but I had to play with it to get fennel to work
Vedor 6mo ago
TIC-80 is great indeed, I had even ore fu with it than with PICO-8 and that's a high bar. But there is one gripe -- when packaging apps into executable, TIC-80 pulls templates from the Internet. On one hand, it's not that big deal, we are online basically all time nowadays. But on the other hand, I would expect that kind of software to be self-contained. I found a quite simple (but definitely not frictionless) workaround though - you can build the templates yourself, edit source code to work with localhost instead of TIC website, and host the templates on local webserver. As I said, it's not a frictionless solution, but I don't know C well enough to make more substantial changes to this behaviour.
mghackerlady 6mo ago
I'm planning on doing a TIC-80 implementation as one of the first major pieces of software on an OS I plan on working on (I've already designed the OS on paper, I just need to actually do the hard part (actually implementing it))

rigonkulous 6mo ago

antirez' LOAD81 never gets enough love in these discussions even though it is simply awesome: https://github.com/antirez/load81 https://github.com/antirez/load81 Anyone looking at Lua/SDL/game engines would learn a lot from antirez' fun little afternoon project ..

jamesgeck0 6mo ago
People talk about the stuff they use, and there are _a lot_ of fantasy consoles. https://github.com/paladin-t/fantasy https://github.com/paladin-t/fantasy
krapp 6mo ago
With all due respect to antirez, this is too obsolete and most of it is too low-level to be of much interest to anyone using SDL for game development. People would be better off looking at the examples page and repo for SDL itself. https://examples.libsdl.org/SDL3/ https://examples.libsdl.org/SDL3/ https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/tree/main/examples https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/tree/main/examples

dizhn 6mo ago

As long as we're doing mentions, here's a reminder. If you bought the racial equality bundle in itch.io you already own pico8. You can download the latest version right now on itch.io. (It is neither open source nor free)