A Pico-8 postmortem

Over the past week I developed my first game in Pico-8 and one of my first games overall. It's a quite versatile engine and I can even run and develop on my laptop. There are of course drawbacks to. Sadly everything can't be perfect and there's always give and take.

Starting with the code, I had to watch a lot of tutorials and write a lot of code. Pico-8 is almost entirely code based, where as Unity has collision box's built in Pico-8 needs it all to be done manually. Writing the code took quite a while and many tutorials had to be watched. This project forced me to make more of my own code though, due to Pico-8 not having as many educational resources. Lua is the programming used in Pico-8 and quite simple and easy to understand.

Pico-8 sprite size is 8x8, so quite limited. Even the Gameboy had 16x16 sprites. Innovation is born in constraint, so I took these restraints as an opportunity to expand my creativity. Other than code I spent the majority of time on art trying to squeeze in as much detail as I could. I made quite a few "tilesets" for myself. The hardest to make being the town at the start of level 2. I must have restarted 5 times trying to find the correct balance between detail and compactness. Although the town was the hardest the tent sprite is by far my favorite.

The map editor in Pico-8 only really allows use of the first two rows, this caused my plans for a third level to be cut short. My plan was for there to be a volcano to go through but I soon realized that the map didn't even load in. This is my biggest problem with Pico-8 and the reason I like unity more. Pico-8 limits scope an incredible amount. Sound design in Pico-8 is super powerful... if you know what your doing. I have no experience with music or sound design and gave up midway through trying to make music for the game. I fell back to only basic sound effects.

In the future I would like to use unity but if I'm the situation where I am right now and can only use my laptop, Pico-8 is a suitable replacement.