For a long time I’ve been thinking about getting out of my comfort zone and try to develop a game for something like the Sega Mega Drive or maybe the Atari 2600. But for a spoiled high-level developer like me that would be quite a daunting task so I’ve postponed indefinitely.

Then last week, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, I stumbeld upon this awesome project called PICO-8. To quote the official website:

PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs. It feels like a regular console, but runs on Windows / Mac / Linux.

It’s a virtual console with an 128x128pixel screen that features a complete IDE for you to writes games in:

Games and applications are developed in Lua and there’s a standard library with some low-level functions, and a basic 60fps update/draw loop to get you started but the rest is up to you. There’s some limits as well, for example on the ‘cartrdige’ size, meaning you don’t have unlimited resources at your disposal.

The timing of this discovery (in the midst of corona induced social lockdown) couldn’t be better so I’ve been spending the last few days building a Tower Defense game for PICO-8. It’s a work in progess but you can try it out on the link below. The source code is not on Github, because you can simply download the ‘cartridge’ from your browser and import it to PICO-8 to see how it works. The PICO-8 comunity is very much about sharing in this way.

I haven’t really looked at any other PICO-8 code, nor am I very experienced in Lua so the code is probably not best practice. But hey that was not the idea here; the idea was to have some fun and I can safely say that PICO-8 is the coolest thing I’ve seen all year.

Check out my game (under construction) by clicking the image below: