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.<p>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.<p>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!
Fun fact, the indie darling Celeste started out as a Pico-8 game<p>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.
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.
My favorite Pico-8 game is a Factorio demake that can be played in an hour <a href="https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=30631" rel="nofollow">https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=30631</a><p>Pico-8 also has a basic music synthesizer so you find many pico-8 songs online if you're into 8-bit music.
Two fun facts about Pico-8:<p>* 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!
<a href="https://pico-8.fandom.com/wiki/P8PNGFileFormat" rel="nofollow">https://pico-8.fandom.com/wiki/P8PNGFileFormat</a><p>* 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.
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)