Learning Pico-8 In One Day

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[@ilyasb4792]

"I don't want to do pathfinding so I made ghost that don't collide with walls" Ah yes, game design.

[@Tantandev]

Funny how limitations sometimes makes actually fun mechanics

[@zyansheep]

@@Tantandev eyy TanTan! I like your videos :)

[@wr41thx29]

This is why at least 2 of my games have ghosts in them. XD

[@painleroux9486]

and then call it a "Feature"

[@algs5483]

It is not laziness, It is a feature

[@shulkyofshulkor6640]

I do really like the pixelart code editor :P It can be messy and not convenient but it looks *beautiful* . :)

[@Miziziziz]

yeah such a pretty aesthetic

[@awesomegamedev]

It's messy, not convenient, pretentious and looks like garbage I know this comment is one year old, but I just couldn't pass by :)

[@shulkyofshulkor6640]

@@awesomegamedev I like the pixelart style but sure, I understand that coding in that is probably pain.

[@awesomegamedev]

@@shulkyofshulkor6640 I love pixel art in general, but seeing pixel-art code editor is beyond what I could bear 😅

[@Manny73211]

​@@shulkyofshulkor6640 I'm 10, so my programs aren't that complex anyways, and I never get close to the character (yes, I know it counts tokens now instead) limit and I don't mind the font.

[@sohamkane6192]

I'm convinced 3:26 was intentional :P

[@Miziziziz]

👀

[@crunk6232]

this was really cool it sounds mad limited (duh lmfao), but it's still a really charming lil thing

[@Miziziziz]

yeah super charming and cute, I admire the devs who stick it out and make super polished games with it

[@DOMINIKUN]

I've used the color pallette of pico8 more times than I can count. Always thought their code editor was neat but ill stick to GMS2.

[@DeepFriedOreoOffline]

I learned how to use Pico-8 a couple months ago while doing a rogue-like game jam. I would love to see some videos about it! Just so you know, setting up an external editor is actually really simple if you use Atom, as it has a downloadable structure for Pico-8's language directly in the program. As well, if you open up Pico-8 from a CMD window, you can call the function PRINTH() and it will print debug strings to that CMD window!

[@cat47]

github is going to sunset atom in December 2022 :(

[@inuinuinuinuinu]

spit out my milk at “fun features like...16 colors”

[@ThatKolehmainenGuy]

Making animated objects in P8 can also be done like this: Make a table for each animation, make a animation speed number (for example 0.2) then add the animation speed to the animation table index until the index is at the tables highest index + 1 or higher. Then change the sprite variable to match. It's way easier and saves characters and tokens.

[@partially2k]

From only hearing about it occasionally, I was under the impression Pico-8 was a legit oldschool engine - got the bundle, never noticed it - thanks miz

[@BrannoDev]

F for godot. If there is one thing i look for in my game engine it is inconvenience

[@tazmenroach5516]

I didn’t even realize that Pico-8 was in the bundle. I saw the DragonRuby engine in there and have been thinking about trying that out but definitely need to try this out too. I need to go through at some point and just try all the different engines in that bundle.

[@rymd-raket]

Its amazing to see how such a limited color palette can be used to create such good looking visuals!

[@juuuuuuug01]

Love the content dude, keep it up

[@cpunching]

>dislikes Lua Aw man, I love Lua. I started with making text games in Excel's VBA stuff and Windows Forms (through Visual Studio obvs lol) in highschool from boredom during classes, and never found a programming language I liked until I found Lua. The tables stuff just makes way more sense to me, and there's just enough "straight forward" features that I don't get too confused no matter how complex the code I'm looking at gets. Tried python once and had no idea that having something tabbed over one too many times would cause it to crash lol. It definitely gets people laughing at me when I bring it up but as someone who's a hobbyist coder and an artist first it's been a godsend for 2d work for me. Maybe all Lua programmers are weird or something.

[@Selicre]

Lua is an interesting language with lots of interesting features like metatables, but the lack of strict typing and some departures from common language conventions all make it kind of hard to work with a big enough codebase.

[@apestogetherstrong341]

@@Selicre i mean static typing is nice, but lua is a dynamically typed language and those have their advantages too you know! also, what departures? the only inconsistency is "arrays start at one" which is not true. You can have arrays that start at zero it's just not the standard way.

[@Selicre]

​@@apestogetherstrong341 Except the stdlib assumes that they start at 1, and breaks in various ways if they don't. As for other departures, mostly the weird syntax (~=) and dubious semantics like global-by-default. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice language, there's just better choices.

[@apestogetherstrong341]

@@Selicre certainly not for gamedev. Lua is the fastest yet with luaJIT

[@christian5256]

I love LUA! I don't think I'm weird...?

[@arlwiss5110]

The PICO-8 and Fantasy Console discords are good places to just check into every now and again to see amazingly pretty stuff just grow through update gifs and such

[@ututat7326]

Smooth, to the point and informative. Good video and didn't waste my time. ✔💯

[@apestogetherstrong341]

"pico 8 uses lua" i think i saw you use += which is not in lua so it has to be some modified version "my least favorite language" >:(

[@icproductions648]

Those operators have recently been implented into Lua

[@Exxag]

@@icproductions648 Lua 5.4 (which is the most recent version of Lua) still has no assignment operator. Pico-8 uses a custom variant of the Lua library (which also includes stuff such as != instead of ~=)

[@darxoonwasser]

@@Exxag and // for comments

[@j3y445]

@@darxoonwasser wait but in 5.3 u use // for floor division. why would they do that :(

[@RootEntry]

pro's use LuaU

[@leastexpected3115]

Some assembler like language would be much more interesting for this type of console and it maybe be more convenient than lua Edit: on second thought, C would be more comfortable than asm or lua, also it would be more easy to include especially with tcc (tiny C compiler)

[@JaseyStudios]

this game logic makes so much sense to me coming from retro console programming

[@krosismytosis]

3:25 Ah yes, the frustration.

[@jamesl542]

I had no clue Pico-8 was in that bundle!!! Thank you, I'm getting it now

[@TheModerGuy]

I take offence that you claim lua tables start at 1. they actually start at 0 OR 1 thank you very much.

[@Raiser991]

As the Lua documentation states: "You can start an array at index 0, 1, or any other value" And this is a very good summary of why Lua is probably one of the most flexible programming languages.

[@humter]

The only programming language I know is lua, I can confirm that lua is awful

[@yeong126]

MATLAB: *sweating intensifies*

[@manda3dprojects966]

It's uploaded in 2020 during era of Ray Tracing, but that video is very nostalgic and cool, it remind me of the life when I was a kid.

[@delphicdescant]

The fact that you have to do everything in code is awesome. Drag-n-drop interfaces cluttered with menus and buttons should be punishable as a crime against humanity.

[@sosasees]

about the character limit: tokens run out much faster than characters, so it's almost always better to use more characters if it means using less tokens

[@axi6677]

Omg miziziziz doing Pico 8?! AWESOME

[@TheCaptNoname]

This begs for a question: What's next on the list? LIKO-12? TIC-80? Maybe Voxatron even?

[@_fragment]

*_YESSS YOU FINALLY DID IT YOU FUCKING LEGEND_*

[@colbyeckert]

I love lua, it's a very comfy language despite its many, many flaws

[@Dilithium1]

3:25 WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT

[@IPlayKindred]

when a game engine is a game in of itself

[@fardeenmohamed916]

wow you made a raspberry pico game!!! its awsome!

[@EpicTyphlosionTV]

Could you try the TIC-80 next?

[@MidnightWanderer00]

Honestly i think TIC-80 and Pico-8 are kind of the same. They use the same language, both are fantasy consoles, people made cool stuff with them...

[@ImJustKerb]

i use pico 8 as my first game engine and its really easy and works great!

[@natalius]

props to pico 8 users :O

[@Nbrother1607]

Apparently, PICO-8 has 8 controllers and keyboard/mouse input. I only know of one game that can use 8 controllers, it's some sort of top-down spaceship racing game. (it's splitscreen with way too much screen crunch and player 1 and 2 have slightly wider viewports for some reason)

[@nuclearjello2243]

Just came across this video and found out the bundle you were talking about exists, almost a year late. Wish I could have gotten it :(

[@wr41thx29]

PICO 8, what game developers use while waiting for the PCB containing their game made in Assembly to arrive in the mail.

[@TheWeakenedWarrior]

Thanks for sharing this.

[@christian5256]

I love PICO-8 so much.

[@jakegraham7692]

You are my favorite game dev channel

[@bloooooooooooooom]

love pico-8, it was p much how i first learned to code

[@jademonass2954]

i thought pico-8 was just a celest easter egg lmao

[@_mickmccarthy]

For anyone watching who likes the look of this but isn't a massive fan of the self-imposed limitations, check out LÖVE (love2d.org/), another Lua-based framework (no fancy guis or out of the box physics handling), but with no limits around pixels/characters/files etc. This is a great example of something made with LÖVE, a mash-up of Super Mario Bros. and Portal: stabyourself.net/mari0/

[@spline5243]

I'd love to test this it looks very interesting!

[@cloudstock1406]

Damn, I'm earlier than usual

[@raindeir5860]

Really cool video!

[@D0S81]

Maybe if more AAA studios knew how to code like you do with pico then we wouldnt end up with so many badly optimised games that run like crap because the developers only know the 'drag n drop' method of making games. And then when said badly made game inevitably break, you wouldnt need the community that actually does know how to code, to come along and fix the games with patches. I honestly do think that while game engines that are literally just lego sets requiring nothing but sticking bricks together to make a game are convenient for newbs. Big studios making big games should know how to code. And code with limitations, like learning to code in older systems. That way you wouldnt end up with as many games chewing your computer up because they just turned the "make it look good" sliders to full. Instead of learning how to make games look and work good via actually putting work in and being inventive with how they achieve it. Its why we have so many badly optimised games that need a hundred 4090's to run despite looking like a playstation 3 game. Im looking at you forspoken. Sorry. Just pisses me off how lazy bug studios have got when a lot of the indie stuff on say itchio or pico wipe the floor in terms of gameplay and creativity in comparison to things like Golum or calisto proticol (a game whose fire sprites are actually sickening at how bad they are and how low their frame rate is compared to games over twenty years old) its crazy.

[@drakomatic]

He said lua bad :(

[@the32bitguy]

Minetest mod developer here, I can relate to your pain

[@joshfromsmosh3352d]

Meh, deal with it. Sorry, but you will be dealing with this for life, until another language comes

[@jupi6851]

thee boomerangth

[@AyavinArchive]

This reminds me of SmileBASIC...

[@obnoxiouslisper1548]

Yeah, but lua is a little bit more complex than Basic, still easy to learn though

[@therealboiskool7229]

fun fact: there was a free version of pico 8 called tic 80, you should go check it out. because you can download it on your android phone or tablet.

[@abowden556]

seems like a good way to ease into retro development, before you get into actually coding for old platforms (6502 assembly etc)

[@noiJadisCailleach]

My experience with pico-8 when it became free during the onset of the pandemic... DL everything needed to get everything running with pico-8 while reading some tutorials and docs... dl, done! Okay, Back to Godot..

[@PixelDough]

Personally, I’d say it’s better to describe the “dictionary” which you used to make the player and ghosts as a “class” because they bear a bigger resemblance to classes, but still great tutorial :D

[@GriffinAndThings]

This is so cool. I love the idea of pico-8. I've no experience with lua, but your distaste for it has me concerned haha

[@runninggames771]

No dont worry. Lua is very syntactically simple. The 2 problems i have with it are arrays starting at index 1, and no real support for classes. Otherwise its one of my favorite scripting languages. Its also really fucking fast when you use luaJIT

[@Remianr]

It looks like Commodore meets 2020 tech and try to adapt to it or something similar :P

[@CloudLadder-c7e]

Pretty cool to see the learning process, documentation -> tutorials -> derivative project -> entirely original additions That font is horrendous though, M and W are way too hard to read

[@Fopull]

Wow this game engine looks very interesting! I’ll have to look at it sometime..

[@WannibeManisha]

Woah really cool, makes me wanna try!

[@patxs]

at 1:16 he types "this is symbols" below "this is text". i had realized the length was different when i saw it but only some of the symbols had been shown previously so i had to look up a map

[@FishcatGames]

omgggg thank u for telling me. it was in the BLM bundle. there's so much in there I barely looked lol

[@happieplantnl]

Please take a look at the quadplay fantasy console!

[@rblx0879]

WHAT DID YOU SAY ABOUT LUA YOU-

[@simeondermaats]

Sorry but Lua is just the weird cousin of programming languages. On that note, C is probably the granddad who served in 'Nam.

[@yogxoth1959]

love this aesthetic

[@partyeffectsdotbiz]

i miss your godot tutorials

[@SorchaSublime]

The prototype for Celeste was made with Pico 8

[@shoaibmujawar1375]

DragonRuby next??

[@obnoxiouslisper1548]

Lua's Arrays start at 1???, what kind of Monster would design such language

[@TheMinecraftFan]

Yes pico-8 is the best.

[@meffcio]

Man, I'd love to have a full one day of free time to learn something new. XD

[@bobdole6398]

right on brother, good content

[@Supervisor360]

Time of the vid 621 Reminds me of E621

[@shastabolicious]

Pico-8's web export is useful, so I guess it's got Unity beat there.

[@inceptional]

Dang, I watched this linked video and was all ready to give Pico-8 a go: kzbin.info/www/bejne/gWa1iYCrfZpnn9k And then I watched your video and saw that I basically have to be a coder to make a game with Pico-8, which has always been my problem with any game creation tools/software in the past like GameMaker and Unity (which, unlike Pico-8 actually have some initial drop and drag functionality if you want to create something really basic but ultimately kinda crap in most cases), and you put me right off again. I really hate programming and having to learn all the syntax and built in variables and functions and just figuring out how to actually code in any way that makes logical sense, and doesn't end up with me scriptings something using a thousand lines of code that could have been done in ten lines if I only knew better, and also runs properly with no bugs in the code and all that crap. Great job! :-(

[@jaytea3085]

3:30 hm that is kinda neat. tho imo it would be cooler if the directions were shift+WASD lol

[@ultrio325]

why NOT Lua?

[@Trianull]

0:59 So similar in fact you mixed up U and W.

[@nal2us2]

i just want to start a game in Pico-8. I installed Pico-8, I double click on the .p8 game..... I get a multicolored screen with what looks like every line of code for the game, but the game doesnt start..... HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[@sosasees]

you mixed up the letters U and W at 0:58. this could be a common mistake for beginners (i don't know if it is), because the PICO-8 font is different enough from the normal alphabet that you have to relearn reading slightly

[@4lexGrey]

if you are looking for different game dev ideas for one off videos can you try raylib, it looks cool

[@parvatiprabhu56]

Inspirational video

[@kellybmackenzie]

Lua is awesome, I just hate that it doesn't allow semicolons. Lua metatables are actually really amazing as a concept! (And I'm totally biased saying this since I'm Brazilian, lol)

[@laugrimdude]

Celeste gang!

[@Temulgeh]

eyyyy

[@abebetaro]

pico-8 is good for making prototype.

[@thehaigu321]

Wait, Pico8 was in the bundle?!

[@kham_pastgom]

You should try LowRes NX

[@wiiasd3682]

I love pico-8 but dang the collision checking is just so buggy and hard to learn for beginners as I only touch Unity for a few months.

[@theonlycatonice]

3:03 Why _Why_ *Why* Whyyyyyy

[@rebca_]

I wanted to do a "It means he's afraid of Santa Claus" joke about the "then" and "end" blocks but I couldn't figure out how to phrase it in a KZbin comment.

[@tengkuizdihar]

If you don't want to pay $15 for pico, you can also make one for free using github.com/kitao/pyxel instead. It's also a retro game engine but with python instead of lua. Array starts at 0.

[@ReviewOrcsUSA]

Tip: 1) press pause at 1:38, print screen & paste to image editor. 2)You have the color palette. 3)????? 4)Profit

[@myh6274]

3:09 this is easily solvable with compression

[@haileyyyyy]

3:05 why, why, whai, whaaaaiii??

[@upyours2707]

For people interested in Pico-8 but dont have the moneyz, there is a free alternative named TIC-80. Good luck to all of you during these hard times.

[@PlayerZeroStart]

Oh, Pico-8 is a game engine? I thought all these games just had the same developers.

[@Xenthera]

1:00 u and w symbols are flipped mate

[@TK-sr2hz]

Try Python with Pygame. It's lots of fun

[@Chris-yj2di]

Pico-8 is alright, but if anyone wants to work with retro-style restrictions I'd say just learn 6502 and make an Atari game. It's not as difficult as one would think.

[@seniormika]

ah man.. i didn't knew that it was 15$ It's too much for me.. (i live in Turkiye..)

[@BoredBlaby]

If I want to get into game making should I start with GMS or unity?