I’ve been playing around with Pico 8, making small games and experimenting to amuse myself. It’s a lovely little program which they call a “fantasy console”. This means the games for it look quite similar to something like the Game Boy Advance, they are low resolution, with low fidelity sound and are generally quite compact experiences. It’s actually a program which you run on your computer, with a full development environment built in. It includes a code editor, a sprite designer, a map layout tool as well as sound and music creation tools. Each one is very constrained, but in a way that makes it interesting to use. It forces you to not overcomplicate things. You have to focus on the core idea.
The whole system reminds me of the 1980s UK home computer scene. There were type-ins printed on the pages of magazines, people sharing tapes of things that they had made. The systems themselves invited you to create and share, rather than the systems we have today which are locked down and incredibly complex to develop for.
While doing this I’ve been playing some of the games that have been released for it. This one is particularly new, only released a day or two ago. In it you play a small green blob, and must cause moss to grow on all the organic floors, walls, and ceilings on each screen by touching them. There are a surprising number of game mechanics here, with Celeste style temporary double jumps, hidden walls, bubbles that you can use to jump higher, generating ladders to other rooms etc. I wonder if they used some of the code from Celeste actually, since the original prototype for that game was created in Pico 8 and is available. In fact, when running other people’s games on this you are still able to open up the development tools and inspect how they made it as well as make changes to play around and learn.
The game took about 25 minutes to complete, and felt very whole and substantial for such a small thing. It’s very impressive how much game people can put into this tiny system.