[HN Gopher] A Pico-8 story: How the fantasy console unlocked Fre...
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A Pico-8 story: How the fantasy console unlocked Frederic Souchu's
dreams
Author : pmarin
Score : 79 points
Date : 2020-11-08 23:10 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nanark.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nanark.medium.com)
| sxp wrote:
| My favorite Pico-8 game is a Factorio demake that can be played
| in an hour https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=30631
|
| Pico-8 also has a basic music synthesizer so you find many pico-8
| songs online if you're into 8-bit music.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| I wish the platform would've been more open, but I know there are
| many other similar platforms now.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Sometimes I feel like... I am glad the developer is getting
| paid to do what he does best. Earning a living wage from it.
| Please appreciate what they've done. Not everything closed is
| evil oracle megacorp endeavor.
|
| I am 100% ok with Pico-8 being closed. It's a fucking game
| engine, not a crypto library. I am a fan of FOSS, but I often
| see people _demand_ and feel _entitled_ for free stuff. This is
| wrong.
|
| Once in a while, sit back and enjoy what people create without
| a slightest bit of dissapointment, entitlement, itch to make
| mods and hack it, etc. It will bring happiness and peace. Look
| at it from a different way - it's someone's unadulterated,
| unbikeshedded vision of what a tiny game engine should be. No
| PR drama, he doesn't need to answer hundreds of angry assholes
| on Github, ... I think its beautiful.
| simias wrote:
| I do find the closed nature of the project problematic, but
| not for the reason you list: if I invest many hours into
| making games on the platform I want to be sure that I'll
| still be able to run them easily 10 years from now.
|
| Hopefully if the author ever decides to stop working on the
| project they'll release the source code for the community to
| keep it alive.
| patrec wrote:
| If you'd like the platform to be more open, it's pretty easy to
| do something about it, just contribute missing bits to existing
| open source implementations like
| https://github.com/picolove/picolove. The overall system is
| pretty simple, so completing a decent open emulator should be
| be doable in a reasonable time frame.
|
| Personally, I'd both like to see and open-source way to play
| back pico-8 cartridges and lexaloffle continuing to be
| financially rewarded for building a pretty cool (and cheap!)
| platform, so I hope the graphics and sound editors won't be
| included in free clones anytime soon.
| Teever wrote:
| Can you list some of these other platforms so that I can check
| them out?
| badjeans wrote:
| https://tic80.com/ (lua, open source - you can pay for the
| binaries or build it yourself)
|
| https://liko-12.github.io/ (lua, open source, I haven't used
| this much, but it seems nice)
|
| https://github.com/ftsf/nico (nim, open source. Not quite the
| same as the others, there's no IDE, etc. But it's a library
| with an API similar to PICO)
| mrspeaker wrote:
| For Pico-8, closed-ness is a feature: the author is known to
| hide secret easter-egg features in updates eventually get
| discovered and unearthed over time. Parts of the memory map are
| still unknown, and people will figure out new "pokes" that will
| save you some tokens or cycles... then someone takes that and
| does something nuts with the undocumented features.
|
| If it were open source, and community-driven then by now Pico8
| would just be a regular old game framework: features would get
| added and added until it was just like any other game library.
|
| As it stands, the secret-ness of the code is a big part of the
| fun. Figuring out how to push the limitations and looking for
| sneaky ways to do new things. It feels like exploring and
| trying to master the early 8bit computers back in the day.
| That's the "fantasy" part!
|
| That's why I call Pico-8 a fantasy console, and the knock-offs
| are just "feature-limited game libraries"!
| brundolf wrote:
| Fun fact, the indie darling Celeste started out as a Pico-8 game
|
| 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.
| gizmogwai wrote:
| You might want to have a look at Voxatron[1], the 3D version of
| Pico-8, that you get as a bonus when you buy a license of
| Pico-8.
|
| [1]: https://www.lexaloffle.com/voxatron.php
| brundolf wrote:
| As others here said, while this is cool, it uses voxels which
| are unrelated to the techniques used in early 3D video games.
| Not much nostalgia value there.
| simias wrote:
| I agree that a voxel engine is probably more productive for
| such a "toy" console approach. You can basically use the same
| techniques as the one you'd use on the PICO-8, just with an
| added dimension.
|
| Polygonal 3D is a huge step compared to 2D engines. You can't
| just create assets with a simple bitmap editor, you need to
| learn 3D modeling and it's a huge can of worm. And then you
| need to learn to animate your models...
|
| With voxels you can just sculpt your models minecraft-style,
| it's a lot more intuitive I think. And animations could be
| done like for sprites: you just key your animations with
| different 3D voxel models.
| f00zz wrote:
| That looks cool, but I think what GP wants is a PS1-like
| virtual console with limited palette, 32x32 textures, and
| unlit, unfiltered, non-projective texture mapping.
| simias wrote:
| PS1 can support 256x256 truecolor (or 4bpp/8bpp paletted)
| textures, dithering and gouraud shading! It also has a very
| weird graphic pipeline that I don't think would be very
| friendly to a novice: the 3D projections are done on the
| CPU and the depth buffering is handled by... the DMA. The
| GPU is purely 2D, hence the lack of perspective correction
| in the texture mapping.
| brundolf wrote:
| The Pico-8, both in its aesthetic and its imposed
| constraints, creates a "fantasy version" of the
| experience of working on actual 8-bit consoles. It
| presents that era as people remember it, instead of as it
| actually was. I think a similar thing could be done for
| the N64 generation.
| lostgame wrote:
| That looks neat - but I don't think it fits the PS1/N64 era
| very well at all. It seems more like that pixel art/Minecraft
| kinda feeling.
|
| I would also absolutely love a very simple N64/Saturn/PS1 era
| 3D modelling / game engine in such a lovely simple package.
|
| Low-poly, low-res textures, with an option for that wonderful
| grainy kinda PS1 dithering if we'd want. :)
| megalomanu wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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!
| aquova wrote:
| I feel the same way about it. I was a student when I first
| heard about it, and I definitely feel that making my own
| (terrible) Pico-8 games made me a much better programmer than I
| would've been otherwise, and also helped me grasp concepts that
| I found difficult to understand from lectures. Even an artistic
| simpleton like myself can make an 8x8 sprite look good, and the
| other self-imposed limitations of the system actually do a
| great deal of reducing the burden of too many choices. By
| holding you back in certain areas, it actually makes the end
| goal of finishing a game easier to reach. If anyone is debating
| picking it up, I strongly recommend it.
|
| Getting back to the article, I was familiar with Fred's games,
| and I personally think he's one of the most talented developers
| in the community, I'm very excited for the upcoming Poom game,
| which frankly is beginning to border on Dark Magic.
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(page generated 2020-11-09 23:02 UTC)