Underwhelming game development with PICO-8
summary
A demo-driven tour of PICO-8 shows a real microdev workflow: Lua running in a ~2MB heap, a 128x128 GPU with 128x128 16‑color sprites, 4‑channel SFX and 32k PNG cartridges that embed code. Examples include a working snake, a jumpy cat platformer and a Sokoban-like “Cat and Yarn.” Animation is implemented as closures placed in an animations table (functions remove themselves when done), input and tile collision are hand-rolled, and everything runs live inside the pico IDE.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction
- 4:39What PICO-8 is
- 13:56Lua in PICO-8 quirks
- 24:19PICO-8 tools
- 34:51Constraints as creativity
- 47:23PICO-8 problems
- 57:05Fast feedback value
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