Getting Started - Tutorial / Guide / Awesome PICO-8 / Helpful Posts

Keyboard Shortcuts

Reload/Run/Restart Ctrl+R
Quick-Save Ctrl+S

Lua

• Tables - Table index start at 1 in Lua
• OOP
• Coroutines
• using External Editor
• multi assignment - local x,y = 10, 11
• Multiline comments
• 16.16 fixed point numbers - need additional library for float

--[=====[ 
for k,v in pairs(t) do
   local d = fullToShort[k]
   local col = xColours[v[1]] -- It stops here!
   cecho(string.format(("<%s>%s ", col, d))
end
--]=====]

Tips

• Circular Clipping Masks / lazydev
• Storing Binary Data as Strings
• Study notes on Pico-8 movement

Tutorials

• Pico-8 Tutorial Crash Course For TOTAL Game Dev Beginners! - general intro on tools available - very basic sprite move
• Let’s make a PICO-8 Game in 30 Minutes! - more complete overview
  • how to reuse existing game to make your own - use celest movement (MIT Licenced)
• Programmer des mini-jeux avec PICO-8 ! Tuto pour débuter
  • Programmer un shoot’em up !
  • Programmer un jeu d’aventure à la Zelda
    • moitié basse de la map / partagé avec les planche de sprites 3 & 4

Pico-8 Feature review

• Official Doc

PICO-8 0.2.5

• Sprite
  • Sprite animation Ctrl-L set start then end - U / W cycle within range Work aslso on big sprite
  • paste big Ctrl-B
  • activate Grid Ctrl-G
  • print ctrl code
• Map in different place
• Save url - a url embeding your code
• Label for cart
• custom font - variable width
• Map Editor
  • move & edit in selection without erasing what’s under it - by using the cursor key
• String are array now
• Char wrap

• TLINE ??

• PICO-8 0.2.4
• 64ko Memory
• Video Remapping - The video memory sections can now be mapped to each other, allowing the screen to be used as if it were the spritesheet, and/or to draw to the spritesheet as if it were the screen.
• Big Maps - This feature doesn’t come with extra cartridge space to match! So to use 0x8000 and above, you’ll need to manually mset() or memcpy() some map data. This feature will be most useful for carts that procedurally generate their maps or have some custom data storage scheme.
• P8SCII - character data can be specified and printed in-line using “\^.” followed by 8 bytes of raw binary data

Debug

• log/debug tips

• You can also STOP() in code and it will stop the interpreter. Then run “.” To single step. “R” to continue running.

• You can also inspect variable with print from pico8 console.
  • and from code itself print('score: '..score, 0, 120, 8)

• printh - prints a string to the host operating system’s console.

• HELP: Performance profiling?

Compression & Packing

• PICO-8 Token Optimizations
  • put all your game data into a string. = 1 token
  • compressed size limit
  • Shrinko8 - A set of Pico-8 cart tools, with a focus on shrinking code size.
• From one Pico-8 cart to many

• rectpack2D / HN - A header-only 2D rectangle packing library written in modern C++.

• PX9 / PX8 - PX9 is a lightweight gfx & map compression library, intended to replace PX8. It uses the same ideas and interface as px8, but is smaller (~297~x 214 tokens to decompress), and requires zero configuration.