PICO-8 Fantasy Console | Hacker News Reader

PICO-8 Fantasy Console

lexaloffle.com

25 pointssephoric5 comments

We bought this and have been having non-stop fun with it for months. It's an incredible piece of software that I only wish I knew about sooner. It gives a retro 70s-80s feel to making video games that gives kids today a hint of what it was like to learn how to program back then, without being overwhelmingly difficult or giving up modern conveniences (built-in spite and code editors, lexical scoping, first-class functions and hash-maps, etc).

Thanks for sharing. It looks like just the platform to get my daughter started.

And bought a copy... ran it and the accompanying sample game, and it looks perfect for the job!

We had tried Lua and Love before but find pico-8 sets a better environment.

We had the same experience, much easier to use since it has a built in sprite and map editor and easier functions. Don't forget to read the manual (accompanying txt file) because it is extremely instructive and you'll miss out on a lot of basic functionality if you don't! It explains not only the API, but how to use the various editors, and even the very helpful differences in PICO-8's own Lua compared to PUC-Rio's Lua.

As a word of caution from one parent to another, I know it's common lately to encourage children to software careers, and even push them toward it, but I've found it's far better to encourage them to cultivate whatever interests and skills they have a natural inclination for. My daughter told me she doesn't want to learn PICO-8 or Scratch, so immediately I backed off and let her cultivate the crafts and crocheting interests and she seems far happier than many young people I've met.

If you like this sort of thing but you want something lower-level, based on an assembly language and targeting a historical platform, you might enjoy my CHIP-8 IDE, Octo. Like PICO-8, it provides an all-in-one toolkit for preparing code/graphics/sound, and easy ways to share your creations:

http://johnearnest.github.io/Octo/

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