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[jjvgaming]

Developing within Limitations! Starting with the PICO-8

During my previous Unity and Game Maker projects, I felt like I could do anything as long as my computer could handle it. While this freedom could be comforting to some people, I didn’t know what to do with the seemingly limitless freedom that I had. I could have imposed restrictions on myself, but that would have felt artificial, and I don’t know enough about emulating hardware to know where to start. Coincidentally, after my last blog post, a Humble Bundle was released with the PICO-8. The PICO-8 is a “fantasy console” with very strict hardware limitations compared to current hardware, which is exactly what I was looking for.

The Fun of Limitations

I have always been fascinated with designing and problem solving within limitations. In elementary school, I could not afford a lot of Beyblades, so I used Legos to build tops that fit to the launcher. When Pokemon cards were banned in elementary and middle school, I developed a board game to play with my friends instead. Even now, when I play fighting games, I naturally gravitate towards characters with limited tool sets. These experiences forced me to use limited materials and be creative to continue doing what I liked, which led to some interesting results, and the process was always fun.

I did not appreciate this kind of thinking in video game development until I read this blog post about developing around the memory limitations of Gameboy Advance cartridges for the Ace Attorney games. This is quote from the article, which summarizes it nicely:

Honestly speaking, the thought “I wish we had that infinite amount of memory”... has actually never really crossed my mind. That’s because I believe that there is a certain kind of “fun” that can only be experienced in the face of extreme constraints. As for what that kind of “fun” is... it’s the chance to sharpen the team’s ability to find solid workarounds.

About the PICO-8

The PICO-8 is a fantasy console with strict limitations to emulate the look and feel of a retro handheld console. To give you an idea of how small the games are, and to emphasize the idea of retro handheld consoles, here’s the entirety of the current state of my project below. The games are distributed as .PNG images in the shape of cartridges, which is pretty cute.

The PICO-8 program boots up in a command line interface with a 128x128 resolution. It contains a text editor, sprite editor, map editor, and sound effects/music editor all in one package. Navigating the command line or performing actions involves typing in simple commands or using hotkeys. Everything else can be manipulated with the mouse. Programs are written in Lua, although it uses a custom Lua library or a subset of the Lua language.

Since the PICO-8 is in an early stage, there is not a lot of documentation for it. However, there are several demo games that are bundled with it to demonstrate all of its capabilities so far.

You can read more about it on the website here.

Project

Goals of the Project

As with my previous projects, I decided to test the PICO-8 out by writing another simple shmup game. This is because I am more familiar with how to create a basic shmup than I would with a new genre, such as platformers, which allows me to focus more on learning how to work with the PICO-8. Since I was not familiar with the Lua language, and I was not familiar with the limitations of the PICO-8, I did not want to create anything more elaborate than my last project. My goals were to:

Create a simple scoring system, which included a score multiplier based on destroying enemies.

Randomly generate enemies for a more “endless” feel to the game, and to experiment with how much content I could fit in the limited space.

Knowing about the limitations, I wanted to see what it would take to create slowdown in the system and experiment with how to manage or design game play with the slowdown.

Current State, and Next Steps

I completed most of the coding today, although the scoring is very rough and the gameplay is not polished. But, I am satisfied enough with what I have now to start exploring the graphics and sound. Through this initial exercise, I have only used about a fourth of the space I have to code with, and less than one of four sprite sheets provided by the console, so I have a lot more room than originally anticipated to work with.

My next goals are:

Add scrolling backgrounds. I might try creating a parallax background since some of the demo projects use them.

Add more visual effects to add more impact to the game.  

Add music.

I would like to give a shout out to the developer who made this short tutorial. I was trying to figure out different ways of handling collision, and their method of handling collision and creating faux hitboxes was perfect.

Download and Play Instructions

If you have a PICO-8 console, you can download the .PNG file above and install it. Otherwise, you can download the file below and play it through a browser by opening shooter.html. There might be some input delay if you play through a browser.

To play the game:

Z - shoot

X - laser

Arrow keys - move

Scoring system:

Destroying enemies increases the multiplier, and increases enemy spawn rate. Enemy spawn rate currently does not decrease.

Using the laser decreases the multiplier.

Getting hit resets the multiplier.

The multiplier decreases after 180 frames, with time indicated by the blue bars in the upper left corner.

Higher multiplier gives a higher chance of spawning the stronger enemies

The game currently slows down when there are too many things on the screen. This intended, and will be tweaked as I experiment more.

Download Link: Here