It certainly has a bit of a learning curve, but I think it turned out pretty well all things considered. The entire project took about three weeks, including code, pixel art, and music. I'm really pleased with pico8's built-in editor and some smart choices in the music tracker. It's limited, but the tools I really needed are all in there.
Enjoy!
roshiya•1h ago
zeta0134•1h ago
My usual platform is NES, and I've got a pretty good handle on how to optimize assembly language to squeeze code down to size, but I haven't really developed that intuition for pico8's Lua implementation. The final version of the game uses 7989/8192 tokens altogether. It just barely squeaks by!
There are some minification tools I could have run, and I think with hindsight there are some architectural changes and code habits I could develop to make this slightly less of an issue. In practice, I'm now learning picotron instead. (It's got actual widescreen! Much more practical for modern displays, I think.)