Posted May 31, 2021 by tducasse
First day working with PICO-8! I've set up a fancy pipeline to deploy to itch.io (feel free to use it, it's open source), and... you could say I am struggling 🤣
My usual game engine (well, I'm a hobby game dev, so usual is a bit much 😁) is Godot, and they basically do everything for you. So handling collisions is basically saying "am I colliding with something right now? what is it? ok then do XXX".
In PICO-8, sprites have "flags". So you set up "flag0 = true" on your wall sprite, lay the sprites on the tilemap, and every time your player moves, you check whether the next x,y would touch something. If it does, you check the flag, and decide what to do, collide, ignore, etc.
It's much more complex than what I'm used to, but also super interesting, because I feel like I understand 1) the value of an engine like Godot, where people have already answered all the questions I had to answer while writing this code, and 2) simply how it works under the hood!
There's still a lot to learn and to struggle with, but right now it's super fun! 😄