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PICO-8 Easier development with Visual Studio

Anila
A browser game made in HTML5

Hello Retro Devs!

Note: this article is definitely adressing noobs/beginners like myself and people that have difficulty with coding but are perseverant enough to try and keep going.

In the last article, we installed external packages for Atom.

Today I want to show you guys how to do the same with Visual Studio Code, with an extra nice little feature that helps very much.
So, Microsoft Visual Studio Code is free, so anyone can download and install it.


1- VS Code

Browse the extension on VS Code Marketplace


2- The Extensions

The ones I tried are:
- pico8-vscode by Jogn Barton
- pico8vscodeeditorby Grumpydev

Those two will add Pico8 language, syntax and color code to VS Code.


3- The Outliner

Quickly access your functions by clicking them


It is an invaluable time saver, and it also helped me thinking about organize my code a little better.


4- Pico8's UI in VS Code

Finally, the last one, cherry on the cake is pico8-theme by Ian J Sikes. Same as the pico8UI in Atom, this will change VSCode Ui to a similar set of colors than Pico8. I think it's fun, but the bloody red is a bit aggressive on my eyes imo :p.

Pico8 UI theme for VS code

That's all folks! I hope you enjoyed it and that it was useful to you. Don't hesitate to share your tips and tricks in the comments!

Cheers.

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