Posted June 23, 2023 by deathsythe
#idle #pico #pico8 #lua #release
Well - I made it. A few days under the radar for submission to the jam, but I am insanely busy tomorrow and out of town this weekend, so I gave myself today as the deadline.
I managed to implement almost everything I wanted (in no particular order):
What I'd like to do in the future:
Tools utilized:
What I learned:
As someone who hasn't written an appreciable line of code since the 90s or early 00s outside of 1 c++ class in undergrad where the only thing I remember is the professor's name - there was a lot to learn, but fortunately choosing to work in PICO-8 was able to unlock some core memories of programming in various BASIC languages and the texas instruments asm/basic on the graphing calculators. The logical manner of thinking and being able to logic my way through for loops and if statements was helpful too, but calling sprites, moving a cursor around a unique and ever changing UI, dealing with arrays and nested array objects or what not... never really understood that, but now it makes sense!
I utilized ChatGPT for some generic debug stuff, but honestly not all that much more than that. It was frequently incorrect, but there were a good number of times where it was able to correct me calling the wrong variable/function or having something inside/outside of a loop or if statement that should have been swapped. Ultimately it was like a more interactive version of rubber duck debugging, and if I didn't have some background in programming logic - it would have been more or less useless.
Working in PICO-8 placed a lot of constraints, but it made me think about clever ways to solve the problem and still get my intended result. It might not look amazing, but there is a lot underneath the hood.
We've come a long way from:
and
to
and
I want to give a big shoutout to a few folks who acted as de facto beta testers for this and provided great and insightful feedback:
I had a good time doing this, and learning something new. I hope y'all enjoy!