Your task is to create a small game for the fantasy console PICO-8 with the theme 2020! 

PICO-8 is for making, sharing and playing tiny games. It feels like developing for a retro console, using the language Lua. The limited specification means that the scope of the games you can make is limited and perfect for a short game jam. Another great thing about PICO-8 is that you can view and edit the source code of any game you find - so why not mod an existing game for your entry?

We would like you to work in 1 or 2 groups made up of people within your presentation stream. Work on your game between all the sessions taking place over the next few days. We have set up a discord server to help you do that.

There will be judging and prizes. At the end of the game jam we will all (staff and students) be able to play each others games and rate them using four categories.

• Gameplay: How fun is the game?
• Theme: How well does it relate to the theme? 
• Originality: How unique and creative is the game?
• Antelopes: How effective is the use of antelopes within the game?

This is all for fun, so try and use the activity as something to focus on outside of the stress of deadlines and coursework marks. It's healthy to take a break from all of that and create something together.

If you are struggling to come up with an idea use this game theme generator.

PICO-8 Resources

• Simple introduction tutorial
• Example game code
• Full API Cheat-Sheet
• Official Resource List
• Sub-reddit
• The PICO-8 Educational Toolset has lots of simple examples you can use and mod
• PICO-8 Sprite Library which allows you to paste sprites into PICO-8 

How to make your PICO-8 game playable on itch.io

1. Export your game from PICO-8 as an html 5 build (EXPORT FILENAME.HTML)
2. This creates FILENAME.HTML and FILENAME.JS
3. Rename FILENAME.HTML to INDEX.HTML.
4. Make a zip folder with the html and js files
5. On itch.io upload the zip file and choose HTML instead of executable when uploading - choosing the display size of 750x640 when you can
6. Ta-da!!