That was beyond stellar. I couldnt find the grey, but got the others. Is there a music conversion program you use or did you manually recreate it in the pico8 music maker? And is this the default pico8 mapspace or did u use some kind of extended memory method? Is this going to go up on splore? Curious how u madeout with the sprite editor etc.
Sum-up: I worked from 8-bit remixes made by danooct1, then used FamiTracker to export source files to midi, followed by midi2pico. I still had to manually edit notes a lot, because I had to put everything on 4 channels to leave the 4th channel free for SFX.
For the level, I coded my own map streaming system: the level is made of sub-maps, each one being a standard PICO-8 map. When the camera gets close to a sub-map’s edge, the game automatically load the neighboring sub-map (combining half-maps when crossing horizontally or vertically, and quarter-maps when crossing diagonally). I use the general memory as a “buffer” for the copy-paste operations. However, this still requires a reload from cartridge operation when reaching new regions, so I had to patch PICO-8 binary to hide that extra loading time (with the new general memory at 0x8000 it may be possible to store more maps in live memory, I haven’t tried it yet). It also means that I did nothing special with the sprite editor (although I have multiple cartridges to store extra spritesheet, e.g. one dedicated to the title menu, one to Sonic, etc.)
For a future version, I’m considering using PicoMap (https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=91798) which handles everything from map data stored in runtime Lua memory. However, it is not compatible with the existing tilemap, which means I’d have to redraw the full map in PicoMap, and I don’t know how much time that would take… But something to keep in mind for future projects.
It’s not on splore for the reasons above, that it requires many cartridges for the title menu, intro/ending sequence, and above all the level data; and also that it requires binary patches to work. If I can make PicoMap work, we could have a single cartridge version running on vanilla PICO-8 with just the in-game (level) part.
Another PICO-8 game called “Dungeon Witches” did it, but I’m unsure whether or not it’s possible for this one yet. As an alternative, I could make a small demo level like bonevolt’s Sonic 2.5, which was also running on a single cartridge.
This is a really good recreation of Angel Island, even with more limited color pallets than that of the Genesis, this is visually great and a blast to play. I can't wait for more of this!
This is great, also my favorite emerald is the yellow one, you see it when you go on the jump ramp, but you have to drop from above to get it. Or you could hold right while spindashing off the ramp which isn't obvious, but feels better.
This is really cool! I did find a bug (I think it's a bug but there's always that small chance it's intentional) that allows the player to screen warp all the way to the end of the stage, it happened at the ramp after collecting the brown/8th emerald. again this demo is really cool and I'm glad it was made!
Wow, okay, I just fixed the bug that allowed you to fall below the ground and move to the end of the stage, but I didn’t know about this one. How do you do it?
You’re talking about the curved wall after the spring after the 8th/brown emerald right? (not the launch ramp before the yellow emerald)
Is it similar to the “wall escape” technique used by speedrunners on the Genesis games, which consist in entering a wall and running toward the left to get projected toward the right?
Yes I am talking about the curved wall after the brown/8th emerald, and yeah it was exactly like screen warp/ wall escape technique, it was the first thing I thought when I understood what happened and that's why I was unsure if it was intentional or not. The bug only happened on my first playthrough and unfortunately I haven't been able to recreate it since, I'll let you know if I do it again. but I remember using a spin dash while holding towards the right of the wall, I hope this works
That was the super nice-to-have feature on the list, but got dropped… Data change (increase speed) would probably be cheap, and it’s super cheap to recolor Sonic’s blue in yellow (as in the original game), but in reality you’d need dedicated sprites for most poses due to hair spikes change, and that would go out of budget (unless it was distributed on a separate cartridge!)
In fact, PICO-8 uses that (almost), you can grab data from other cartridges, just not code! In fact, I’m already at the limit, using all 16 cartridges… But I guess I could merge a few of them.
It was in the original plan, but dropped when I hit PICO-8’s code limit and realized the Fly mechanic would go over the limit (also I’d have to adjust levels to make emeralds harder to get, unless I make playing with Tails the “easy” mode).
How did you know about my secret plan?! It turns out that after Sonic Mania, both Sonic Team and Evening Star will be working on 3D platformers, and I won’t be applying to them any time soon… But I’m glad that what started as a “tech demo for my portfolio” ended up as a proper experience with an actual level to play through.
Well, Sonic Mania went the opposite direction, increasing color palette and sprites count, but it also give it its charm.
In fact, I’m still jealous of Sonic Mania walk and run cycle sprites count, which is 2x of Sonic Master System, 1, 2 and pico sonic, and 1.5x of Sonic 3! PICO-8 having limited resolution and color palette, most games stand out thanks to leveled-up animation.
But due to limitations of spritesheet (and my own ability to draw many sprites), I had to stick to Sonic 1 run cycle and art style; which ended up quite nice in the end.
There are many resources available for that, and also schools if you want to go professional. I was doing web programming before, but I started working on standalone games 10 years ago with resources like Game From Scratch (https://www.youtube.com/c/gamefromscratch/) and later, Brackeys (https://www.youtube.com/c/Brackeys/). I’m on the code side of things but you can find your own field(s) of speciality. But more importantly, stay with the community: in the case of PICO-8, looking at other devs’ work and talking with them about how they do it is very instructional.
I definitely can, with the EXPORT command. The Windows, OSX and Linux executables you see have been produced like that.
In reality, they are just a common PICO-8 runtime executable (+ some shared library e.g. DLL depending on the platform) + a .dat file which contains the compressed Lua script + assets data.
So it’s just the .dat file that characterizes the game, while the pico8 runtime binary is just a common file for all games exported on a given platform, with a certain version of PICO-8.
WOAW your demake is so fantastic, i love it :) But i'm really so sad ... i can't play it with my real PICO8 engine on my Batocera PC :( If i understand fine i must use your modified version, but i can't ... i can only use the real engine :( Is it really impossible to make a version working fine on the real engine please ? Thanks a lot
(Note: some technical stuff below, I don’t know if you’re a PICO-8 programmer or just using it from the player side, but I put them in case you’re interested)
Ah, an enthusiast!
Let’s see… The biggest issue is the token limit. The most direct way to cut that is to remove all the backgrounds and foregrounds… I can try, but I’m fearing for the visuals.
The second issue is the “fast reload” patch. Unlike the token limit, it will not prevent you from running the game, but the game will freeze for up to 1s every time you change region (128x32 tiles). A true fix would be to store all the regions in Lua tables, and copy them myself instead of relying on PICO-8 reload. I believe it would be faster, not because of the implementation (Lua iteration may be slower than the engine’s C code even adding I/O operations).
An alternative could be to make a special reduced version of the level for vanilla PICO-8. This would fix the complex background code and the region loading issue (Bonevolt did it on Sonic 2.5 so I know it can be done, with the slight difference that my OOP code tends to be bigger).
For better results and in the spirit of PICO-8 I’d go with the second solution. Unfortunately I’m working 1 day/week on the project now (spending other days on new projects), mainly to complete the intro sequence, so I don’t think I’ll be able to make that happen any time soon.
Ah, sorry for the long explanation then. I can’t guarantee an update after the last things I was already planning, but I’ll see if I find a nice solution!
OK! I cannot give you an exact license since it’s already fan art; just credit me and notify me when the game is out (consider it a kind of CC-BY-NC as mentioned in the itch game metadata, except that it only applies to my work of adaptation).
I don’t know if they will work in 4 colors though, you’ll have to try. If it fails, you can always ask pixel artists for help (I’m not 100% satisfied of my sprites, so if you find one maybe they can make nice sprites specifically for this color palette).
To extract the sprites:
download the cartridge release (.p8.zip) and extract it
open data_stage_sonic.p8 in PICO-8
check the spritesheet and run export sonic_spritesheet.png
If you don’t have PICO-8 I can upload it directly on this page too.
Yes, actually I’ve noticed that the exported spritesheet from PICO-8 misses one foot in the fall sprite due to it sticking out.
So I’ve uploaded the arranged spritesheet with the fixed foot as “picosonic sonic spritesheet (arranged) - pink background v6.0.png” (mostly useful for PICO-8 users; they should set transparency color to pink) and a variant “… transparent background v6.0.png” with a transparent BG (you’ll probably want that considering you’re gonna change the colors anyway).
Which platform are you using? Where are you stuck?
Basically if you press C 3 times on the keyboard, you should immediately show the menu, start the Start Cinematic and then skip it to immediately start the level.
For web only: make sure to enable Javascript. I removed the need to click on Run Game, the game is now automatically loaded on page load, so you just need to click on the embedded game with the Play icon.
It was planned initially, unfortunately, after a year or two I realized it was getting out of budget… (not just time but also code size limitations of PICO-8)
Maybe one day, someone will redemake it in Pixel Vision or something and go even farther… ?
Yes, they are in the downloadable files, in pico-sonic-png.zip. It’s a multi-cartridge game so it’s actually a set of many cartridges (for code and data).
However, to run the game you need a patched version of PICO-8, because I went overboard and the ingame cartridge has more tokens than allowed. The patch would extend the number of tokens allowed (and also doing fast reload of data to avoid a short freeze each time you change level region). That’s cheating in a sense, but I’m still following the (compressed) characters / cartridge size restriction.
Unfortunately that prevents me from posting the game as a proper cartridge on the BBS, and you from playing the game from your player… Sorry for the inconvenience.
Note: there are more info on patching on https://github.com/hsandt/sonic-pico8#releases but it’s still incomplete (missing patches for Windows editor, etc.), and I don’t expect people to go to that length either. So the binaries are still the definitive version for this game.
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That was beyond stellar. I couldnt find the grey, but got the others. Is there a music conversion program you use or did you manually recreate it in the pico8 music maker? And is this the default pico8 mapspace or did u use some kind of extended memory method? Is this going to go up on splore? Curious how u madeout with the sprite editor etc.
Very good question!
I explained the audio conversion process here: https://github.com/hsandt/sonic-pico8#audio-1
Sum-up: I worked from 8-bit remixes made by danooct1, then used FamiTracker to export source files to midi, followed by midi2pico. I still had to manually edit notes a lot, because I had to put everything on 4 channels to leave the 4th channel free for SFX.
For the level, I coded my own map streaming system: the level is made of sub-maps, each one being a standard PICO-8 map. When the camera gets close to a sub-map’s edge, the game automatically load the neighboring sub-map (combining half-maps when crossing horizontally or vertically, and quarter-maps when crossing diagonally). I use the general memory as a “buffer” for the copy-paste operations. However, this still requires a reload from cartridge operation when reaching new regions, so I had to patch PICO-8 binary to hide that extra loading time (with the new general memory at 0x8000 it may be possible to store more maps in live memory, I haven’t tried it yet). It also means that I did nothing special with the sprite editor (although I have multiple cartridges to store extra spritesheet, e.g. one dedicated to the title menu, one to Sonic, etc.)
For a future version, I’m considering using PicoMap (https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=91798) which handles everything from map data stored in runtime Lua memory. However, it is not compatible with the existing tilemap, which means I’d have to redraw the full map in PicoMap, and I don’t know how much time that would take… But something to keep in mind for future projects.
It’s not on splore for the reasons above, that it requires many cartridges for the title menu, intro/ending sequence, and above all the level data; and also that it requires binary patches to work. If I can make PicoMap work, we could have a single cartridge version running on vanilla PICO-8 with just the in-game (level) part.
Another PICO-8 game called “Dungeon Witches” did it, but I’m unsure whether or not it’s possible for this one yet. As an alternative, I could make a small demo level like bonevolt’s Sonic 2.5, which was also running on a single cartridge.
This is a really good recreation of Angel Island, even with more limited color pallets than that of the Genesis, this is visually great and a blast to play. I can't wait for more of this!
Thanks! I can’t promise more content on this specific game, but I intend to work on more platform games one day!
I'll be looking forward to it then!
Congrats!
bro thats acrually sick
This is great, also my favorite emerald is the yellow one, you see it when you go on the jump ramp, but you have to drop from above to get it. Or you could hold right while spindashing off the ramp which isn't obvious, but feels better.
I LOVE YOUR GAME !!!
THIS IS AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This is really cool! I did find a bug (I think it's a bug but there's always that small chance it's intentional) that allows the player to screen warp all the way to the end of the stage, it happened at the ramp after collecting the brown/8th emerald. again this demo is really cool and I'm glad it was made!
Thanks!
Wow, okay, I just fixed the bug that allowed you to fall below the ground and move to the end of the stage, but I didn’t know about this one. How do you do it?
You’re talking about the curved wall after the spring after the 8th/brown emerald right? (not the launch ramp before the yellow emerald)
Is it similar to the “wall escape” technique used by speedrunners on the Genesis games, which consist in entering a wall and running toward the left to get projected toward the right?
Yes I am talking about the curved wall after the brown/8th emerald, and yeah it was exactly like screen warp/ wall escape technique, it was the first thing I thought when I understood what happened and that's why I was unsure if it was intentional or not. The bug only happened on my first playthrough and unfortunately I haven't been able to recreate it since, I'll let you know if I do it again. but I remember using a spin dash while holding towards the right of the wall, I hope this works
is there some type of way to go super sonic if you restard the game with all emeralds?
That was the super nice-to-have feature on the list, but got dropped… Data change (increase speed) would probably be cheap, and it’s super cheap to recolor Sonic’s blue in yellow (as in the original game), but in reality you’d need dedicated sprites for most poses due to hair spikes change, and that would go out of budget (unless it was distributed on a separate cartridge!)
that seperate cartridge thing is actually a good idea
Time for some "Lock-on Technology"
In fact, PICO-8 uses that (almost), you can grab data from other cartridges, just not code! In fact, I’m already at the limit, using all 16 cartridges… But I guess I could merge a few of them.
This is such a good demake! Fantastic job
Thanks!
we need a tails version (not saying you have to)
It was in the original plan, but dropped when I hit PICO-8’s code limit and realized the Fly mechanic would go over the limit (also I’d have to adjust levels to make emeralds harder to get, unless I make playing with Tails the “easy” mode).
where green
Look up!
o
How did you know about my secret plan?! It turns out that after Sonic Mania, both Sonic Team and Evening Star will be working on 3D platformers, and I won’t be applying to them any time soon… But I’m glad that what started as a “tech demo for my portfolio” ended up as a proper experience with an actual level to play through.
Good! But there is no full screen
There is! Just click on the rectangle on the bottom-right
Is not there. Im on mobile
where is the red white and black emerald.
Red should be near the start of the level, but there is no black and white emerald, just a grey one.
Thanks! Hm… I remember hearing this kind of sentence, but I don’t have a particular reference in mind.
The sprites are ADORABLE- If I had the skill, I'd want to swap the ones in Sonic Mania for Sonic's sprites from this
Well, Sonic Mania went the opposite direction, increasing color palette and sprites count, but it also give it its charm.
In fact, I’m still jealous of Sonic Mania walk and run cycle sprites count, which is 2x of Sonic Master System, 1, 2 and pico sonic, and 1.5x of Sonic 3! PICO-8 having limited resolution and color palette, most games stand out thanks to leveled-up animation.
But due to limitations of spritesheet (and my own ability to draw many sprites), I had to stick to Sonic 1 run cycle and art style; which ended up quite nice in the end.
bro my teacher played this
o_O in which context?
played with a controller
a sega genesis one
Oh, I meant in a casual event or as part of a class, e.g. “retrogaming history” or “introduction to PICO-8”
Wow I didn't know you could make something this cool in PICO-8 !! Amazing work!
Thank you!
Wow, this is so freaking impressive!
I love it. Amazing job
Thanks!
i wanna do games like you... but looks like i will never be able to make a game...
There are many resources available for that, and also schools if you want to go professional. I was doing web programming before, but I started working on standalone games 10 years ago with resources like Game From Scratch (https://www.youtube.com/c/gamefromscratch/) and later, Brackeys (https://www.youtube.com/c/Brackeys/). I’m on the code side of things but you can find your own field(s) of speciality. But more importantly, stay with the community: in the case of PICO-8, looking at other devs’ work and talking with them about how they do it is very instructional.
thank you!
1: no badnik
2: masterpiece
I LOVE IT. I really hope for a fully fledged game. :)
i wanna die.
Ummmmm ok?
Impressive.
Thanks!
You can't release pico games as executable ? right ?
I definitely can, with the EXPORT command. The Windows, OSX and Linux executables you see have been produced like that.
In reality, they are just a common PICO-8 runtime executable (+ some shared library e.g. DLL depending on the platform) + a .dat file which contains the compressed Lua script + assets data.
So it’s just the .dat file that characterizes the game, while the pico8 runtime binary is just a common file for all games exported on a given platform, with a certain version of PICO-8.
Nice work.
WOAW your demake is so fantastic, i love it :)
But i'm really so sad ... i can't play it with my real PICO8 engine on my Batocera PC :(
If i understand fine i must use your modified version, but i can't ... i can only use the real engine :(
Is it really impossible to make a version working fine on the real engine please ?
Thanks a lot
(Note: some technical stuff below, I don’t know if you’re a PICO-8 programmer or just using it from the player side, but I put them in case you’re interested)
Ah, an enthusiast!
Let’s see… The biggest issue is the token limit. The most direct way to cut that is to remove all the backgrounds and foregrounds… I can try, but I’m fearing for the visuals.
The second issue is the “fast reload” patch. Unlike the token limit, it will not prevent you from running the game, but the game will freeze for up to 1s every time you change region (128x32 tiles). A true fix would be to store all the regions in Lua tables, and copy them myself instead of relying on PICO-8 reload. I believe it would be faster, not because of the implementation (Lua iteration may be slower than the engine’s C code even adding I/O operations).
An alternative could be to make a special reduced version of the level for vanilla PICO-8. This would fix the complex background code and the region loading issue (Bonevolt did it on Sonic 2.5 so I know it can be done, with the slight difference that my OOP code tends to be bigger).
For better results and in the spirit of PICO-8 I’d go with the second solution. Unfortunately I’m working 1 day/week on the project now (spending other days on new projects), mainly to complete the intro sequence, so I don’t think I’ll be able to make that happen any time soon.
Thanks a lot for your answer. I m not a développer. But i will stand for your update. Take your Time ... 😉
Ah, sorry for the long explanation then. I can’t guarantee an update after the last things I was already planning, but I’ll see if I find a nice solution!
Ok thanks a lot for the answer :)
hey can i use the sprites in my gameboy sonic game?
OK! I cannot give you an exact license since it’s already fan art; just credit me and notify me when the game is out (consider it a kind of CC-BY-NC as mentioned in the itch game metadata, except that it only applies to my work of adaptation).
I don’t know if they will work in 4 colors though, you’ll have to try. If it fails, you can always ask pixel artists for help (I’m not 100% satisfied of my sprites, so if you find one maybe they can make nice sprites specifically for this color palette).
To extract the sprites:
export sonic_spritesheet.pngIf you don’t have PICO-8 I can upload it directly on this page too.
could you upload it please? thanks
Yes, actually I’ve noticed that the exported spritesheet from PICO-8 misses one foot in the fall sprite due to it sticking out.
So I’ve uploaded the arranged spritesheet with the fixed foot as “picosonic sonic spritesheet (arranged) - pink background v6.0.png” (mostly useful for PICO-8 users; they should set transparency color to pink) and a variant “… transparent background v6.0.png” with a transparent BG (you’ll probably want that considering you’re gonna change the colors anyway).
From my 4 year old son:
Thank for making this. I liked how you can go really fast most.
Cheers, mate. Cracking job. Between us we got all the Emeralds. 🥳
Good job!
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh i cant start
Which platform are you using? Where are you stuck?
Basically if you press C 3 times on the keyboard, you should immediately show the menu, start the Start Cinematic and then skip it to immediately start the level.
For web only: make sure to enable Javascript. I removed the need to click on Run Game, the game is now automatically loaded on page load, so you just need to click on the embedded game with the Play icon.
windows 10
operating system dosent help much
Windows binary should be working. Does the app start? Are you stuck on title menu?
Send me a screenshot/GIF of what you see and tell me what you’ve tried.
nvm i got it
you will need hydro city and super sonic (if you collect the all)
It was planned initially, unfortunately, after a year or two I realized it was getting out of budget… (not just time but also code size limitations of PICO-8)
Maybe one day, someone will redemake it in Pixel Vision or something and go even farther… ?
It's an impressive work and has a very nice graphic design, it really looks like an official game! ;D
Thanks!
very cool game, didn't know Pico-8 is capable of such games! great pixel art too
Found this through SAGE. This is great!
Even got all the emeralds!
Thanks, and congrats!
Do you have the cartridge image? If so, just reply with the image. (for P8 Player)
Yes, they are in the downloadable files, in pico-sonic-png.zip. It’s a multi-cartridge game so it’s actually a set of many cartridges (for code and data).
However, to run the game you need a patched version of PICO-8, because I went overboard and the ingame cartridge has more tokens than allowed. The patch would extend the number of tokens allowed (and also doing fast reload of data to avoid a short freeze each time you change level region). That’s cheating in a sense, but I’m still following the (compressed) characters / cartridge size restriction.
Unfortunately that prevents me from posting the game as a proper cartridge on the BBS, and you from playing the game from your player… Sorry for the inconvenience.
Note: there are more info on patching on https://github.com/hsandt/sonic-pico8#releases but it’s still incomplete (missing patches for Windows editor, etc.), and I don’t expect people to go to that length either. So the binaries are still the definitive version for this game.
i tought this was pico, from new grounds....Im stupid
bro they took pico as an 8 year old and mad him make this game
pico 8 is a software and not a character
Ah, I got it! pico must be a character on newgrounds, and jasons_itch made a joke about the possible confusion: “this game was made with pico (8)”
nice
but i clipped into ground
Was it in a slope like the first curve, or inside a loop?
If so, that is a known issue although hard to reproduce, I will add it to the list of known issues and try to fix it in a future patch.
If it was in another place though, please tell me where so I make sure to fix this location too.
slope
ok
i cant find the first emerald
but this is good
Ok for find The red emerald (first emerald) go to The part what in Sonic 3 are speed monitor AND ring monitor upper (only in sonic 3 AND pico Sonic)
nice dude i beat it
I can never find that white emerald.... I got all the rest.
It’s well hidden, but follows some logic… I’m considering adding better visual cues in a future update, though.