After developing & releasing 2 commercial games, and playing around with different game engines/frameworks over the years, I’m convinced PICO-8 is absolutely the best platform for a hobbyist game dev.
Its constraints steer you clear automatically of the biggest unsung villain of hobby game development: scope creep. (Wanting to make your game multiplayer is a variant of that.)
Its inability to import external assets forces you to engage with things outside your main strength, like making art/music/sfx, and the fact that everything is so lo-fi means unskilled art/music/sfx still looks & sounds decent.
Anyways, I highly recommend pico-8 to anyone looking to get into gamedev, or anyone frustrated with the big engines (Unity/Unreal/Godot etc)
Honest question - does anyone aside from the devs actually play PICO-8 games?
I can absolutely see the appeal of simple/constrained platforms from the dev side; I look back fondly on my Amiga days, optimising the living daylights out of an asm routine or endlessly fiddling with programmer art. But I don't know whether there's any appetite now to play the things, and without that there's no real feedback loop.
This was honestly the same thought I had from the quote in the article from the dev who was enthusiastic about developing for a 400x240 monochrome screen. There's nothing wrong with developing something for your own happiness without caring about whether others want to use it, but it felt like it was maybe missing the fact that features like color and higher resolution were probably not introduced in devices with the idea that they were going to make development easier.
Comments
After developing & releasing 2 commercial games, and playing around with different game engines/frameworks over the years, I’m convinced PICO-8 is absolutely the best platform for a hobbyist game dev.
Its constraints steer you clear automatically of the biggest unsung villain of hobby game development: scope creep. (Wanting to make your game multiplayer is a variant of that.)
Its inability to import external assets forces you to engage with things outside your main strength, like making art/music/sfx, and the fact that everything is so lo-fi means unskilled art/music/sfx still looks & sounds decent.
Anyways, I highly recommend pico-8 to anyone looking to get into gamedev, or anyone frustrated with the big engines (Unity/Unreal/Godot etc)
Honest question - does anyone aside from the devs actually play PICO-8 games?
I can absolutely see the appeal of simple/constrained platforms from the dev side; I look back fondly on my Amiga days, optimising the living daylights out of an asm routine or endlessly fiddling with programmer art. But I don't know whether there's any appetite now to play the things, and without that there's no real feedback loop.
This was honestly the same thought I had from the quote in the article from the dev who was enthusiastic about developing for a 400x240 monochrome screen. There's nothing wrong with developing something for your own happiness without caring about whether others want to use it, but it felt like it was maybe missing the fact that features like color and higher resolution were probably not introduced in devices with the idea that they were going to make development easier.