pico-view:
2024 Q4

Hello Pico-View Reader, Happy New Year! This issue is the fifteenth in the series and takes a look at both the recent events in the past few months, as well as a reflection on the whole year.

Thank you to the writers, contributors, and all supporters, that includes you reader! We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. And as always, have fun adventuring through the pixels and paragraphs of this issue of the Pico-View web-zine!

Authors & Contributors:

the_swest, Roybie, Sean Gransee, Bikibird, Extar, alanxoc3, Werxzy, VoidgazerBon, Achie, and Nerdy Teachers

Zine Supporters (Memberships):

RB, Tubman, luchak, dcolson, drpaneas, Cort, Sourencho, bikibird, retronator, TheJudge, AzureBit, Yutsud, Liquidream, Taichara, Zellkoss, Fred M, Johan Peitz, Tom Hall, SDotComics, Tréveron, Diante Clark,  RJOE, Pierre

Become a Supporter

Contents:
- Cover Art by Werxzy
- Shadowbox Pixel Art - the_swest
- PICO-8 on Antstream Arcade - Nerdy Teachers
- Extended Maps and Palettes of Samurise - Roybie
- Everyone Draw Developer Interview - Nerdy Teachers feat. Sean Gransee
- Everyone Draw PICO-8 Mural - Nerdy Teachers
- Featured Game Review - Achie
- Christmas Past - Bikibird
- Christmas Present & Future - Bikibird
- Top 10 Games of 2024 - Achie
- Top Rated Games on Itch.io - Achie
- Updated Top 200 - VoidgazerBon
- Data Packing for Picodex Dual - alanxoc3
- Lookback Pico Playtime - Extar
- New Debugging Resource - Nerdy Teachers
- Picotron Textmode editor - Werxzy
- December Event Winners!
-Pixel Art Gallery - Everyone Draw
-Closing Remarks

Shadowbox Pixel Art

by the_swest

When I first came across Techdweeb’s video on creating shadowbox pixel art, I knew I had to try it for myself. As soon as I saw the square frames, it all clicked—this was the perfect opportunity for PICO-8! While I followed much of the tutorial, I made some tweaks of my own, which I’ll share here. Of course, I highly recommend watching Techdweeb’s video for more inspiration.

In this guide, I’ll show you how to create your own shadowbox pixel art using Celeste Classic as an example. Feel free to adapt it for any game you love!

PICO-8 games are perfect for these projects since their chunky pixel style works beautifully in square frames, which are commonly available online. I used a 20x20cm frame, which gave the art a striking look without making the pixels too large.

Materials

• Shadowbox or deep box frame
• White card (matte works best)
• Printer
• Craft knife and cutting mat
• Scrap cardboard
• Glue (any kind)
• Black permanent marker

Step 1: Prepare

The first step is finding and preparing your layers. I decided to recreate the iconic first level of Celeste, so I started by taking a “background” screenshot. To get a clean image, I edited the code to remove the player and particle effects. For the player sprite, I took a screenshot at just the right moment during a jump.

You’ll want to stick to 3-4 layers for simplicity. I went with a background layer, a layer for the rocks, and a foreground layer. Customize these layers to your liking! If I were to redo this, I’d handle duplicated elements differently. For instance, in my Celeste shadowbox, the flower appeared on multiple layers when viewed from an angle, creating an unintended "double vision" effect. To avoid this, I’d remove the flower from the layers below it. As a general rule of thumb, anything that is on the top layer should not be included in the layers beneath it. Since I didn’t do this initially, I filled in the gaps manually with a Sharpie later. Planning for these overlaps in the design process would have saved time and improved the final result.

To make cutting easier and give the design a bold, cartoonish look, add thick black borders around your cutouts and the edges of each layer.

Step 2: Printing and Cutting

Choose card stock that’s sturdy enough to hold its shape—floppy card won’t support overhangs. I used a home printer and printed at the frame’s exact dimensions with the highest settings for the best quality.

Step 3: Assembly

To assemble, use scrap cardboard to create supports for each layer. I used two layers of cardboard for each picture layer, but you can adjust this depending on how much depth you want. Be sure to keep the cardboard supports away from the edges, so they’re not visible from normal viewing angles.

I glued the background layer directly to the back of the frame. This helped prevent curling and aligned it neatly, but be aware that parts of the background may be visible through the frame. I encountered this issue with my Sonic shadowbox but fixed it by colouring the visible edges black with a Sharpie.

Finally, glue the layers together, ensuring everything is firmly secured.

I hope you enjoyed making your shadowbox! I’m not usually a crafty person, so this project was a fun step outside my comfort zone. If you create your own, please share it with me on Discord or Reddit (@the_swest). I’d love to see what you come up with!

- Joystuck / the_swest

PICO-8 on Antstream Arcade

by Nerdy Teachers

If you haven't heard of Antstream Arcade yet, it is the world’s largest retro games streaming service available on PC, Xbox, PlayStation, Android, and iOS, with over 1,300 licensed games available for instant play. If you love PICO-8, I think it's safe to assume you're also a retro game enthusiast. So you'd know that it's either very hard or expensive to find and collect physical retro games. Emulating digital copies is much easier, but it has its own drawbacks, especially in legal and ethical terms. 

Many people download retro games (Jack Sparrow style) or purchase a mini console or handheld that comes with hundreds of retro games already loaded (somewhat suspiciously.) Unfortunately in these cases, the original developers are not compensated, even when their games are still being enjoyed today which is such a shame when compared to the music or movie industries. 

As retro gamers I think we know that doesn't sit right with us and we do wish to support the creators of the games we love. Antstream Arcade is preserving retro games and making them accessible the right way by securing full licenses with publishers or, in many cases, directly with the original developers so that they can share in the profits of the streaming platform.

Antstream Arcade Games Catelogue

If you browse Anstream’s catalogue, you'll discover a trove of classic and nostalgia-filled games, all authentically optimized for play on modern devices. That's one of the great features of PICO-8 too, where we can export and play our games almost anywhere; computers, handhelds, and in mobile browsers.

And soon, thanks to Antstream Arcade, a selection of PICO-8 games will be available to be played on Xbox and PlayStation consoles as well!

Last year, the Antstream team noticed and was amazed by the quality of retro-style games coming from the PICO-8 community and so they reached out to a small number of developers and got to work implementing a way to stream PICO-8 games and include the full features of their service. And they have a history of delivering on their promises too. In November 2024, with the support of many of the original developers, Antstream launched a catalogue of Net Yaroze titles on the platform, many of which have been unavailable to play since PlayStation shut down the service in 2009.

The PICO-8 titles that will be featured on Antstream Arcade will include a few features we have not had in PICO-8 yet, such as competitive global leaderboards, organized challenge modes, and tournaments!

PICO-8 Announcement Video

I am always happy to see the PICO-8 community grow in terms of both developers and gamers, so I'm very excited for the millions of Antstream Arcade subscribers to discover the amazing PICO-8 titles we have to offer. So visit the Antstream website and sign up to their social channels to get alerted first when new PICO-8 titles launch. 

Antstream Socials

Get ready for their announcement of the official launch of PICO-8 games which should happen early in 2025. And if you're a developer, keep an eye on your inbox as they may be getting in touch with an opportunity to get your game onto Antstream Arcade’s PICO-8 collection.

- Nerdy Teachers

Extended maps and palettes of samurise

by Roybie

I recently released a game called Samurise which you can now find on the PICO-8 featured list. It is an action platformer with an always-running mechanic; imagine an endless runner crossed with Jump King.

It started life as a single-screen high score game made for Pico1k Jam 2024 back in September and I decided it was fun enough to expand into a larger game with a continuous smooth vertical map.

Extended Level

The first problem was that I knew I would need a lot of sprites for the characters and the map, which would only leave me half of the available map memory.

That would give me 4096 bytes, or in terms of full 16x16 tile screens, 16 screens. This did not sound like enough to get the feeling of really ascending into the heavens that I was hoping for.

I knew about, but had never used the extended map, which is a region of memory that the map() function can be told to use instead of the usual memory region with a couple of poke commands.

-- enable extended map
poke(0x5f56, 0x80)

This region is 4 times larger than the standard map region, giving me 128 screens worth of map to play with. In the final game I only ended up using half of that!

Another convenient poke allows you to set the map width, perfect for making a long thin map!

-- set map width
poke(0x5f57, 16)

So now I had a map, one screen wide and 128 screens tall. I think this technique could be especially useful for genres like shmups!

There are a couple of downsides to this method though.

Downside 1

The map data must be loaded into memory at runtime, which means it must be stored in code and use up precious tokens/chars!

This I solved by storing the level data in a separate cart, the extended map memory is not reset when loading another cart with load() and so can be loaded by a separate cart which then loads the main game ready to go!

My map data was a simple array (list) of sprite IDs which the level loading cart just looped through and used mset() to write to memory. Nothing fancy, this only happens at first load so performance is not a concern.

for idx,tile in ipairs(map_data) do
  idx-=1 -- need to start at 0!
  -- calculate map co-ordinates from index
  local x=idx%16
  local y=idx16
  -- set map tile
  mset(x,y,tile)
end

Downside 2

The inbuilt map editor is not influenced by either of these pokes, and will continue to present the standard map memory in the standard width.

This required building a custom level editing tool.

Camera

One of the most important aspects of any platformer is the camera movement. Especially for Samurise, where the movement is constant, I really wanted to avoid just centering the character and having a nausea inducing map movement.

Two main techniques here are a deadzone where the camera doesn't move if the character is inside it, and camera smoothing, so it follows the character with easing, rather than instantly.

To add to the feeling of smoothly rising, I made a dead zone that reached pretty far down the screen and also reduced the camera speed moving downwards. I think this is an area that could be tweaked though, it made it difficult to see where you were landing when falling a long way and was one of the biggest feedback points I got from players.

local top_bound = 76
local bot_bound = 120
local camera_speed = 20

-- target camera position to the player
local ideal_y = player.y - top_bound

if player.dy >= 0 and player.y - camera.y > bot_bound then
   	ideal_y = player.y - bot_bound
   	-- slower speed for following downwards
   	camera_speed = 5
elseif player.y - camera.y > top_bound then
   	-- if inside deadzone, ideal position is current position!
   	ideal_y = camera.y
end

-- ease to target position
camera.y -= (camera.y - ideal_y) / camera_speed

So now I had a pretty nice feeling prototype, the camera smoothly follows upwards but doesn't move back down for small falls or when coming back down from a jump.

Second Screen Palette

But nobody wants to play a full game with just one level, especially one so lime green! The final special technique to address this is using the secret 2nd screen palette! This awesome feature lets you use 2 separate palettes on screen at the same time for up to 32 colours, with the caveat that you can only change the palette per line. However, this is perfect for a vertically ascending map game!

See this BBS post for an excellent write-up about enabling more than 16 colors to the screen.

Memory locations 0x5f70 to 0x5f7f represent 16 8-line sections of the screen. Setting these to 0 uses screen palette one, setting each byte to 0xff sets the corresponding 8 lines to screen palette two. Values between 0 and 0xff can be used to set individual lines.

So using the camera and map, I calculate how many lines into a new section is on screen and so how many lines need setting to the second palette.

-- enable the per line palette swapping
 	poke(0x5f5f,0x10)

	-- set screen palettes
	pal(screen_pal_one,1)
	pal(screen_pal_two,2)

	if lines>=0 then
    	-- get number of full 8 lines to change
    	local l=lines8
    	-- if the number of lines is not a clean multiple of 8, get the remaining line count.
    	local l2=lines%8

    	-- set full 8 lines to second pal l times
    	memset(0x5f70,0xff,l)

    	-- set necessary remaining lines
    	memset(0x5f70+l,2^(l2+1)-1,1)

    	-- set subsequent lines to first palette.
    	memset(0x5f70+l+1,0,1)    
	else
    	-- set all to first palette
    	memset(0x5f70,0,16)
	end

Samurise was a lot of fun to make, I learnt a lot of new techniques like the ones mentioned here.

An honourable mention goes to parens-8 which I used for the first time and really let me get a lot more content in than would have been otherwise possible! PICO-8 might have some pretty tight restrictions, but using some of the less documented techniques you can really get a lot more out of it than seems at first glance!

- Roybie

Everyone Draw Developer Interview

by Nerdy Teachers
Feat. Sean Gransee

Everyone Draw (Infinite Pixel Art Canvas) is a website and mobile app for a globally shared digital drawing space where anyone can explore, create, and collaborate in its vast pixel art world. It was developed in 2021 by Sean Gransee, a full-stack software engineer specializing in business-to-business software as a service. We discovered his project "Everyone Draw" because it uses the PICO-8 palette! So we tried it out, really enjoyed it, and decided to reach out to Sean for a Pico-View interview.

Nerdy: What was the initial concept and motivation behind developing EveryoneDraw.com?

Sean: A few years ago, I stumbled upon a video comparing the sizes of various video game maps. A few days later, an idea popped into my head. What if there was a game where the map went on forever? What would people do in the more central areas, and how would that compare to the far-off areas that few people will ever find?

I was working full-time, so I didn’t want to invest too much time into anything. The idea of building an infinite canvas where people could simply place individual pixels seemed perfect because it was something achievable in my spare time. It also seemed like a fun departure from the types of applications I was building at work.

I had never, never drawn pixel art before. I wasn’t even familiar with similar projects that were already out there, such as Reddit’s r/place. All I set out to do was build something that I personally thought would be fun and interesting.

Nerdy: As PICO-8 developers and gamers, we adore the PICO-8 palette for its vibrant and unique style that is quickly recognizable. What made you decide to use the PICO-8 palette for this enormous project?

Sean: I wasn’t familiar with PICO-8 before I started this project. I knew I wanted to have a limited color palette so the canvas would have a cohesive look even with thousands of strangers collaborating on drawings. So I Googled something like “pixel art color palettes” and it brought me to Lospec.

After browsing lots of color palettes, PICO-8 really stood out to me. It was a great balance of having all the colors you would need to draw almost anything, while still being very easy on the eyes. For years, I didn’t even know what the palette was called or that there was such a passionate community behind it. I originally thought it was just the creation of some random Lospec user.

Nerdy: In PICO-8 game development, many of us have realized how much fun and creativity comes from its limitations. Everyone Draw has similar extreme limitations when compared to other drawing apps with the color options, the minimal user interface, and the lack of drawing tools, which forces everyone to place one pixel at a time. As a contributing artist myself I found it made me slow down and enjoy the pixel art process almost as a meditation, making me wonder if that was intentional or a happy accident. So what was your intention or reasons for designing the limitations this way?

Sean: It was intentional. People have been begging for more drawing tools for years, but I’ve always resisted. Every drawing is so much more impressive when you know that it was drawn one pixel at a time. Even something as simple as a square becomes impressive. There’s a 1024x1024 pink square on the canvas, and it’s cool knowing that people have tapped on it over a million times to bring it to life.

I also wanted to make Everyone Draw accessible to anyone. The more drawing tools there are, the more you need to learn. Someone might see a bunch of tools and immediately decide “I don’t have time for this”. But anyone can understand the concept of tapping a color and then tapping a pixel. I’ve showed it young children and grandparents and plenty of ages in between, and everyone is able to start playing around with it right away.

Nerdy: I've seen the community will often run events or projects where they choose a theme and a new location, then encourage everyone to go contribute to create a massive drawing together. What have been your favorite or most notable projects that surprised or impressed you coming from the collaboration of the community?

Sean: The world map (canvas , timelapse video) is my favorite. It’s incredible that such an intricate drawing was able to happen with so many people contributing to it, and many actively trying to attack it. (Shoutout to the amazing moderators! This wouldn’t have been possible without them.) It’s also close enough to the origin that a lot of people randomly find it, so it’s evolved quite a bit over time. Certain countries have started talking over more and more land. It reminds me of the board game Risk that I loved playing as a kid.

Another fun one was the one with all the tiles (canvas , timelapse video). I don’t even know what to call it. It was amazing to see so many individual drawings come together over the course of a month to create something so beautiful.

Nerdy: Looking back to when you started this project in 2021, did you expect that over 360 million pixels would be painted from over 300 thousand artists in just 3 years? And looking forward, do you have any plans for updates to this project or a similar project in the future?

Sean: I wasn’t sure if it would catch on. I tried to make it as shareable as possible, so I figured it had a shot at gathering millions of pixels. But that would only happen if it gained some initial momentum, and I had no idea if that would ever happen. At the beginning it was just an empty canvas, so why would anyone want to draw on it to begin with? Luckily I was able to get past that initial hurdle with a few social media posts, and the canvas has been pretty active ever since.

I don’t have any future plans for this project. I’ve never really had any plans to begin with. I just work on it during periods where I have some free time. It’s really just a fun hobby for me, and I’m trying to avoid having it feel like too much of a job.

Anything I do in the future will probably be related to moderation, and will go unnoticed by the public. There’s an amazing team of volunteer moderators that works tirelessly to keep the canvas free of obscene drawings, and I want to continue making it easier for them to do this.

Nerdy: I saw that you have been an international traveler for 2 years now. I'm American but live in Thailand, which I see you've come to a couple times already, and I've met many "digital nomads" who have found the freedom to travel and work internationally as software developers. How has the traveling experience been for you while maintaining your career as a software engineer?

Sean: I’ll actually credit Everyone Draw with helping me maintain my career. In mid-2023, I quit my job and started traveling the world with my fiancée and our dog. For a while, I wasn’t doing any software development work. I actually started a YouTube channel to document our travels, so that became my main focus for a while.

But after a while, I kept having the itch to go back to software development. I found that I enjoyed making software a lot more than making videos. I was also worried that my skills would decline after years of being out of the industry. Working on Everyone Draw gave me an outlet to keep my skills sharp. Nowadays I spend most of my time freelancing, and most of the gigs I’ve gotten were directly related to the skills I picked up while building Everyone Draw.

Everyone Draw: PICO-8 Mural

After having a great chat with Sean Gransee, I was motivated to start our own collaborative project to represent the PICO-8 community and games. So join us in your free time and add your own sprites or ones from your favorite games!

So if you get the app, you can jump to and bookmark these coordinates:

( 655330, 655330 )

- Nerdy Teachers

Featured Game Review

Quantum Maze

by Achie

Can a quantum computer run Crysis?

Yes and no.

If you are familiar with what games I cover in or outside of Pico-View you have probably guessed a trend by now. I’m quite fond of both roguelikes and puzzle games, both for mostly the same reason. They make the cogs in my brain turn and when those cogs align and you arrive at a solution, that moment is pure bliss. So today how bout we put on our thinking hats and get into quantum entangled sokoban boxes … or not.

Quantum Maze

My cavemen brain is not the best versed in Quantum Physics, but hey, that is why we are playing a game! The creator, mostlydaniel, will guide us through on what we will need to know about all this. 

So let’s jump into the first few levels, which serve as a tutorial, teaching us basic Sokoban skills! ⬅️⬇️⬆️➡️ to move around and push a box if it is in front of you! To be able to progress place boxes on highlighted tiles and enter the goal tile yourself!

After these first two establish the basic mechanics, we are immediately introduced to the main puzzle element of the game. Quantum entangled boxes. Colored the same, they behave the same even if you only modify one of them. More than that, boxes are capable of interacting with each other the same way you can push them!

Next we will enter a series of trickier levels where you learn about gates and the fact that it does not matter which blocks are on the tiles as long as there are blocks there! You will have to use the tricky combination of moving entangled blocks and those who are free roaming!

Even better, the game doesn’t refrain from using red herrings. There are a few stages called freeing stuck boxes, but your goal is not really letting them free, you use them to move other boxes around. Not gonna lie, I felt really dumb after realizing this and completing the stage for the first time. But hey, it is 10pm after playing almost every game released in Q4, my brain is entangled with a bucket of salty cabbage water in terms of thinking capacity.

And to be honest, all this crumbles down when you learn about inverse gates, quantum weaving, pushing through gates with other entangled blocks, strict operation orders between 4 entangled blocks, combined with free blocks … This is just melting my brain. in an absolutely good way. 

I was looking for something like this since I played Puzzles of the Paladins and Infiminoes! I’d love to tell you about each level, but that would spoil the fun! The game presents itself in a much more minimal manner compared to the two mentioned but it lives up in the puzzle department 100%! The later levels, not gonna lie, defeated me so it will be a returner for my game sessions for sure!

Just look at this for example!

I personally really enjoy the minimalistic look. Stone me if you must, but I like simple, well designed games! 

Audio-wise the background OST is a pure BANGER! I truly enjoy the low toned beep-boops and when the higher melody kicks in, oh boi, so do my neurons to hyperfocus and solve the levels. At no point did I find it monotone or irritating, which can be a problem on longer session thinking games. The pushing and clearing sounds are nice and impactful, everything is just well done!

We have a level skip feature (thank god) which I really do enjoy as it helps you to not get stuck on one level while enjoying the rest of the game. Not gonna lie I used the feature a lot of the time as there were some levels that got too tricky for the late night session I’m doing, while also writing.

All in all I do think we got one of the best puzzle games in a while on our hands and if you are a fan of the genre, you will find everything that you like here! Tight puzzle design, an absolute jammer of an OST and the cutest little presentation!

And with that, I’ll thank you for reading through all my ramblings this year and looking forward to an amazing next one with all of your fantastic creations!

About the Author

I stream PICO-8 gameplay and PICO-8 game development on Twitch, as well as write detailed dev logs and a game review series called "Pico Shorts".

 Thanks for reading!

-@Achie

PICO-8 Advent Calendar Confidential
Christmas Past

by bikibird

(All quotes in this article have been edited for length and grammar.)

I’ve been involved with the PICO-8 Advent Calendar for the past three years. It’s a tradition I look forward to every year.   

We released our seventh annual advent calendar just a few weeks ago. I hope everyone had a good time playing the games. The elves and I had only one mission: to spread holiday cheer with daily games, demos, and toys designed to inspire joy and wonder in the player.  

We keep the games secret until they are released because surprises are part of the fun.  The variety and creativity of the games is inspiring, but there’s still a fair amount of mystery surrounding the calendar itself. This article seeks to dispel that mystery and let the reader in on the shadowy doings of the PICO-8 Advent Calendar Cabal.

Christmas Past

The first advent calendar was organized by @Bigaston and released in December 2018. Bigaston shares this origin story for the calendar:

As I remember, Humble Bundle was hosting an advent calendar with yogscast and indie games. At that time, I was just starting my game developer life and I discovered PICO-8. I thought it would be nice to do something similar for PICO-8 and have one game a day, each made by a different creator. I got in touch with Trasevol_Dog, who was far more famous than I and knew a lot of PICO-8 creators.

I think we started contacting people on Twitter and eventually invited 24 people. Then, if I remember well, 2darray made the PICO-8 calendar cartridge. Our decision process did not involve much discussion. It was like 'Ok it can be nice to have this - okay I can do it' and everything was really nice! Next year my priorities changed a bit and I didn't have the time to host again. So, enargy took over.

@2darray shares this remembrance about the creating the first advent calendar cart:

The main thing I remember about working on the calendar was that it was tough to fit all the preview thumbnails into a single cartridge! The main selection page shows all the days/entries in one screen, which means all of those small thumbnails had to fit into the standard screen-sized sprite sheet, but I wanted each entry to have a larger preview image that would show up when you selected it.   

All the images combined would have required more sprite sheet space than I had.  I assumed it'd be fine to store all the data as strings, and decode them on-demand. This worked for a while, but then at some point, we had so many entries that it was threatening to go over the character-count limit, too! This was a sudden crisis, and I wasn't sure what to do. I mentioned it to my dad (a science and programming nerd) since he was visiting from out of state at the time. He emailed me to say 'I THOUGHT ABOUT IT WHILE I WAS DRIVING: RUN-LENGTH ENCODING' and that turned out to be the missing ingredient I needed.

It greatly shrunk the encoded data, and the decoding strategy was super succinct (so it didn't cancel out the compression win).  All 25 large-thumbnails could now be fit into the cartridge again. And, that's the story of how Christmas was saved by a bored physicist.

Zep, the creator of PICO-8, contributed a game to that first year’s calendar, kicking off the tradition of a Christmas day game from Zep every year since.

2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 (update me)

The following year, @enargy took over leadership for a two year term, establishing the advent calendar as a beloved PICO-8 tradition.  Not much is known about this period.  The calendar posts refer to a "secret cabal of PICO-8 merry makers."  Most of this group took their oath of secrecy very seriously and declined to provide comment for this article. However, certain documents created by enargy regarding the group’s activities were recently sent to me from a confidential source:

Sometime after 2018 I took over administration of the Discord server. Every year we've said 'this is the year we're going to knock them out in January,' but, well, that's not really how things work out. Which is totally fine. Having a jam atmosphere and that sort of collaborative spirit when everyone is working in October or later is really what it's about to be honest.

I made a version of Gorillas.bas with Yetis for the 2019 calendar. That was the first game I tried out in QBasic back in the day so that was a very nostalgic project for me.

More than my stuff though, I loved seeing how everyone motivated each other and workshopped ideas -- PICO-8 will always be my favorite community even if I haven't released a cart in a while.

In response to the leaked documents @TheTomster gave this public statement:

enargy recruited me. I got to launch UFO Santa Candy Blaster as the first game of the calendar, which was really cool! That's still probably my favorite of the games I've released. I’ve always tried to make fairly simple games that are quick to play, which suits the calendar format really well. The holiday deadlines are a great way to force a game to be finished.

In 2019, there were some challenges making the daily game deliveries on time. The shipping company, Unreliable Santa Pico Service, was blamed and delivery speed improved when they switched to Shamazon. Their CEO, Jeff "Polar" Bearzos, assured the cabal that not only would the company take on the remaining orders, but that they fully intended to catch up to the projected release dates.

In 2021, TheTomster took over the cabal for three years in what I assume was a bloodless coup.  We were in the depths of the pandemic, but the cabal still managed to release a few new games and re-release some throwbacks for Twelve Days of Pico Christmas in 2021 even though cheer was in very short supply that year.  The calendar continued to be published by TheTomster in 2022 and 2023 in this new abridged form.

I joined the cabal in 2022.  I wasn’t invited.  I just sort of barged into their secret meeting room one day.  Finding it was not easy.  First I had to join the main PICO-8 Discord.  I had never been on Discord before and I was concerned that this form of social media might run too “hot” for my personality.  Instead, I found a wonderful low-drama server where I could learn from others and share my work. Thus encouraged, I took the next step and messaged TheTomster, not knowing what would come next.  An invitation to join a second, secret Discord is what came next.  I didn’t know exactly what to expect, maybe some gnomes tinkering and making plans in a dank basement.  I hesitated a moment.  Would they think I was good enough to be there?  Would they like my game ideas? Was I in over my head? There was only one way to find out. I clicked the link and I was in. What I found, to my delight, was a cheerful and welcoming group of elves, bursting with joy and excitement over their creations.  

I got to work right away on a game about ice skating.  In the middle of developing that game I suddenly had inspiration for a second game about waiting up for Santa, so I wound up contributing two games that year.  

Now I know that the advent calendar elves (That’s how we spell devs around here.) are a supportive and friendly bunch. We share progress gifs, help with playtesting, and give encouragement and advice to each other.  The Advent Calendar Discord is truly a magical place to be and nothing to be intimidated about.  I had so much fun that I was back in 2023 with another game.  

- bikibird

Advent Calendars Past

Flying into the holidays of 2024 with Zep's game "Midnight Blue"

PICO-8 Advent Calendar Confidential
Christmas present

by bikibird

In 2024, TheTomster announced that they weren’t able to continue in their roles as organizer and calendar creator. The elves, being industrious, moved quickly to fill in the gaps in production.  

@SmellyFishstiks created the 2024 calendar cart.  The menu is particularly cozy this year with twinkling stars, gently drifting snow, and Christmas trees that look like they were cut out of construction paper.  Smelly also included a delightful and creative  arrangement of "I saw three ships (come sailing in.)"

Christmas Present

I volunteered to act as organizer.  As I thought about what I wanted for the calendar and how I would fulfill my role, I realized I wanted to return the calendar to its roots and shoot for a full calendar of 25 games.

The calendar survives and thrives from year to year by the constant recruitment of new elves. The word of mouth method had only gotten us so far. It was time to try something new.  So,  after consulting with the existing elves, I created a PICO-8 Advent Calendar Jam on Itch.io in October to draw folks in. I also started an aggressive marketing campaign, which consisted of posting early and often on Reddit, Lexaloffle, and the PICO-8 Discord.  I probably sounded like a broken record by the time I was done.  Hopefully I wasn’t too annoying.  It was for a good cause.  Others amplified the message over their own social media. 

By November 1st, over 20 folks had joined the jam and a good proportion of them were newcomers.  It looked promising.  More joined as the month progressed, but as of November 30th we only had nine games done, with maybe three or four more games in the pipeline– far from a full calendar, but inline with prior years. 

We decided to go ahead and release games one by one starting on December 1st. The plan was to spread out the games throughout the month and run funny little Santa letters on the days we didn’t have games.  Almost as an afterthought, I added a link to the jam page with a request for more games when I released the calendar cart.  I didn’t think much would come of it, but it was worth a shot.  That little link turned out to do a lot of the heavy lifting this year.  More and more games kept coming in throughout the month.  It soon became clear that a full calendar was within reach.  The elves even became so encouraged that some of them started work on second games.  We made it to 25 games exactly.

I was overjoyed at the turn out and more than a little relieved. Now, let’s hear from some of the other elves that participated this year. @rhyswynne shares these thoughts:

I am new to the PICO-8 scene after playing and enjoying a few games that I put onto my Ambernic device. After beginning to dabble in game development in Godot, I gravitated towards the PICO-8 because it felt a lot less complex and I could come up with ideas and scale them up a lot quicker. I started my first entry, "Frosty's Snowed Under!" after finishing a game jam with a goal to release it for Christmas. I wanted to make a tribute to an old Commodore 64 Christmas game, Frosty the Snowman, for the longest time.

I freely admit I'm not the best programmer, but having a group of folks who were happy to help and playtest was very handy, especially toward the end of developing the game. I wanted to help achieve the max submissions to the advent calendar. With a small amount of time to build a game, I decided on a simple "Simon Says" game based around Mari Lwyd, a Welsh Christmas tradition that involves a singing horse skull.

Overall I really enjoyed my experience of putting together a couple of games for this game jam.  It was excellent to be part of a successful project that so many people enjoy in the run up to Christmas.

@dredds had this to say about their participation:

I’ve been using PICO-8 for a few years and I’ve enjoyed the previous advent calendars as a player. I saw a post asking for submissions to this year’s advent calendar.

I already had an idea that might work– what would a text adventure be like if written for a machine that had game pads and no keyboard? I wrote a mock-up of a UI that combined text descriptions with point-and-click interaction, and it played surprisingly well. The advent calendar gave me an idea for a scenario [and] a deadline to ensure I would actually finish it. It ended up as Last House of the Night.

I found the Discord for the Jam to be really friendly and helpful. I ended up writing two games. I was inspired by the other projects I saw on the Discord to write a wintery mini-game. I started with a prototype. Encouraged by feedback to a GIF, I developed it into an action game in which you had to avoid obstacles as your snowball rolled down a mountain getting bigger and bigger as it collected snow. The hard deadline forced me to focus on getting the core gameplay in place and then design the map and add polish. A good lesson for future projects!

The friendly group on Discord gave lots of useful feedback on early versions. This project was a bit more of a rush: I finished it the night before the deadline. But I am happy with the result despite (or maybe because of) the corners I had to cut and features I had to leave out. I feel it achieved the “wintery” atmosphere I was aiming for.

Snowball Run

Christmas Future

I hope all the elves will be back for another advent calendar in 2025. I know I will be. I hope you now see that we’re really not a shadowy cabal after all. We’re just a merry band of happy little elves who just want to spread holiday cheer by sharing the joy and wonder of PICO-8 games.

The jam accepts games, toys, and demos. The carts may be of any size, but we emphasize small, Christmas-cookie sized projects. Holiday reskins of older games are welcome too. The carts don’t have to be about Christmas although many of them are. Carts about any of the December holidays or winter themed games are welcome. We try to cast a wide net. 

The main metric by which we judge the carts is whether they create a sense of joy and wonder in the player. This jam is about the spirit of the holidays however you define it. I hope you will consider helping to make the 2025 advent calendar a true community calendar by joining us next season and keeping the tradition going.

- bikibird

Top 10 Games of 2024
from Official BBS

by Achie

Here are this year's best PICO-8 games based on the Lexaloffle BBS star ratings given by you all! The amount of variety here stands as a perfect example of the wide tastes of the PICO-8 community. So no matter the type of gamer you are, you are bound to find a game or two you'll love in this list.

#1 

Oblivion Eve

By: SmartAlloc

An amazing roguelike action-brawler that seems to happen when you try to cross PVE Smash Bros and low-rez PICO-8! Sword sharpened and so in the juice, that its so thicc you can actually cut it.

#2 

Praxis Fighter X

By: ericb

Do you have problems with the local company ruining the economy? Fear not, we have fighter jets on sale for this high tempo shoot'em up gem!

#3 

Woodworm

By: spratt

Gnaw your way through amazingly constructed puzzle levels of this carving movement puzzle game! Wood never felt more tasty!

#4 

Puzzles of the Paladin

By: Nerdy Teachers

Your trials await young Paladin! The arduous dungeon is filled with many puzzles that will require your best movement and the right tools! Grab all the gems or at least try for days in this amazing movement puzzle game.

#5 

Driftmania

By: MaxBize

Initial Deez brakes we are gonna drift through these maps like we're running in the 90’s! Are you fast and precise enough for the levels or are you gonna play dodge’em with the walls, like I do? You decide!

#6 

Hot Wax

By: TRASEVOL_DOG

Tetris’s goth sister is here and it is your job to light all her hand made candles! Place, combo and burn carefully to earn more points in this very unique twist on the tetris-like genre!

#7 

Feathered Escape

By: yokozuna

You thought BAS was tough? Parkour your way through saws and tight spots in this amazingly constructed movement god platformer spinoff of the original score chaser! Keep your wings in, the blades are sharp!

#8 

Balloon

By: Lobo

Do you know what happens to a balloon after you let go? Now you can experience it in this totally realistic simulator of balloon precision! Bees, frogs and spikes, everything is super nice! Maybe …

#9 

Tiny Hawk: Pico Sk8r

By: morganquirk

Grind your way through the map, ollie all over the ramps and try to do your best squawking tricks in this score chasing time trial remake of the classic series! If only I were good enough at this!

Read a great thread about how this game was made.

#10 

Build a Jetpack

By: Yoshiip

Dive deeper into the sea to grab the rare fishes from the depths of the sea! Upgrade your gear to dive deeper for rare resources that you will need for your jetpack to escape the confines of the raft! Be careful, fish be angy sometimes!

Congratulations to all the developers of these games! Your creations have been thoroughly enjoyed this year. If you're looking for even more games and are curious about the rankings of the top 20 or top 50 of this year, don't worry, we have you covered in the rest of the zine!

- Achie

2024 Itch.io games

by Achie

This is the first time we have decided to take a look at the top rated PICO-8 games of the year from itch.io. So we filtered through them to bring you some great games that either did not get posted on the BBS, or received many positive ratings on itch but apparently went overlooked on the BBS.  So this proved to be another great way to dig out and spotlight these hidden gems for you all.

Make Ten

By: Pancelor

“Are you better at math than a 10 year old”, the game? Scavenge through the randomly generated map and combine as many numbers to 10 as you can in the limited time you have! 2 minutes is all you have in this minimalistic puzzle game!

Infinimoes

By: Werxzy

What happens if you throw tetris pieces into an infinite singularity and ask someone to fill funky spaces with them? A gorgeous and challenging puzzle game with so many levels you cannot fathom! Palace your way through various levels and fun stages and discover all the secrets!

SUPER World of Goo

By: Peter Mosevich

Are you ready for the mind blowing physics of this amazing remake? Are you ready to join the speedruns or are you more of the slow and steady wins the race? Whatever you choose, this game is an amazing piece of the PICO-8 catalogue!

Add Town

By: Peter Mosevich

Ever wondered what would happen if you combine a city builder with 2024? The awesome polish, the wonky tiles, and the animations made this game sneak into everyone's hearts! You're next!

Solitomb

By: Jakub Wasilewski (krajzeg)

A roguelike solitaire poker combo builder? Many words and even more possibilities in this super juiced horror-esq experience of building solitaire piles to defeat and guard against the monsters lurking in the deck!

Backstreet Warriors

By: SebaGamesDev

The ultra rare PICO-8 beat’em up genre surfaces again in this striking homage to all your classical games: Double Dragon, Mighty Final Fight, River City Ransom, you name it! Can you defeat the gang of 99 in this non-stop brawl or will you be left behind, beaten in the backstreets.

Carrot Up

By: Mibyle

This super cute carrot and bunny themed shoot’em up, that will charm your heart and will push your “score go higher” activated brain! Let’s see your skills sprout and your scores rise!

Kuiper Cargo

By: Spratt

Do you have what it takes to be the best space merchant? Pack your ship tight in this Tetris inspired push-your like upgrade based game and achieve the highest merchant guild rank!

Ghost Wave

By: monoRAIL

If there's something strange in the neighborhood, who you gonna call? GHOSTWAVE! Clean up all the ghosts with your high tech helicopter and grab all the released ghosts and push forward in this classic inspired shoot’em up game!

- Achie

Updated Top 200 PICO-8 Games

by VoidGazerbon & Nerdy Teachers

Last year, we unveiled our "Top 200" webpage, listing the PICO-8 games with the highest star ratings received on the BBS. This was the first time you could easily view such a comprehensive list in order of their popularity. We want to thank all of you who have been using and sharing the page with others.

Although stars and popularity constantly changed throughout the year, our list remained frozen in time since 2023. We waited as long as we could into December this year to regather the stats and bring you an updated best games list!

You may be aware that this year, the Lexaloffle BBS has had quite a lot of updates. One of them being the automatic sorting of search results by stars! That means you can now reliably splore and find the better games of the genre or keyword you searched for right away.

What you might have missed about this, is that it is also possible to sort the entire BBS in order of stars by just searching for a single space!

That means you can get an up-to-date "Top 20,000" list whenever you want. Of course that meant it wasn't enough for us to just update our Top 200 page to match it. So, we simply had to provide you with even more that the BBS doesn't yet offer!

We’re thrilled to introduce an exciting new feature added right on to our Top 200 page! You can now explore the highest-rated games from different timespans: (1) of all time, (2) the past five years, (3) the past three years, and (4) just the past year! Look for buttons like this at the top of the page.

Top 200 Games in Recent Years

5 3 1

We realize that it's quite difficult for new games to gather enough stars to make it onto the Top 200, especially when the classics are now easier to find and are still gaining stars themselves! So we wanted to find a way to give more opportunity to modern PICO-8 games to gain attention, stars, and plays by all the PICO-8 gamers out there, and we're very happy with the solution we've come up with.

Updated Top 200
PICO-8 Games

Now, with multiple Top 200 lists organized by release date, we can showcase the rising stars and recent hits, making it even easier for you to find those hidden gems you may have missed. Happy browsing!

- VoidgazerBon & Nerdy Teachers

Data Packing for Picodex Dual

by alanxoc3

I thought I had pushed PICO-8 to its limits when I published the original Picodex in April 2023. That is, until September later that year when I wrote:

I've been casually drawing Johto Pokemon in PICO-8. I think it will be cool to do something with that. Maybe a just-Pokedex Picodex. Or convert all Pokemon to black/white and try to create a full Johto battle-sim. Not sure if the latter is possible, but it's a fun idea.

Thus I spent the next 14 months of my free time proving myself wrong! And now I'm proud to present my 32kb sequel called Picodex Dual, a complete battle simulator for the next generation of Pokemon games, Gold/Silver/Crystal (GSC).

While it may not seem like it at first glance, this was a much more ambitious project than the previous game. It has roughly double the content, but packed into the same amount of space. In this post I will go over the interesting challenges I faced while packing the data section of the cartridge.

Dual Colored Sprites

From the start I knew I needed to minimize sprite space to help fit all the extra data and code. Making sprites stored at 16x16 pixels with only 1 bit per pixel seemed like a good way to do that. Outlines are rendered by drawing the sprite multiple times, shifted 1 pixel in each direction. Sprites are packed such that each pixel contains part of 4 different sprites.

Clever pal & palt logic can be used to draw sprites without any sprite unpacking code on startup. Try loading the game with LOAD #PICODEX_DUAL and replacing all the code with this snippet to see how easy it is to unpack all 256 sprites:

function spr_pkmn(num,x,y,c)
  for i=1,15 do
    palt(i,2^(3-num64)&i==0)
    pal(i,c)
  end
  spr(num%8*2+num%648*32,x,y,2,2)
end

function _draw()
  cls()
  for i=0,63 do
    spr_pkmn(i+t()1%4*64,i%8*16,i8*16,i%14+2)
  end
end

I also made a custom sprite editor on my playdate so I could sprite on the go! This was a huge time saver for me, because I was often away from a computer just standing in lines and stuff. The animation here shows the editor running on the playdate simulator. The left side is where I sprite, the middle is a preview, and the right side is a reference image. It also demonstrates how the outlining algorithm is abused to fake dark colored sprites like Murkrow.

Learnset Packing

A learnset is all the possible moves a Pokemon can learn from leveling, breeding, evolving, tutoring, TMs, HMs, RBY import, glitches, and events.

11927 is the number of bytes it takes to store all learnsets without compression, but I needed this smaller to fit the remaining data! The size can easily be reduced to ~7300 by removing duplicate moves that evolved Pokemon share with their pre-evolutions.

It can be reduced even further if the move id 255 is reserved to mean a range. For example, Magikarp can learn 6 moves: splash, tackle, flail, bubble, dragon rage, and reversal. Assume splash=1, tackle=2, ..., and reversal=6. Instead of Magikarp's learnset taking up 6 bytes, it could be represented like 1 255 6 in just 3 bytes.

Generally, the amount of space this "range" technique can save depends on how move ids are assigned. Since determining the optimal assignment is one of those NP problems, I created a Python program that utilizes some brute force and a genetic algorithm to find a near-optimal move assignment. I ran this program on all 16 cores of my laptop for about a week. And it was totally worth it, bringing the learnset byte count down to just 4110! A 35% compression ratio from the initial size.

More Data Packing

My general data packing strategy for the remaining data was to make every bit count. Since peek/poke only work on 8 bit boundaries, I made a function that unpacks variable bit-length values when the game starts up. Here are some examples of how I'm packing the remaining data:

• About 90% of all Pokemon base stats are multiples of 5. Rounding the non-conforming 10% to a multiple of 5 allows each stat to be stored in 6 bits rather than 8 bits. With 2 bits saved per stat, 378 bytes are saved in total. Similar logic is done for move stats as well.
• Each trainer's data takes up 7 bytes and 2 bits. 1 byte for each Pokemon in the team. 1 byte representing a TM/HM. 2 bits for the trainer's gender. Trainer Pokemon learn the first 4 moves from their respective learnset, replacing the last move with the trainer's TM/HM if they can learn it.
• All Pokemon names are shortened to 8 characters. Move, item, and trainer names are shortened or renamed to 6 characters. This helps save space, but also makes the text fit into the 64x64 screen size. Text stored in the data section uses 5 bits per letter.

for iloc=0x3200, 0x4278, 68 do
  -- remove loops
  -- set speed to 7
  -- set filters to max
  poke4(iloc+64, 0x.07d7)

  for loc=iloc, iloc+63, 2 do
    -- only triangle/saw/tilted/square waves
    -- set volume to 6
    -- remove high pitch notes
    poke2(loc, %loc & 0x70df | 0x0a00)
  end
end

::_:: -- play a pokemon cry each second to test the filter!
if t() % 1 == 0 then
  cls()
  print(t()1, 1, 1, 7)
  sfx(t()14%64, 0, t()1%4*8, 8)
end
flip() goto _

And there we go! That's how I managed to fit data for all 252 Pokemon along with cries and sprites, all 252 moves, 57 trainers, and more within about half a PICO-8 cartridge. If you're wondering how I managed to cram all the code in too, well I'll have to write about that another time because it was definitely a journey! Until then, happy hacking!

- @alanxoc3

Lookback on 2024 with
Pico Playtime

by Extar

Editor Introduction

You probably already know Extar as the game dev and content creator behind Pico Playtime where he makes weekly videos about high-quality PICO-8 games. In each video he gives you a play through and talks about what he thinks is good about it, breaking down the mechanics, and noticing fine details and extra efforts that were put into the games to make them great.

Over the year, he has already covered each game from the Top 10 BBS list, which you can watch here:

If you have a hard time keeping up with PICO-8 releases, then definitely subscribe to Pico Playtime to stay up to date on games you shouldn't miss.

And each year he gives his own personal favourites list which he shared with us with written description and reviews:

Extar's Best of 2024

1. Driftmania

A beautifully simple and fun 2D isometric racer by MaxBize. Complete a series of time trials on a variety of unlockable tracks featuring twists and turns, speed boosts, water obstacles and ramps. The presentation is great, the car graphics and turning are so smooth and there's some nice music between races. Where the game really shines is in the driving. The handling of the car is superb and the addition of a ghost mode makes hunting down faster times deeply satisfying.

2. ExTerra

It wouldn't be a Best of PICO-8 end of year list without at least one shmup. ExTerra is another fantastic shooter by LokiStriker. A straightforward caravan-style shmup pitting you against waves of enemy ship formations and giving you a satisfying arsenal of weapons to try out. If you ever needed reminding how bad you are at shmups, this is the game for you. The game features some very demanding gameplay if you're wanting to post truly impressive scores. There is a combo system to rack up scores and the alternate fire features a close-range lock-on style attack. Presentation is as-always excellent, with stylish ship designs and some great music. The game has a portrait-mode feel thanks to a large HUD taking up the sides of the screen, giving the game a unique look on PICO-8 and a more authentic classic shmup experience.

3. Hot Wax

There's been some great puzzle games this year, Hot Wax is superficially a Tetris-like, but once you understand the candle burning mechanics you will see that it is so much more. A wonderfully gloomy, gothic atmosphere and some very nice lighting effects make this a very stylish little puzzle game.

Hot Wax is a wonderfully original puzzle game made by Rémy Devaux/Trasevol_Dog for Ludum Dare 55. This game bears a superficial resemblance to Tetris but that's where the similarities end. Summon a demon by keeping as many candles burning for as long as possible. It takes too long to explain the game's rules, just go and play this oh-so-addictive puzzler.

4. Oblivion Eve

Oblivion Eve is a brilliant action platformer by Smartalloc. Combining Rogue-like elements and some great platformer combat the gameplay makes this a stand out and that's before you even get into some of the weird graphics and upgrade system which adds an extra layer of brilliance to the game. The music by some guy called Extar is okay too, I guess. :P

Oblivion Eve by Smartalloc is a dark fantasy action platformer for #Pico8. Jump, dodge and use a whole arsenal of different attacks to fight your way through a rogue-like prison to free an enchained titan. Absolutely bonkers story, brilliant dense combat and a fun upgrade system. The graphics and animation are outstanding. The music by some guy called Extar is okay too I guess.

5. Praxis Fighter X

There is an ever growing list of incredible shmups popping up on the console thanks in part to the Lazy Devs community who have turned themselves into an incredibly talented shmup hive mind. Praxis Fighter X combines solid shmup mechanics and gameplay with some beautiful graphics, sound and even the light sprinklings of a story with some nice visual story-telling--something of a rarity in the genre.

6. Solitomb

Solitomb is a wonderful card game in a similar vein to Balatro. Build poker hands from a solitaire board and fight evil dungeon dwellers. Card games often struggle on PICO-8 due to the lack of screen space but Krazjeg has managed to make it work thanks to the addition of a plethora of quality of life features, animations and object highlights. Moving the mouse over the board brings up a flurry of helpful tool-tips and cards ripple as they are highlighted. The always wonderful Gruber provides the atmospheric music in the game.

The gameplay is challenging even on the lowest difficulty and even with all the tool-tips there is a steep learning curve to overcome before you'll be able to make much progress past the first couple of levels. Persevere with the game and you will uncover a rich, and deep card game. Destined for an expanded version and a full Steam release, this going to be one game to watch in 2025. 

7. Samurise

Samurise by Troypicol/Grim Ninja is stylish platformer with beautiful graphics and some lovely evocative music. Similar in style to a single-button platformer, although in this case you have an attack/dash button as well, your samurai runs endlessly and it is your task to skillfully jump, wall jump, dash and slash your way through possessed demons from Japanese folklore. A wonderfully simple premise executed with style and polish.

8. Tiny Hawk Pico Sk8r

I love the Tony Hawk series but couldn't imagine how it could ever work on PICO-8, well here's your answer. Tiny Hawk: Pico Sk8r by MorganQuirk is a great demake of the skateboarding franchise. Chain moves together and look cool until you inevitably fall off. The familiar gameplay is intact and there's even a couple of levels that will be very familiar to fans of the series.

9. Trichromat

A lovely twist on the familiar Sokoban formula. Your character can split into red, green and blue copies and all of the graphics have a lovely glitchy spectrum effect. Reds and green objects combine into yellow and so on. The puzzles are typically fiendish with new mechanics and level gimmicks introduced every few levels including teleporters, doors and colour splitting. There's also some lovely lo-fi music to go with the retro look and feel of the game. 

10. Zebulon: A Lost Cat

Rounding off my list is yet another wonderful Metroidvania platformer for PICO-8. Zebulon: A Lost Cat by NuSan is a wonderfully polished platformer, letting you explore a single, vast level as an increasingly agile and charmingly animated cat. Leaning towards the precision platformer side of things in terms of what it asks of the player, there are several distinct areas in the game each testing your platforming skills and making good use of the various new abilities and power-ups you unlock through the course of the game. The game has seen a release on Steam and is even available on Switch, which is just crazy when you consider its humble origins on PICO-8.

- @Extar

Resources for PICO-8 Debugging

by Nerdy Teachers

Our Guide has a new section specifically for debugging resources. Last year, we added a page for "debugging motivation" and this year we've just added a page for understanding and debugging PICO-8 error messages. 

This should be especially helpful to beginners following tutorials and running into unexpected errors. It first covers how to read the error messages and understand the different parts of the error.

Then there is a table of all the error messages we have taken note of over the years with a link to jump directly to read more about it, see examples of what could cause those particular errors, and tips for how to go about debugging them!

If you run across any error messages we don't have listed yet, let us know and we'll make sure to include it.

- Nerdy Teachers

Picotron Textmode Editor

by Werxzy

A little before Picotron 0.1.0 launched, I was interested in making a textmode render engine, but I think a few other people started posting their own textmode ideas and my interest waned a bit. I also was much more interested in rushing to make a solitaire game. Around Picotron version 0.1.1d however, a few changes piqued my interest and I started working on the idea. I do plan to open the rendering engine up a bit for other projects, but I started with a textmode graphics editor due to it being essential for making nice looking apps in the textmode style.

If you follow me anywhere online, you might have seen some of the textmode art I've made while working on the tool. In fact, the cover art for this Pico-View issue was made using it! Textmode offers a new way to approach making art. While similar to pixel art, it also allows for adding more detail, while keeping that blocky look. I've also found it a bit easier and quicker to make drafts and then refine the details.

Textmode uses a mostly predetermined set of sprites, all the same size. The editor has a little window that allows selecting individual ones to draw onto the canvas. Each one can be rotated or flipped.

Each tile in the canvas can have 2 colors. One for the "foreground" color and one for the "background" color. The editor has another window for selecting each of them.

By combining the tile and color selectors, more detailed textmode images can be created.

The base textmode rendering engine works storing the textmode information into 4 different layers, each using "userdata" in picotron. "userdata" being compact bytes of data allowing for faster math operation. Two are for the foreground and background colors, one is for part of the sprite id, and the last one is for the sprite bank and flip bits. First, the sprite id and bank userdata are merged to be used to call `map()`. Then colors on the screen will get reassigned based on the color userdata. 

The main reason I'm storing the data this way, is so that functions like `rectfill`, `circfill`, and `line` can be used on any of the layers for some fun effects. For instance, drawing only on the background layer with a circle to have a lighting effect or making a glitchy effect by randomly changing the tile id while keeping the colors.

The editor is ALMOST ready, but there are a few issues with how the rendering is handled on the current version, but I will try to release it on the Lexaloffle BBS soon after (or even sometime before) Picotron 0.1.1e is out. I hope you look forward to it!

- Werxzy

December Event Winners

by Nerdy Teachers

Since we started our PICO-8 beginners course this year, we've been gearing up to hold events for learners who are using the free PICO-8 Education Edition. The course involves practice assignments which we call "Side Quests" in the meta game called "PICO-8 Game-Dev RPG". The Side Quests are for everyone following the course to really practice what they've learned and develop the practical skills to match the knowledge gained.

Throughout December, we ran our first event to go along with a set of 4 Side Quests. The reward for the best submissions: a full license of PICO-8!

The judging criteria to discover the best of each Side Quest was: 

(1) Beauty; (2) Creativity; (3) Detail; (4) Code Cleanliness; and (5) Community Upvotes (stars)

I was truly impressed by all of the submissions, especially with the limitations we added. All of these scenes were created without adding any sprites, loops, or fill patterns! Instead, they put in meticulous work through drawing and layering simple shape functions and printing text and glyphs to the screen.

And so we are so happy to announce the winners of our very first PICO-8 giveaway event!

Side Quest 3: A Potion Shop Display

Winner: HenryYue 

This scene is immediately striking with the yellow-orange-brown color scheme, allowing the colorful potions to really stand out. The uniquely circular bar and shelf unit adds great 3D perspective with the interiors of the shelves and placement of the potions enhancing the effect. The amazing large gem that draws your eye doesn't look like it was made with shapes because 16 individual pixels were manually coded with pset(), proving the effort spent on details. Finally, the background wall and floor patterns were all made by printing lines of PICO-8 glyphs, with the final result looking even better than if done by a fill pattern.

With this much attention to detail, I look forward to seeing the future games coming from this developer-in-training! Congratulations!

Side Quest 4: A Dungeon Map

Winner: Verb

This map drawing took this Side Quest challenge way farther than I was expecting, given the limitations. Overall, the map is immediately readable thanks to the ( ░ ) glyph used to clearly define the floor space from the (complex and double width!) cave walls. Then you read the title "Cave of Bossman" and your eye spots Bossman towering over his minions with a clever use of two PICO-8 glyphs merged together. Looking around you see more glyphs that are easy to recognize as pickups, health, enemies, and even a winding river cutting through and disappearing at the edges. Finally we spot our hero that is another glyph but includes a sword and shield. I could definitely see this as a game level that I would strategize through its well crafted level design.

The creativity level of this developer-in-training has us excited to see what games they will create! Well done!

Side Quest 5: Geometric Spellcraft

Winner: DOOM32

The geometry-nerd part of my brain can't stop staring at this simple yet wonderful design. It uses only 16 lines, 1 circle, and 1 oval to pull off its 3D effect of looking at an object in a void space, or the pupil of an eye. Those simultaneous images make for the perfect title and description of a locator spell that makes me want to jump into a D&D game. Precise use of variables and efficiency of design allowed this to still have detail while avoiding meticulous code crunching to get there.

We are excited for what games can come from the mind of someone with this much pragmatic forethought. Bravo!

Side Quest 6: Noble House Banners

Winner: Redstoner158

These banner designs are so organic and intricate that it's hard to discern what shapes were used to create it, but we went over the code and sure enough, no magic (nor restricted code) was used in the layering process of drawing these elaborate shapes. All of the submissions in this Side Quest are absolutely amazing so this design had very strong competition to beat. After trying to dissect the shapes used to create each emblem, you take a step back and notice the unique glyphs used to accent each banner. This little touch of detail adds a real sense of pride and symbolism for these insignias that fantasy-console armies could rally behind.

The ambitious work put into this proves the dedication and diligence of this developer-in-training that we hope to see carry over into their future PICO-8 games and projects. Outstanding work!

Bonus Quest: Greatest Skill Level-Up!

Only a few participants chose to dedicate their time to doing all 4 Side Quests, and it has been a joy for us to witness the submissions come in throughout the past month, especially when we could witness the growth and development of skills with each submission! That is the heart and soul of our course, the Side Quests, and this event. We're overjoyed to see the progress achieved in leveling up the skills required to complete each challenge to a higher and higher quality. So we wanted to recognize this person's continued dedication to themselves and this craft.

Bonus Winner: Martín G

If you participated in this event but didn't win today, don't worry, your effort was not for nothing as your participation in this event earns you credit towards our future events giving you an edge towards winning next time! And another opportunity to win PICO-8 will come again soon, as we wrap up this Pico-View and continue with our video lessons.

To the winners, congratulations once more! To receive your licenses, we will be attempting to contact you through your lexaloffle accounts, so if you haven't done so yet, make sure to include your email or social media to your profile and keep an eye out for a message from us.

- Nerdy Teachers

Pixel Art Gallery

Artists: Everyone Draw Community

"Isocity" Community Project

Exploring Everyone Draw's infinite canvas reveals absolutely incredible pixel art that will surprise and delight you in different ways. Above, is a city center where all buildings, roads, and vehicles are drawn in isometric projection. The scale and amount of detail of this project is unbelievable.

Community Projects can also be smaller and sillier like "Frogwall". This is only the start of a long line of increasingly creative evolutions of the same simple frog sprite.

"Frogwall" Community Project (small section)

Some projects designate smaller spaces for each artist to fill in, like this skyscraper project. When I discovered Everyone Draw, this project was just starting, so I contributed the room on the 2nd floor, right side. I started filling in the room with indoor plants and just kept going! Someone else later added a red Pikmin in the room which I think is perfect.

"Skyscraper" Community Project

Some projects are impressive for the ideas that add even more limitations like using only the bright green color. The fact that one person had the idea or simply started drawing in only green, and everyone joined in to create impressive 1-bit pixel art in this space renews my faith in online anonymous communities.

1-Bit Greenland Community Project (rearranged)

Let's be honest though, it isn't a perfect online space with no griefers or trolls. There are still plenty of those, but thanks to volunteer moderators and the good people in the community many of these landmark spaces are vigilantly maintained.

"Trans Flag" by community

This incredible "Trans Flag" space is a recurring target for trolls and transphobes to try to destroy but for every 1 hater, there are dozens of decent folk who defend and maintain spaces like this.

Not only is the pixel art here amazing, but it is also a monument of perseverance and communal support.

And I know you quickly spotted a beloved character in the PICO-8 community!

With so much negativity on the internet, it's heartwarming to discover spaces like this next one. The stunning red and pink roses stops you in your tracks and all around it you'll see messages of awe and appreciation for the artistry.

"Roses" by anonymous

Then there are community projects where you have to pause to remember that the canvas was originally the PICO-8 white. And that means for this space scene, hundreds of thousands of black pixels had to be patiently clicked or tapped into all the gaps between fun space-themed pixel art.

"Space" Community Project

Lastly, a community project that we will all certainly love is a long line of Gameboy games, organized side by side here. How great is it to see these classic title screens in the PICO-8 palette?? It certainly lights a fire of inspiration and motivation to develop more games myself!

"Gameboy Title Screens" Community Project (rearranged)

Check out EveryoneDraw.com, even to just explore and discover more incredible pixel art in your free time. It is available in your browser (with some limitations), or as a mobile app (recommended). And whether you are a pixel artist or not, I welcome you to contribute to our PICO-8 mural by adding a sprite or two from either your own PICO-8 games or a PICO-8 game you really like.

- Nerdy Teachers

Closing Remarks

Thank you for reading this 2024-2025 New Year's issue of the Pico-View web-zine! We hope you enjoyed all of the articles this month. Here are the folks who helped piece the zine together one pixel at a time...

-Werxzy - Cover Art
-the_swest - Author
-Roybie - Author
-Sean Gransee - Intervewee
-Bikibird - Author
-alanxoc3 - Author
-Extar - Author / Game Reviewer
-Werxzy - Author
-VoidgazerBon - Author and Coordinator
-Achie - Game Reviewer, Author, and Coordinator
-NerdyTeachers - Editor, Author, and Illustrator

Thanks to all the authors, contributors, and readers for supporting our PICO-8 zine! If anyone would like to write an article, share pixel art, contact us @NerdyTeachers on twitter or on our Discord.