A curated list of PICO-8 resources, tutorials, tools and more. Inspired by the awesome list thing. You might also like awesome-lua and awesome-love2d.
PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs. When you turn it on, the machine greets you with a shell for typing in a subset of Lua commands and provides simple built-in tools for creating your own cartridges.
- Community
- Demoscene
- Resources
- Tutorials
- Tools
- Text Editors Language Support
- Hacks
- Articles & Posts
- Podcasts
- Talks
- Clones
- Contributing
- License
- Lexaloffle
- Subreddit
- #pico8 on Twitter
- #pico8 on Freenode
- Pico-8 Console News
- Pico-8 Wiki
- Slack Team - PICO-8 Slack chat.
- Discord Server - PICO-8 Discord chat.
- Pico-8 demos on Demozoo
- Pico-8 demos on Pouet
- Article with demoscene effects code
- Pico-8 demos on Youtube
- Official Manual - Placeholder dump of pico-8.txt! (Proper manual coming soon).
- Cheat Sheet - by Neko250. Based on the official manual, with edits where found appropriate.
- PicoZine #1, #2, #3 and #4 - PICO-8 Zine is a 48-page fanzine made by and for PICO-8 users.
- Going from Lua 5.2 to PICO-8's Lua - This document is here to help folks with a proficiency in Lua understand the limitations and discrepencies between Lua and PICO-8's Lua.
- Cheat Sheet (printable) - A reduced cheat sheet in a printable format. German and Englisch version available.
- Cheat Sheet (wallpaper) - An enhancement of the printable cheat sheet for use as a desktop wallpaper.
- Music Tracker Tutorial Series - Making audio with PICO-8.
- Tron Lightcycle game from scratch - A quick introduction to PICO-8 writing a game from scratch.
- A PICO-8 Spaceshooter in 16 GIFs - Screencaptures of writing a Spaceshooter game step by step.
- Token optimization - tips&tricks for saving tokens.
- Tweetjam, BBS thread - cards which code fits in a tweet (really useful to learn some fun techniques).
- Sample code on the BBS - the search is not 100% accurate, but some of those cards features some nice tricks you can re-use in your future code.
- Newgrounds Medals Tutorial - a little tutorial to add Newgrounds Medals to PICO-8 games.
- Binary save system - Custom game save system that supports various data types
- Sprite Editor - External sprite editor compatible with Pico-8 and PicoLove.
- pico2png - Spritesheet extraction written in perl.
- Spritesheets and tools for the PICO-8 Palette - Compilation of works assest and tools using the PICO-8 palette.
- Pico8Utils - Compilation of lua scripts based on the unix philosophy for working with .p8 files.
- picotool - Tools and Python libraries for manipulating Pico-8 game files.
- p8dl - Carts Downloader - Python - Downloads cartridges into the correct folder (looks at your config.txt).
- Pico-8 Carts Downloader - Bash - Downloads cartridge from the BBS (single cart, whole index or dump your favourited entries) & rename them according to their metadata.
- p8 responsive webplayer transform - Python script that makes your HTML export page responsive.
- Color Palette - Hex and RGB colors codes for web.
- PICO-8 font - by RhythmLynx.
- pico-test - PICO-8 testing framework.
- Lib-Pico8 - A Pico-8 library of useful common functions.
- pico8-missing-builtins - Provides Lua built-in functions to pico8.
- P8Coder - A programming tool that replaces the lua code in pico-8 cartridges (p8) with the code you write in P8Coder.
- Pico-Kit - An opinionated collection of Pico-8 helpers that make it easier to get going. Adds OOP, better debugging, and physics.
- picoDeploy - Deploy Pico-8 carts as standalone applications on desktop (Electron) and mobile (Ionic).
- pico8Grunt - A build system for pico8 games, using gruntjs.
- PICO-EC - A tiny scene-entity-component library created for the PICO-8 fantasty console.
- PICO-Tween - A small library of tweening/easing functions for use in the PICO-8 fantasy console, inspired by Robert Penner's easing functions.
- p8 - A dependency manager and build tool. Lets you share code/sprites,
require()dependencies, and auto-reload carts on save. Works with any external code editor and supports MoonScript. - MIDI to PICO-8 - A tool to convert MIDI files to PICO-8 music.
- midi2pico - A MIDI to PICO-8 converter.
- Custom template - A simple and clean template, that fixes issues with fullscreen, mouse and just looks nice.
- Fillp Tool - A simple helper tool for generating fillp patterns.
- Visual Studio Code: vscode-pico8
- Atom: language-pico8
- Sublime: Sublime PICO-8 - PICO-8 plugin for the Sublime Text editor (color scheme, font, build system, code completion, snippets...).
- Vim: vim-pico8-syntax
You might be interested to install pico-8 programming fonts they support the pico-8 custom characters as well as various fonts (bitmap and regular anti-aliased fonts). Check the BBS thread here.
How to install the font(s):
- Linux: copy the files on ~/.fonts and
sudo fc-cache -f -v - Windows: copy the files on c:/windows/fonts/
- Mouse - How to retrieve mouse coordinates (with demo).
- p8keyboard.js - Javascript "keyboard adapter" for the Pico-8. Send ASCII characters to a Pico-8 program running in a browser.
- SFX Modifications - Four effects that can only be applied by modifying memory (with demo).
- Tracker State/Audio Memory Locations - How to access and modify audio data as it is playing.
- GameShell - A modular handheld game console that allows you to play & modify retro games and DIY new devices. Check the GameShell Docs for how to run PICO-8 on the GameShell.
- Indie Retro News - A great introduction to PICO-8 by @ABrugsch.
- Clear Code - 3 part series on how to write better pico-8 code.
- pico chat - A bite-sized podcast about Pico-8 and other tiny games.
- Sharing the love - Making games with PICO-8. linux conf au 2017 - Hobart, Australia
- TIC-80 by Nesbox - Tiny Computer, available on HTML 5, Windows, Linux 32/64bit, Android & MacOSX
- PicoLove - Pico-8 Reimplementation in LÖVE.
- LIKO-12 - An open source fantasy computer made using LÖVE with 96kb RAM.
- PX8 - Open Source Fantasy Console (128x128 pixels) in Rust (with Python/LUA code support).
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To the extent possible under law, Felipe Bueno has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.
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