Popular games built on game engine PICO-8
A hardcore platform game for the PICO-8 fantasy console.
A short, Sokoban-style puzzle game with many doors, but only one key.
For my very final prompt, I wanted to leave the students with one lasting idea: that I make games for enjoyment and want to do it as much as I can, even when I’m limited to a day or two’s work and 8192 Pico8 tokens. I hope that came across in this little game.
Driftmania is an arcade time trial racing game. Your goal is to get the fastest possible time on each of the 15 challenging tracks
Portal Golf is a physics puzzle game with portals. Place portals around the level in order to get the ball to collect every gold bar. You have no control over the movement of the ball and can only place portals before you start the run. Try to use as few portals as possible to earn medals, or just fill the whole level with portals and have fun!
Dodge bullets and fight off the militarized police force defending a corporate toxic sludge pipeline.
In this 2D platformer with golf controls, you must aim, charge, then launch yourself around a dangerous abandoned power plant in order to save the worms!
A little puzzle game with a little puzzle twist.
Explore planets, collect alien eggs, survive.
A Pico-8 platformer about hiking around a mountain, made in three days for Celeste's third anniversary.
A demake of Terraria, in PICO-8!
Experience a nostalgic throwback with this Pico-8 demake of the classic iOS game Birds and Saws. Dive into the retro charm and challenge yourself as you guide a bird, skillfully avoiding menacing circular saws to rack up high scores.
Picross game with 12 easy (10x10) puzzles and 15 normal (15x15) puzzles.
"From Rust To Ash" is roguelike auto battler where your items are your build. Fight, Loot, Scavenge. Arrange your items to benefit from each other, store items in your backpack for future synergies, scrap what you don't need to increase your health. Do all that you need to survive the encounters before you.
This is a mouse controlled real-time inventory management game, think of it as Attache Case from Resident Evil but things are happening at the same time as you're trying organize it. It is a demake of the original game by Alex Sian aka Shoutscion.
In 2021, the last time I taught the class, I didn’t want to hide the homework in the games. Instead I used the games as ways of presenting ideas. I made several, but I like this one, a reinterpretation of the fortune-telling minigame from Ultima IV.
Mess with the Flock, you get the Glock. An Owl-some Roguelike Twin-Stick Shooter.
Solve puzzles in dimly lit corridors and uncover the story of an ancient king gone mad.
Porklike is a classic, turn-based Roguelike with minimalist lo-fi aesthetic. Enter the tower of Wurstlord. Can you make it to the top and steal his legendary Kielbasa? 9 floors of dangerous traps and enemies await you. Only if you move carefully and master your character's abilities will you become the champion of Porklike.
Jump and fight your way up through this vertical platformer through various short levels, and challenge yourself to keep up the combo's.
When you shoot rock, gem fall out. Get gem. More gem got without shoot = more combo point. Get 10000 point to become master of shoot rock. This was an entry for PICO-1K Jam 2022. The whole game fits in exactly 1024 bytes of compressed PICO-8 code.
This is 2018’s assignment, a diabolical puzzle. You’re a monk who has forgotten where his cell is in the monastery, and who must walk the labyrinth in order to remember it. If you can find his room, you’ll find out what the assignment prompt is. I was a bit worried the students would be unable to find the prompt hidden in this one, but about half of them got there eventually. (The rest were expelled from the university.) 2018’s class was 100% Pico-8 so it seemed appropriate that the prompt game should be in Pico-8 too. Pico-8 is so great for prototyping — as a case in point, it builds to a single JS and HTML file which loads quite happily in the browser from a local file, so you don’t get annoying permissions or crossdomain problems.
Yep, just a normal day. Nothing weird is going to happen at all.
A casual game where it's time to tidy up the solar system. Shove planets into each other to make bigger planets. No stress, take your time. Play strategically to trigger insane combos. Earn missiles to get out of tricky situations. A totally accurate simulation of celestial bodies.