Satelite Catcher

How I programmed the small Game Satelite Catcher within 8h.

The idea

Browsing to the latest tweets on twitter I came in contact with a nice little Pico8 challenge. As you might know, tweets have a limite of 280 Characters. So some cracy guys actually are able to programm games within this limit...


Long story short there was one in particular where you fly across the screen selecting coins. Sounds familiar? I played the game for maybe 30s. Than I quickly started thinking of how to make this more fun. The answer was "explosions" and well you know the rest :D.

The engine

I could have programmed this game in Unity no issue, but I wanted just a hacky small little retro game with not to many features. So Unity might have been an overkill. And as the original game, I based the idea on was actually made in Pico8, well the decision was actually already made :P.

A word about Pico8

The Lua Engine Pico 8 is now arround for some years. Its target are mainly developers which have a strong emotional band with old retro consoles from back in the 90's. So long before my time :D.
But there is also a second target group. People who like to enjoy game dev.
For the second group Pico8 becomes so appeling because it is quick and easy to work with. And that is for one reason: LIMITTATIONS which forces you to focus on the really important stuff and not to get lost in super fancy graphics, the best soundtracks and using all the fancy shmancy super giga usfull features which an engine as for example Unity trows at you ;-).

Limitations make you fast

So Pico 8 has an intergrated Pixelart editor, and there is a way to import graphics from somewhere else but I higly recommend sticking with the intgrated one, it is lots of fun, at least for me. Oh have I mentioned sprites can only be 8x8 pixels and only have 1-16 colors (technically 32 but there is some worl needed to get the extra 16 colors)

Wanna make some music? Pico8 has you covered with its 8bit music editor (you can even export the created sound effects and musics as wavs ;-) for other engines / projects)

Have I already mentioned code limits yet? You can only use a finit count of tokens (a virtual currency used to count the bytes / chars your code needs as it gets compiled from lua). As a comparison my little game already used 1/4 of the maximum available tokens o.O.
The whole programm code of Satelite-Catcher

In short: to developpe a Pico8 game you have to cut many corners and simplify your project until it fits the limitations. This leads to very minimalistic and really doable projects which you are actually able to finish in really short time frames!

Conclusion

Make simpler projects, make more projects, use limitations. And if you are like me and like the look of Retro games, give Pico8 a shot :D.