PICO-8 _UPDATE() ZINE

In it he explains what PICO-8 is to newcomers, and also talks about his creative process during the design of the fantasy console among many other insightful topics.

He’s using Raspberry Pi’s with Kano OS installed (from Kano PCs). The monitor is a 10.1″ LCD screen with the RPi attached on the back.

The setup looks smart and cool, specially for kids learning the ropes!

Jakub Wasilewski (AKA krajzeg) developed an engine of sorts for the lighting effects in the game, that was documented in real time in social media, as progress was made. It was very insightful to watch at the time.

Since the developer put the game in a pay-what-you-want model through itch.io, we will not embed it here, but let you choose to name your price if you want to play it and support him. Note that the full download has additional goodies like a map, journal, etc.

If the incredible lighting effects weren’t enough, the handling of the pico-8 palette will convince you this is on another level. But it’s not all looks: The game has some very interesting puzzles, and a save game feature reminiscent of older console game methods.

For all of this, Dank Tomb gained a spot in the PICO-8 Hall of Fame. Be sure to check out the rest of Jakub’s carts and games, for there is something to learn and admire in them as well!

If you are interested in the history of this game’s evolution, it is all well documented in krajzeg’s twitter timeline, starting in Jan 2017.

Jakub also wrote a very insightful article over at hackernoon.com split into 4 parts, about the realtime lighting effects and other game design considerations for Dank Tomb, which we cannot recommend enough.

It’s a very neat trick of using many colors to emulate the mixture in luminance of the primary RGB values.

And it also has one of the most catchy chiptunes ever made on PICO-8. What’s not to love?

As with many other consoles meant for hackers and tinkerers, the Gameshell has its pros and cons.

Krystian Majewski from the Lazy Devs Academy already did a very thorough review of the Gameshell specifically for PICO-8 usage, so you better watch that video:

You should judge for yourself if the console suits your needs and if it is a good candidate for THE BEST PICO-8 HANDHELD. 

In our opinion, the cons outweigh the pros: It’s very expensive, and the lack of a keyboard (in contrast to the PocketCHIP) means you can only use it to play games in portable mode... And that’s a deal-breaker for us. But if you are looking for a handheld to only play your PICO-8 games while developing in another platform, then the control scheme is ideal.

Also, if you are an emulation or retro-gamer fan, the Gameshell seems to be much more capable than the aforementioned CHIP.

Essentials: RESUME

This might be very basic knowledge, but it surprised me when I found out: If you press Escape after running your game with RUN, you are thrown back to the command line; If you use the command RESUME, the game will continue running where it left off, as if it was just paused (well, kind of- it calls a new frame in the _UPDATE() game loop).

You can run code in the prompt as usual, but here is the tip: you can use the variables with the values as they were left by the game state when it was interrupted. This means you can PRINT their values or modify them and resume to test without editing the actual code. You can change values to quickly test things without having to run the game from the beginning up to that point. Neat!

Old School: PRINT() everywhere

An old time classic, fill the code with PRINT statements to see if that part is reached in runtime, or to see the value of a variable as it changes in realtime.

A good way to do this in a game loop is to save the variables you want to debug in another variable in your _UPDATE() loop, and print them in your _DRAW() loop.

You can even get fancy and save them in a table, to then print them in multiple lines, having a sort of debug watcher on a corner of your screen.

Community made tools

There are different solutions made by members of the pico-8 community that range from simple to complex. This is a list of PNG carts and their respective links to their BBS threads (remember that you can download these images as .p8.png files and load them in your pico-8 machine!)

Let’s have a look:

VDMP: var_dump to “pretty print” a table. bbs thread

Die n’ Dump: stop execution and “pretty print” a variable. bbs thread

Variable Inspector: Adds a popup to your game that lets you traverse complex tables like an unfoldable tree. Amazing! bbs thread

Debugging Tools: feature-rich debugging hud. bbs thread

Super Debug Menu: Press the tilde key during runtime to show an overlay with lots of debugging and performance info. Superb! bbs thread

...And that is all for this part of Debugging Tips. I will be surely trying out all of these snippets and tools and pick a favorite!

It is also one of the most modded and remixed games in the pico-8 community.

The creators Matt Thorson and Noel Berry went on to make an extended standalone version of the game with enhanced graphics by Brazilian studio MiniBoss.

No doubt a great success story, Celeste has a well deserved place in the PICO-8 Hall of Fame.

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