Let's Make Breakout in PICO-8 | An in-depth 48 hour long screencast teaching old school game programming
PICO-8 and its free clone TIC-80 are super interesting pieces of software if you're interested in learning game programming at all. They are fantasy game consoles with included code, sprite, sound and music editors to simulate programming for an old school 8 bit video game console, which is a really nice and easy way to get started with game programming.
A guy by the name of Krystian Majewski has created a YouTube channel called Lazy Devs Academy where he teaches in a giant 48 hour long series of 75 videos how to write the classic game Breakout with PICO-8. No prior programming experience needed.
It might seem a bit long, but at episode 8 you've already seen how to write a pong game and at episode 11, the basic breakout game works. The rest of the episodes are adding features like sound, music, powerups, effects like screen shaking and brick explosions by using particle emitters, so adding a lot of polish to the game to turn it into something people would have actually bought in stores at full price in the early days of video gaming.
So you'll learn the programming of a real game here from start to finish and learn absolutely everything about PICO-8 in the process. PICO-8 uses Lua as the programming language which is very easy to learn, if you know any other programming language picking up Lua shouldn't take you more than an evening. But it's also easy to get into for people completely new to programming.
PICO-8 costs $14.99, but there is a clone called TIC-80 which is free and open source. It looks exactly the same but has added features, it lets you for example use not only Lua but also JavaScript for programming. While PICO-8 portrays itself as a fantasy console, TIC-80 has a bit less strict restrictions so it aims to be a fantasy old school computer, something a bit more powerful than an old console.
I've written about both PICO-8 and TIC-80 if you want to know more, the article includes many screenshots of the development environment and lots of animated GIFs of games made with the tool.
You can play the game created in the screencast directly in your browser or go to YouTube to watch the screencast.
PICO-8 is so cool, I've seen so many awesome things made for it
Yeah the virtual limitations really bring out the creativity in people. TIC-80 has a bit less stricter limitations, so you see a lot more 3D games there, but people even managed to do basic 3D with PICO-8 :)
And it's just so easy to get started, especially with the screencast since it's aimed at complete beginners who never programmed before. You don't need a text editor, or a graphics tool, it all comes out of the box with both PICO-8 and TIC-80.
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