After a serious accident, I was in hospital for several months. Rather than waste my time watching TV shows all day, I thought it would be a good opportunity to take a look at Pico8 and learn from the ground up how to make oldschool games on this platform.
My first exercise on Pico8 was to create a “coach-o-matic” so that I wouldn’t have to count seconds and series during my rehabilitation exercises ^^ This allowed me to take my first steps in discovering Lua, thanks to the invaluable tutorials by Aurélien from GameDevAlliance (in French) and then especially Kristian from LazyDevs.
Obviously, one of the first cases of learning how to make a game is the space shooter… It’s not that I’m a big fan of the genre, but I must admit that I really wanted to try to make a differential starfield (the starry background) as pretty as possible (given the limitations of the console).
So I started with that… then one thing led to another and I learned a lot, with each micro-function being a little challenge and a learning experience!
This hobby certainly helped make my hospital stay less painful as it was great fun to gradually learn pico8 and regain my bipedal status at the same time !
