Jumping Into Pico 8 Multiplayer!

While Godot is our favorite general-purpose game engine, earlier this year we played around with making a Playdate game, and learned some Lua in the process - with the ice having been broken w.r.t. Lua and smaller game engines, I was excited to try making a game for a platform that has long interested me - Pico 8! On itch io, I assume Pico 8 needs no introduction, but I'll mention that what drew me to it was its design philosophy - with built-in code, sprite, map, sound, and music editors, everything is laid out with clear thoughts and strong intentions. It also runs natively on Raspberry Pi, making it an easy addition to our traveling CRT array of games!

So what did we build with Pico 8? Pico Swords! A re-telling of the Two Swords game released earlier for Playdate, this one feels much more conventional, but with on-point pixel work, a classic catchy background tune, satisfying sound effects, and an addictive game loop, this was the perfect tight little package to get us started with Pico 8.

What's next? Well, I've already started building out an expanded version of Pico Swords with randomly generated, scrollable dungeons, and seamless 1-4 player jump-in/jump-out gameplay, essentially a multiplayer version of Explorey Dungeon, this could become a nice Gauntlet-clone or something. We even have a super cool method for viewing a minimap, ala Diablo, complete with faux-transparency!

We look forward to working more in Pico 8, Playdate, and Godot! And who knows, maybe more in the future :)