Make Your First Awesome Retro Video Game!

Set up Pico-8, a fantasy console, to build simple retro games with two buttons and browser-based play. Explore the educational version for an easy, web-friendly learning path.

Enter Pico 8's engine mode to write code and use the sprite and map editors, sprite sheets, retro sound, and the tracker to build art, levels, and music.

Master Pico-8 game basics by defining init, update, and draw functions, and grasp how the engine executes commands to draw sprites, art, maps, and text at 30 frames per second.

Press a button to shoot a bullet sprite upward. Check collisions by overlapping x and y to reduce enemy health to zero and draw enemies only when health > 0.

Create a bullets table and a shoot function to add bullets at the player's position, then update and draw each bullet with sprite 33, moving upward and removing off-screen bullets.

Implement collision detection between bullets and enemies. Adjust hitboxes and offsets so bullets reliably register hits, deleting enemies and bullets when health reaches zero.

Use a particle system to render stars that spawn each frame, fall down with varying speeds for parallax, and are drawn with pset while off-screen stars are removed.

Celebrate completing the course and stay inspired to keep creating games. Apply core concepts like functions, tables, math, if statements, and variables to create animations, collisions, bullets, and stars.