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.

Create a space shooter prototype by drawing ship and enemy sprites in the sprite and map editors, position the ship with x and y coordinates, and move it with arrows.

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.

Organize a retro game project by modularizing code into tabs and functions for init, update, and draw of player, enemies, and bullets, then review for readability.

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.

Create a score variable initialized to zero and print it in the upper left corner. Increase the score by 1000 when an enemy is shot.

Enhance the retro game visuals by adding dual bullets from the ship, banking sprite animations, and a looping fire animation driven by a frame table and timer.

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.

Trigger explosions when enemies die by initializing, updating, and drawing explosion particles that use enemy coordinates, render color-changing particles with random directions and shrinking sizes.

Add immersive audio to your retro game by creating shoot and explosion sounds in the sound editor, assigning them as SFX zero and SFX one, and triggering them in code.

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.