The PICO-8 fantasy console
PICO-8 is a fantasy console (a limited development environment for building retro games) that contains a text editor, music composition tracker, and graphical sprite editor. Game logic is programmed in a modified version of the Lua programming language. It’s credited with starting the trend towards building games with limitations, and features the following limits:
- Only 32 hard-coded colors can be used.
- The Lua program has a limit on size and number of tokens.
- Songs are limited to 4 voices playing at once and about a hundred tracks.
- Graphical sprites must fit in limited memory.
Despite that, there are thousands of impressive PICO-8 games that contain 3D graphics, pleasant sound tracks, and compelling gameplay.
There are a lot of tutorials for the PICO-8: