Catch Pikachu!

About

I made this game a few years back using the PICO-8 engine. In PICO-8, the games and even the program's interface are limited to a 128 x 128 pixel display with only 16 colors and a 4-channel audio output.

Motivation

There were a few reasons why I decided to take on this project.

1. I wanted to experiment with game engines and learn more about game programming.
2. I was also interested in coding the physics and collision logic from scratch.
3. The PICO-8 Manual was really well-written which helped getting started.

Learnings

Key takeaways from the project included an understanding of how game engines enforce the separation of rendering logic from game play logic. I got some familiarity with the Lua programming language and its constructs (Tables were interesting). I should have spent more time setting up the characters, objects, and world building to give the game some proper substance (definitely on the next project with a proper game engine). Performing meticulous playtesting would have helped polish the game more for a more enjoyable user experience as well (again maybe for the next project).

Code

The code for this work can be found at github.com/dzarrini/pico-8.

Game