PICO-8: The Fantasy Console for People Who Actually Want to Finish a Game

A developer’s logbook on the tiny tool that brings game dev back to its essence.

PICO-8’s Homepage — source: author

This article was originaly published in French on my website: NX Academy. Since I wrote only in French on NX, I decided to publish an English version here on Medium.

A few weeks ago, I took part in my very first game jam on itch.io. I won’t dwell on it here: I’ll come back to it in another article. But in short: I loved it, and I learned a huge amount in very little time.

I built my game with MonoGame. It’s a pretty cool C# framework. It lets you do a lot, but it’s a big tool. To ship the game, I quickly found myself juggling several other programs on the side: Aseprite for the sprites and spritesheets, and Sonic Pi for the music. It wasn’t insurmountable but, honestly, that was a lot of pieces to assemble before even writing the first line of gameplay.

It was while trying to lighten all of that, after the jam, that I stumbled onto PICO-8. And there, it just clicked. Within minutes, I understood the tool’s potential: everything is in one place. You code, you draw, you compose, you play. All without leaving the program.

A heads-up: this article isn’t a tutorial or a technical reference. For now, it’s more of a “logbook”, or, in other words, the field notes of a developer discovering PICO-8 and wanting to share why he finds the tool so clever. If you’re curious about game dev, a beginner, or simply someone who’d love to finally finish a game, you should find something for you here.

PICO-8’s running on my web brower — source: author

What is PICO-8?

PICO-8 is what’s called a fantasy console. Basically, it’s a game console that never existed. Nobody ever manufactured the machine. Its creator simply invented its specs, like a tiny screen, a handful of colors, a minuscule amount of memory, with the idea of recreating the spirit of old consoles. The “retro” feel of the console isn’t an accident tied to age. It’s a genuine design choice, embraced from start to finish.

When you launch PICO-8, you land in a small environment where everything is gathered together. You can run games, code your own, draw your sprites, build your maps and compose your music. You can do all of that in one place, without installing a single extra tool. PICO-8 bakes the code, music, sound, sprite and map editors directly into the console. It’s a bit like an IDE for video games: a single environment that centralizes everything.

To use it, I bought the paid version from the official site. It’s software that runs on your computer (Windows, Mac or Linux) for around $15. If you just want to try the tool before pulling out your credit card, know that there’s also a free education edition: a stripped-down version of PICO-8 officially made by Lexaloffle, playable straight in the browser. For my part, I didn’t test it; I went all in right away.

On the code side, you program your games in Lua. I find this language very readable. To give you a reference point, in spirit it reminded me a little of Ruby. Nothing intimidating: it’s a lightweight language you pick up fast.

Doom’s running on PICO-8 — source: author

What kinds of games can you make?

Quite a lot, actually, as long as you stick to small formats. You can make platformers, puzzlers, shoot’em ups, small roguelikes or mini-RPGs. Here, the common denominator isn’t the genre, it’s the scale. PICO-8 is built for short, complete games: the kind of game you finish in one session and, above all, that you finish at all. Because the code size is deliberately limited, games stay compact: you can play them and beat them in one sitting.

This whole little world lives in an already well-stocked ecosystem. PICO-8 ships with a built-in cartridge browser to explore what others have created. On top of that, most of these games play directly in the browser. It’s hard to make sharing or discovering a game any simpler.

Personally, I mostly see PICO-8 as a fantastic prototyping tool. The idea: quickly put together a playable prototype, share it, gather feedback, and start building a community around your concept. If the potential is there, nothing stops you from later moving to a beefier toolchain (MonoGame, Aseprite and friends) to turn it into a more ambitious “commercial” version.

The perfect example here is Celeste. The original game (now called Celeste Classic) was developed in PICO-8 by Maddy Thorson and Noel Berry in just four days, as part of a game jam, back in 2016. That little prototype went on to become one of the most acclaimed indie platformers of its time: the full game shipped in January 2018, this time rebuilt in C#. One and the same idea, then — one that stands perfectly well on its own as a PICO-8 game, and that served as a springboard to a far more ambitious one. Both at once.

Why I find it interesting

PICO-8 lets me focus on the very essence of video games: game design (I’ve been reading a lot about it lately, and I’ll come back to it soon). It’s entirely possible to make a cute little game and polish your pixels. But above all, the tool pushes you to work on game feel. For example, the way a jump responds or the way movement feels crunchy and satisfying. Everything else matters less. All that’s left is the one question that really counts: is it good to play?

Being able to focus on game design is, in large part, down to the fact that everything is centralized. There’s no toolchain to set up, no back-and-forth between five programs. With PICO-8, I code, I draw, I compose, all in one place. The upshot is that I move much faster and tie myself in far fewer knots. What’s more, since you go back to the fundamentals — the game loop, sprites, collisions — without a heavy framework to tame, the feedback loop is almost instant! I tweak a line, I rerun, and I see the result within a second.

There’s also a point I find far from negligible: distribution. PICO-8 lets you export your game to HTML/JavaScript, making it playable in a browser in one click. Concretely, that means you can spread your game and get it known very quickly, without asking anyone to install anything. For a creator looking for feedback as well as a community, that’s precious.

Finally, something I care about. You can absolutely lean on AI for the code. But for the music and the sprites, you’re still largely left to get your hands dirty and make them yourself. And honestly? I think that’s great. That manual work is precisely what gives a game its personality and its character.

Constraints (and why they’re a strength)

For me, it’s constraints that give rise to the best games. That’s part of why I got into game jams. I like creating under constraint, a bit like in cooking, when you have to make do with what’s on hand rather than an infinite pantry. Having a frame is what unlocks my creativity.

And constraints are something PICO-8 has no shortage of. The screen is a small 128×128 pixel grid, the palette is fixed at 16 colors, and the code itself is limited: a cartridge (a game file) can’t exceed 8192 tokens. Basically, every word, number, parenthesis or punctuation mark counts. So you simply don’t have the room to spread yourself thin.

That’s exactly where the constraint becomes a strength. When space is tight, you stop dithering over a thousand options and you get to the essentials. It forces you back to the heart of video games, to focus on game design without letting your mind get cluttered by everything that’s superfluous. Better still: having to fit your ideas into so little space teaches you to write more efficient code and to approach every problem with creativity. The limit doesn’t curb inventiveness — it fuels it.

Let’s be honest for a second: this frame has its flip side too. PICO-8 isn’t made for sprawling games. On an ambitious project, you’ll eventually hit the token ceiling — and then you have to either optimize what’s already there or port the game to a larger platform (back to the path mentioned above). But for what PICO-8 is going for — small games with character — these limits aren’t an obstacle. They’re the playground.

A quick look at the code

Don’t panic, we’re not going to dive into a full tutorial here. I just want to show you what the skeleton of a PICO-8 game looks like, to demystify the whole thing.

It all revolves around three functions that you define, and that PICO-8 calls for you:

function _init()
  x = 0
end

function _update()
  x = x + 1
end

function _draw()
  cls()
  print("hello pico-8!", x, 60)
end

This tiny program displays the text “hello pico-8!” drifting gently to the right. And it illustrates the whole mental model:

• _init() is called once, at startup. This is where you set up the initial state. In our case, we set the variable x to 0.
• _update() is called on every frame, 30 times a second. It's the game's logical core: this is where you evolve the state. Here, we increment x, so the position advances frame after frame.
• _draw() is also called on every frame, to draw. cls() clears the screen (otherwise the text would leave a trail behind it), and print() displays our message at position x on the horizontal axis, 60 pixels from the top.

The thing to remember here is this separation: on one side what changes (_update), on the other what gets shown (_draw). You never write the game loop yourself. You fill in these three slots and the engine takes care of the timing. Once you've got that, you've got the thread of almost every PICO-8 game.

What’s next?

I’m only just getting started with PICO-8, but I already know I’ll be sticking with it for a while. The tool has something addictive about it: that feeling of being able to go from idea to playable prototype in a single evening, friction-free.

I’m about to take part in a new game jam: the Retro Recreation Jam, which kicks off in a few days. The premise: take a game from before the NES era and reimagine it your own way. I already have my idea in mind, but I’ll tell you more about it very soon.

In the meantime, if this article has made you want to try PICO-8, don’t overthink it: fire up the free version in your browser, type a couple of lines, and see where it takes you. That’s often how the best stories begin.

Resources

• The official PICO-8 site, to buy the tool and explore the console: lexaloffle.com/pico-8.
• The official manual, which covers the whole API as well as the built-in editors’ functions: the PICO-8 manual.