[megalomanu]

I've developed my first video game ever in 2020 thanks to Pico-8 (and thanks to the COVID and the lockdown, too) I was impressed by how it was easy to learn. Once you understood that everything revolves around a big gameplay loop, you can really just focus on what matters (gameplay, art). I like that it encourages trade-offs and workarounds. I've never felt blocked or stuck too long.

Also, as a software engineer, I wasn't afraid of the development part of the game, but I was very skeptical of my capacities to draw characters or levels. Pico-8 helped me to achieve something without feeling ashamed. Because I knew that I was, by nature, limited in my sprites, it helped me releasing my inhibitions and drawing as if I was a 5 years-old boy proud of his drawings. Same thing for the music and sounds.

Another cool thing is that even when writing code, I didn't feel like I was doing the same thing as during the day. Just writing code, in a closed and stable environment, with a very modest API, and finally the ability to release and convert your game into a JS file in just one command is infinitely satisfying. After a day spent struggling with CloudFormation on AWS, it was a blessing!

[the_other_b]

I'm a FTE by day, hobbyist gamedev by night and some of the best advice I got when learning how to do basic pixel art was to start with a small palette and work your way up.

Working at 16x16 _only_ has greatly increased by skill since I have to be creative and work around the size limitations. Additionally, a small color palette does the same, but I'm not there yet..

[aquova]

I feel the same way about it. I was a student when I first heard about it, and I definitely feel that making my own (terrible) Pico-8 games made me a much better programmer than I would've been otherwise, and also helped me grasp concepts that I found difficult to understand from lectures. Even an artistic simpleton like myself can make an 8x8 sprite look good, and the other self-imposed limitations of the system actually do a great deal of reducing the burden of too many choices. By holding you back in certain areas, it actually makes the end goal of finishing a game easier to reach. If anyone is debating picking it up, I strongly recommend it.

Getting back to the article, I was familiar with Fred's games, and I personally think he's one of the most talented developers in the community, I'm very excited for the upcoming Poom game, which frankly is beginning to border on Dark Magic.

[ofrzeta]

> Because I knew that I was, by nature, limited in my sprites, it helped me releasing my inhibitions and drawing as if I was a 5 years-old boy proud of his drawings.

That's a great achievement. "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child." (Picasso)

[lewsid]

I had the exact same experience (even down to releasing my first game during lockdown)! The whole process of developing in Pico 8 is like digital therapy for me. It reminds me what excited me about coding all those years ago before it became a career.