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by vunderba 849 days ago
Nice work, gives me very Micro Machines vibes for the NES. The only thing I don't like about PICO-8 is that its completely closed source. An open source alternative that seems very promising is Pyxel. It has similar retro / pixel art limitations, a built-in sprite editor, music tracker, etc.

https://github.com/kitao/pyxel
2 comments
jamesgeck0 849 days ago
IIRC, the browser builds of Pyxel games end up pulling down 30mb+ of Python libraries, which seems a bit overkill for little pixel games.

TIC-80 is probably the closest open source thing to PICO-8. The browser builds ran 10% slower than the desktop app last I tried. It doesn't have a "CPU budget," so it's possible to write inefficient code that works fine on powerful machines but not slower ones.

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vunderba 848 days ago
So I just ran a test deploy of a Pyxel little animated star field:

https://gondolaprime.pw/games/starfield/index.html

Developer console shows approx ~7MB transferred. Still more than I would have expected for literally just a small looping animation but a bit better than 30MB at least.

Maybe there's been some progress on this front.

Thanks for the TIC-80 recommendation - I really like that it supports multiple langs (Lua, JS, Python, etc) - that's some great flexibility.

EDIT: It looks like TIC-80 games pull a tic80.wasm file which is approximately ~6MB in size. I'd say Pyxel and TIC-80 are roughly comparable at least with respect to bundle size.

https://tic80.com/js/1.1.2837/tic80.wasm

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filleduchaos 848 days ago
> Developer console shows approx ~7MB transferred

Bytes transferred over the wire don't equal actual file size (due to gzipping, etc). Your page actually weighs 21MB.

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vunderba 848 days ago
Yes, I'm well aware of that - but your average viewer isn't going to notice expanded resources, however they ARE going to notice things like time-to-first-byte and network transfer.

EDIT: Just to be clear since I can't edit the older comment - instead of bundle size it would have been better to say that the "network transfer size" is roughly comparable.

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WithinReason 848 days ago
There is also Nico, written in Nim therefore can be compiled for the Web or as a native binary: https://github.com/ftsf/nico
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