Awesome PICO-8

A curated list of PICO-8 resources, tutorials, tools and more. Inspired by the awesome list thing. You might also like awesome-lua and awesome-love2d.

PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs. When you turn it on, the machine greets you with a shell for typing in a subset of Lua commands and provides simple built-in tools for creating your own cartridges.

Contents

• Community
• Demoscene
• Resources
• Tutorials
• Tools
• Libraries
• Assets
• Text Editors Language Support
• Hacks
• Hardware
• Articles & Posts
• Talks
• Clones
• Contributing
• License

Community

• Lexaloffle
• Blog
• PICO-8
• Forum/BBS
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Youtube
• Subreddit
• #pico8 on Twitter
• #pico8 on Freenode
• Pico-8 Console News
• Pico-8 Wiki
• Slack Team - PICO-8 Slack chat.
• Discord Server - PICO-8 Discord chat.

DemoScene

• Pico-8 demos on Demozoo
• Pico-8 demos on Pouet
• Article with demoscene effects code
• Pico-8 demos on Youtube

Resources

• Official Manual - Placeholder dump of pico-8.txt! (Proper manual coming soon).
• PicoZine #1, #2, #3 and #4 - PICO-8 Zine is a 48-page fanzine made by and for PICO-8 users.
• Going from Lua 5.2 to PICO-8's Lua - This document is here to help folks with a proficiency in Lua understand the limitations and discrepencies between Lua and PICO-8's Lua.
• Cheat Sheet (printable) - A reduced cheat sheet in a printable format. German and English version available.
• Cheat Sheet (wallpaper) - An enhancement of the printable cheat sheet for use as a desktop wallpaper.

Tutorials

• Music Tracker Tutorial Series - Making audio with PICO-8.
• Tron Lightcycle game from scratch - A quick introduction to PICO-8 writing a game from scratch.
• A PICO-8 Spaceshooter in 16 GIFs - Screencaptures of writing a Spaceshooter game step by step.
• Token optimization - tips&tricks for saving tokens.
• Tweetjam, BBS thread - cards which code fits in a tweet (really useful to learn some fun techniques).
• Sample code on the BBS - the search is not 100% accurate, but some of those cards features some nice tricks you can re-use in your future code.
• Newgrounds Medals Tutorial - a little tutorial to add Newgrounds Medals to PICO-8 games.
• Binary save system - Custom game save system that supports various data types
• Lazy Devs Breakout - step-by-step videos for roguelikes, shmups, and more

Tools

• Sprite Editor - Keyboard only 8x8 pixel art tool.