PICO-8

PICO-8 logo

PICO-8 is a fantasy console created by Lexaloffle Games. The first to describe itself as a "fantasy console", PICO-8's success led to many other fantasy consoles being created in the years since. The harsh limitations of PICO-8 were specifically chosen, according to its website, to be "fun to work with, [...] encourage small but expressive designs, and to give cartridges made with PICO-8 their own particular look and feel."

Capabilities

PICO-8 games are limited to a 128-by-128 pixel display with 16 colors available to be used out of a total of 32. In addition, games can take advantage of a 4-channel synth for music and sound effects, a 128x32 map with built-in functions for drawing and manipulation, and 256 8x8 sprites.

Programming

PICO-8 games are programmed in a special flavor of the Lua programming language. It does not include the Lua standard libraries, but it does provide functions that serve similar purposes.

PICO-8 programs are limited to 8192 "tokens". Tokens are:

• Literal values, such as nil, booleans, strings, or numbers
• Variables
• Operators
• Opening brackets (closing brackets are not counted as tokens)
• Keywords except local and end

In addition, programs cannot be larger than 64 KB, and must compress to 15 KB or smaller.

Publishing

PICO-8 games can be published on the Lexaloffle BBS, which can be accessed within PICO-8 using the "SPLORE" cart explorer. Additionally, PICO-8 games can be exported to HTML or to binaries for Windows, Mac, and Linux.