Finally made something with Pico-8
Years ago I bought a copy of Pico-8 and tinkered but never made anything with it. As someone who generally dislikes IDEs and has 20+ years of Vim muscle memory, I found it hard to actually edit code in the thing.
Another problem is Lua is great... but Lua sucks.
The former problem is actually solved by using the external editor support in Pico-8. It notices when you edit the file externally and happily loads the changes before running. Plus I found a nifty Vim plugin which makes editing the .p8 files quite managable.
The latter problem can be kind of avoided by using a language which compiles to Lua, though I didn't try that for this game. I just found myself frustrated semi-frequently with 1-based indexing and the lack of types and pushed through. The convenience of the rest of what Pico-8 provides, from the simple sprite editor to the music player, makes up for it.
The game I made is called 'Linkage' and I've published it on itch.io here. It a simple puzzle game where you rotate cells to link together a graph. I find it kinda meditative.
It's also a game I've half-arsed a couple of times before, once for the GBA and other for the 3DS. Any time in the past when I've decided I want to make a game I think sure, I'll start small with this Linkage puzzle and see what it's like. And each time I decide bah, game dev is not really what I want to spend time on. It's hard--arguably one of the hardest things to do on a computer--but not hard in the super fun fulfilling way. Kinda more in the 'whew, I'm glad that's over' way.
Using a fantasy console though was enjoyable, especially while I was away camping, and absolutely takes me back to my teens when I was trying to teach myself BASIC to make games on an IBM PCjx. The Pico-8 is pretty much emulating what we had back then. Sixteen colors, 320x200 graphics, three beeper channels for sound and a language with bugger all structure, let alone types or an IDE.
Anyway, that's done, now back to fixing my plots.