HIVE PICO-8 Tutorial
In the purple text box below are links to HIVE's own teaching materials. Below the lesson index you can find links to other handy PICO-8 resources (the documentation being the most important one of them). The lessons embedded on this site contain the source code and other handy notes right under them.
Following each lesson, under the sample source code, in a box like this, there is a CHALLENGE
Demonstrate that you understood the concepts and functions covered by making your own take on the covered material. Each sucessful demonstration nets you a merit badge. Collect them all! B E C O M E A C O D I N G G O D!
HIVE Programming Glossary: for quick definitions of important words and jargon. If this is your very first time dipping into coding, have this page open!
HIVE PICO-8 Cheat Sheet: download the pdf referenced in the videos all the time.
Lessons
- 2a: functions & the coordinate system
- 4a: loops & conditional statements
- 4b: interactivity
- 5a: layers to understanding programming
- 6a: map, sprites & palette swapping
- 6b: simple timers & palette cycling
- 7a: array tables, modulus & stretching sprites
- 7b: drawing scrolling sine waves with for & time
- 7c: flipbook animation with modulus & time
- 7d: building tools & objectifying dudes with tables
- 7e: adding complexity to your tools
- just a few more to come!
Other important links
- Lexaloffle - makers of PICO 8
- PICO-8 Documentation
- PICO-8 Education Edition: for Web - play with PICO-8 in your own browser, all you need is a device with a keyboard!
- PICO-8 Wikia - repository of lots of spicy undocumented behaviors and examples
- Programming in LUA - deeper dive into Lua, for serious big bois
Resources
- PICO-8 Zines - great getting started tutorials and scripts
- PICO-8 Book - more great tuts and demos
- Demo-Man Tutorials - learn about trigonometry, vectors, how to lerp, and how to calculate collisions
- Lazy Devs Academy Youtube Channel - make a roguelike or a breakout along with dude and learn about lots of things, great breakdown source for new features in PICO-8
- Easing/Animation Curves cheat sheet/library - by ValerADHD
- How does 3D projection work? (in 2 and a half minutes) - old school Doom-style “fake” 3D by ValerADHD
- Understanding Memory in PICO-8 - thorough explanation about binary, hexadecimal & manipulation of memory from Lazy Devs
- Text Styling with Control Codes - vid explanation from Lazy Devs, in-depth reference lives here.
- Tutorial on bitwise math, and its uses in PICO-8
- lucatronica - a prolific tweetcarter
- lorenschmidt - makes fun maze algorithms
- OuzzGame - explains game math concepts through animated gifs under hash tag #pixcode
Music Tutorials
Games
- #tweetcart on Twitter - a hashtag community for tweet-sized pico8 cart demos
- Itch.io - games tagged #pico8