I got SO frustrated at one point at #amaze2024. There was a great panel about how we don't have control over the engines and tools we use. About how small, open source engines are the way to do that.
They lamented the closure of walled gardens like Flash (I fear for Dreams in a hopefully far future), and how much culture is lost to the whims of the market.
They mentioned the contradiction of user vs corporate interests. They mentioned open source as an example to follow.
I mentioned Pico-8 as an example. I LOVE the thing. And yet, isn't it susceptible to oblivion, being proprietary? Isn't it another walled garden that one day will close?
I guess those games published as HTML or binary will still be playable but how about the ones playable only through splore?
As long as we keep making games in proprietary walled gardens, those games, those engines, won't belong to us and could (and will) disappear.
@kednar I'm not too worried about #pico8 in this respect. For one, its capabilities are so well-documented by now that people have been making compatible binary implementations for a while. The .p8 format is also very well understood and documented. If it suddenly went away, I'd count the weeks (if not days) before someone had an open source feature-compatible implementation up and running for people to use. I also suspect zep might open the code at some point far, far down the road. Maybe.
I've been taking @pikuma's incredible 3D graphics programming from scratch course. I reached the part where we've made a basic spinning cube and I wanted to try implementing it in #pico8
Had a blast putting together this entry for my first #TweetTweetJam ! Turns out rhythm games without sound are pretty tough, but some sacrifices have to be made when there's only 500 characters to work with...
If you’ve been on the fence, there’s still time to join! Make a tiny game in 500 characters of code! We’re up to 48 participants and 44 entries so far! Think we can hit 50?
An art game funding initiative gives out tiny grants for tiny games. They accept #Pico8. The grants are 1500 EUR per game. The deadline for applications is May 23rd. If you are accepted you need to submit the actual game by Aug 22nd. https://goldextra.com/en/briefs-2024-death-call-open-now
Here's my entry: Make Ten! I'm so happy with how this turned out -- it's a little math-based highscore-chasing game, simple rules with a lot of depth. the 500-character source code is the next post in this thread
Took things down from 1500 chars to 637, but things are looking pretty dire at this point! Not sure how I can take this down any further, will have to try again tomorrow!
Reach the token limit
"Maybe I can store my tables as strings and deserialize them at runtime ?" Reach the character limit
"Maybe I can encode my tables as binary data and store them in the map ?"
Wasn't sure I would have time for #Tweettweetjam but here I am, 455 characters in.
I was over budget with monster map collisions (probably wouldn't be now!), so the "solution" was "what if the monsters are eating the level?" Still need to add win/lose conditions.