Any opinions of Pico-8?

I’ve owned Codea for about 3 years now. From time to time I play around with it but it hasn’t ever really sunk in. I have no background in programing but I have come basic experience scripting in DOS. Would Pico-8 be more approachable then Codea? I know they’re both based on Lua so I would imagine the knowledge gained in one would be transferable to the other.

PICO-8 is in the latest Humble Developers Bundle so I bought it.

Hadn’t heard of Pico8 before, but it looks like an interesting idea, having a self-contained retro platform and IDE for that platform.

Lots of PC/Mac/Linux -based game engines use Lua, e.g. Defold, Corona, but the SDK is often very different, so you can’t easily port projects between them.

Codea is pretty unique in getting you to implement your own draw loop, and also of course in being iPad -based (though there are other iPad coding environments for other languages e.g. Continuous for C# F#, Pythonista, Swift Playgrounds etc).

It depends, what platform do you want to code on, and what platform (if any) do you want to release on?

I have no idea about the relative approachability. It looks like it comes with asset creating tools for music, sprites etc, so if you think you’re more of a designer than a coder, that might help.

Thanks for your comment. I’m just trying to get my feet wet with something that will stick. I’ll been flirting with game development since purchasing Turtle for my Atari 800.

If you want to do game development, then I suggest you put more effort into learning Codea. It’s actually easy to use and allows you to do everything you need for a lot of games. See the very first discussion that lists games made with Codea.

I had a quick play with Pico-8. I think it’s an interesting idea, and some of the games other users have created are incredible, but for me anyway, it takes the retro 8-bit aesthetic too far. I don’t mind pixel-art in the games themselves, but I don’t want to look at pixelart text in the code editor! It reminds me a little of the iPad app LowRes Coder, which also has a slightly lowfi editor. Codea is still I think the friendliest and most approachable coding environment I’ve used. But still has lots of power if you want to explore shaders etc.