Underwhelming game development with PICO-8 - Jonas Winje - NDC Oslo 2024

This talk was recorded at NDC Oslo in Oslo, Norway. #ndcoslo #ndcconferences #developer #softwaredeveloper Attend the next NDC conference near you: https://ndcconferences.com https://ndcoslo.com/ Subscribe to our YouTube channel and learn every day: / @NDC Follow our Social Media! https://www.facebook.com/ndcconferences https://twitter.com/NDC_Conferences https://www.instagram.com/ndc_conferences/ #gaming Enterprise Software Engineering is a blast. You're typically overwhelmed, buried under a growing mass of complexity. Also lost and probably crying. Good stuff. Sometimes you wanna do something else. PICO-8 is a tiny fantasy console/devkit. It comes with a set of restrictions that work as stylistic constraints and also make things pretty approachable: With 8x8 pixel sprites and only 16 colours to choose from, it's pretty possible for incompetent artists to draw stuff without making a complete mess of things. Also 128x128 screen resolution, this many sprites and that many sound effects. You write Lua code, but not too much of it. You really don't get to make something that's large enough to crush your spirit. As a devkit,/IDE it includes all the tools you need to make a game and it is effortless to jump between writing some code, drawing some pixels, and playing your game. So I dunno, let's draw a cat and make it jump around. Development can be pleasant instead of sad.