Pico 8 is a software-based gaming console for making, sharing, and playing small games with

a retro aesthetic.

It emulates the look and feel of 8-bit consoles, providing limited color palettes, screen

resolutions, and memory constraints.

The Pico 8 dev environment uses Lua and is focused on being accessible to developers while

offering depth for complex projects.

Johan Pites is a games industry veteran and developer extraordinaire, having created dozens

of games across many platforms.

He's an expert in Pico 8 development and joins the podcast to talk about creating games for

the console.

Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got a start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Gary's Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.

Welcome to the show, Johan. How you doing?

Thanks, Joe. I'm really good. So happy to be here.

I've followed your work for a long time as a big Pico8 fan, and as we'll cover, you are one of the more prolific PICO8 devs. I think I counted yesterday, and I think it was seven or eight of the 30 PICO8 games on Steam are yours. So I'm very excited to have you on the show. But before we start talking about PCO-8 and PCO-8 development, I wanted to, one thing I didn't know is what was your journey into game development and how did you come to become like a PICO 8 depth in particular? Well, I think that's two very different things. I started out with board games when I was a kid, a huge fan of everything that had dice in it, basically.

Then one summer, I guess I was 10 or something, a friend of mine had a Commodore 128 at home, and we shut off all the light, close the windows, close the doors, and we spent an entire

summer just learning everything about it, how it worked. And I guess we weren't too good at it.

He had a cousin who knew way more than we did, but definitely my first intro into computers.

And from then, I just realized all the things that I wanted to do with board games, I could now

do, or I couldn't do it, but I could at least attempt to do it inside a computer instead. And basically, I've been stuck since. So that was, I don't know, 35 years ago or something. So it's been a while. That's awesome. But I think what I actually liked with PICO8 was that it harkens back to that day, right? You just launch it. There's a prompt, you can just start typing.

Everything is testable from the get-go. You don't need any specific setups for plugins or everything. It's just there. And for me, it's also similar. I think if I think back, I also used Amos quite a lot, which was a game programming package for the Amiga. I think it was for the ST as well, maybe. Also, this integrated

package where you could just do everything without touching anything else. I think Flash was really

close to that as well with ActionScript. And I think all those environments are things I really, really,

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