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Add to SafariWhen comparing PICO-8 vs TIC-80, the Slant community recommends PICO-8 for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D Lua game engines?” PICO-8 is ranked 4th while TIC-80 is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose PICO-8 is:
Because it's an all in one product, you don't have to worry about things like how to load sprites.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Takes away the pain of having to wire things together
Because it's an all in one product, you don't have to worry about things like how to load sprites.
Pro Very simple programing language
It's lua with a few modifications.
Pro Encourages building simple games
As a beginner it's all to tempting to try to make the games you like to play, like Zelda or Call of Duty when we should probably be making pong.
Pro Restrictions of tokens count "forces" to write code effectively
When you reach 8192 tokens, you're screwed. However, this limit can teach you to take a look at entire code and think how you could optimize it.
Pro Possible writing code in external editor
Since launch of 0.1.12c version of software, you can now write and include external script using the same directive just like in C / C++.
Pro Perhaps one of the easiest sound editors around
Pro Share the game in a .png file with other Pico-8 users
Pro You can read the code of any game you play
Pro Lots of examples
Almost every game made for the Pico-8 is open source (if you can download the .png, you can see the source).
Also there's the fancy Pico-8 "fanzine" that has lots of code examples as well as other great tutorials in a beautiful physical or PDF form.
Pro Easy to get things going very quickly
Pro All tools in one place
The app contains tools for coding, sprite editing, map editing, sfx and music editing.
Pro Free
Free version already includes most features but a paid version is available.
Pro Retro-styled and restricted environment
Pixelated Software with a good retro style.
Pro Many Scripting languages' supported
Use awesome scripting languages like: Lua, Wren, Moonscript, JS, Ruby, etc.
Pro Export
Exports easily to Windows, Windows-XP, mac, Linux and HTML.
Pro Noob underdog
You can imagine this engine Shiva Lua scripting language making 2d side scrolling Megaman style games a Bandai trademark.
Cons
Con No collision library or other common things
Pico-8 is very minimalistic and as such doesn't come with really any abstractions whatsoever which means often you end up re-inventing the wheel.
Con Code editor leaves some things to be desired
Such as code completion and automatic indentation.
Con Costs 15$
Unlike many of the other frameworks it's not free. However this is kind of a feature because it means it's much more likely to be supported.
Con Memory restrictions could be confusing or frustrating to a beginner
