Game Development on the PICO-8 with Johan Peitz

What It Covers

Johan Peitz discusses PICO-8 game development, explaining the fantasy console's constraints, tools, and commercial viability. He details creating PicoCAD, a three-d modeling tool built within PICO-8's limitations, and strategies for sustainable indie development.

Key Questions Answered

• •Memory constraints as game design: PICO-8 forces developers to make trade-offs between sprite memory, tile maps, music, and code within strict limits. Advanced developers learn to compress data, move assets between memory regions, and use the sprite bank for music storage to maximize available space.
• •Multi-carting technique: Games exceeding PICO-8's 16k compression limit use multiple cartridges that load sequentially. The first cart generates procedural content into RAM, then loads the main game cart while preserving that data. Some ports like Doom use 64 carts with complex build pipelines.
• •Commercial PICO-8 viability: Peitz released five to six games in one year, achieving modest profit primarily through Itch.io rather than Steam. The platform exports to Windows, Mac, Linux, and Raspberry Pi with single command. Patreon supporters split evenly between game access and source code tiers.
• •PicoCAD rendering solution: Three-d rendering uses PICO-8's t-line function to texture lines between vertices with tile map coordinates. Peitz solves vertex selection by drawing the model first, storing screen positions in vertex data, then checking mouse proximity during the update phase rather than implementing ray tracing.