itch.io

Nah I must have miswrote that, you're the second person who misunderstood what I mean't lol. So, yes individual cart has that small of a size. But you can release 16 carts together as a package.  I want to write a source cart with all the assets and codes that form the base of the game, then copy that into separate carts and build around that, treating every cart outside the source cart as an individual level.

I’m a little confused by your phrasing (probably not your fault I am autistic lol) so if you could re-elaborated that id really appreciate it!

And not exactly what I meant. I didn’t mean like on the par of old game consoles that PICO is inspired by. It’s still a modern game engine with features and capacity far beyond what was possible back then. My only question was about being able to create basically anything I want, use a base code and asset list across multiple cartridges, and use each individual cartridge as an individual level

Hey, so I'm new to game making and coding (like a month in), and I found out about Pico-8 a week ago through celeste thinking it was just the name of the prototype. I actually found out what it is yesterday. I know most projects are made for a singular cartridge, but how much content can I get out if I do that with the 16 cartdrige release (and I'm pretty sure it doesnt but I'm pretty sure it doesn't combine them, right? Just releases them as 16 seperate files). Like I know I can make a cartridge that has all the code and assets that's shared between all levels, then I can use that to get to work actually generating playable content, but like is that viable? Is it possible that I could get like 4 hours of content out of 16 carts? I'm not expecting to do that anytime soon, but 4 hours of content is what I consider to be the minimum length a game can be (and it has to be a cheap indie game) and really be a legitimate release. I also just really love games with lots of content. I don't wanna play a fuck ton of games, I want to be really into one or two games. so Pico-8 is great for learning but due to the small maximum size for a single cart, it's great for learning, prototyping, game jams, but the only reason reason I'm really interested in any of this is as a develeper. Purely as a gamer, I have very little interest such short projects.

EDIT: There seems to be a bit of confusion about what I meant. So, I don't know exactly how it works but there is a function mentioned on the website about releasing up to 16 carts together as a singular package, tho it doesn't actually stitches them together into one file. Still, I can indicate the level order through various methods. I basically want to create a level 1, when it's done, duplicate it, and use it to create a source cart. Delete everything but the code and assets that are shared between levels. Copy that into the level carts, build the levels around that. That way I can utilize all the bennifits of PICO without the issue of the very minimal max game length. Also I've checked the forum and I have my answer, very capable. And Zep did say in a forum post that there is functionality for one cart to send you to another or for them to check and send data to eachother. So I can't turn them into one file but by adding a main menu cart I can more or less get around that. Plus if I really wanted to I'm sure there's some other game development program I could export them into and actually rewrite bits of the code to stitch them together as one file, add extra functionality, etc. I'm actually pretty sure I could just use Voxatron lol. It's their 3D engine (still in Alpha) and it has functionality to port PICO cart into it. Shouldn't be that hard to make a level select through it. Could basically treat Voxatron as the game and PICO-as the levels. It's file size limit is 1MB which is waaaaaaayyy past PICO's