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