> The harsh limitations of PICO-8 are carefully chosen to be fun to work with, encourage small but expressive designs and hopefully to give PICO-8 cartridges their own particular look and feel.
It can be a little frustrating at first, but if you focus on the other important elements of a good game it can be really satisfying.
In addition, there are some people doing some very cool stuff really pushing that limit as far as possible.
- https://twitter.com/paloblancogames/status/97765346516502528...
- https://hackernoon.com/pico-8-lighting-part-1-thin-dark-line...
Just to cherry pick a few. Personally, I like the restraints.
To add to the others, Pico-8 definitely uses a modified version of Lua 5.1/5.2.
The author, "zep" (of lexaloffle games), is also a wonderful human being that goes out of their way to support people who buy it / play PICO-8 games and deserves every penny for it.
While I hope they some day consider open sourcing PICO-8 so it may live on, for now, it provides them with meaningful income and lets them actively develop it, which I wholeheartedly support.
It's also worth noting that TIC-80 has a $5 "PRO" version; the free (as in no cost) and open source version is basically shareware.
> For users who can't spend the money, we made it easy to build the pro version from the source code.
So the pro version is still FOSS, their builds are just not gratis.
TIC-80 is a bit more 'powerful' in that it's a bit higher resolution with double the sprite count.
The most substantial differences:
>PICO-8 has its own BASIC-like language
>TIC-80 is programmed in Lua or JS
>
>PICO-8 is commercial software, costs $15
>TIC-80 is open source