It’s been a few days since I Â started messing with creating content in PICO-8, so I thought I’d document my journey so far through the magic of bullet points.
- There’s a programming cheat sheet. Â This helps.
- There’s also a more detailed manual online, Â if you want to know everything. Â (This might not be the best starting point, though.)
- YouTube Video tutorials abound, though the language in some is not safe for school. I will likely make my own tutorials once I feel I have enough skill to do so.
- Pressing F9 to save 8 seconds of an animated GIF to your desktop is a really neat feature that I will probably be using more than I should. (The images aren’t large by default. The GIF in the corner here is shown full size.
- This is definitely something my students are not going to understand fully on the first day.
- This is something several of my students are going to love.
- I got caught up in the sprite editor at first. I shouldn’t have. You can do all kinds of cool things without sprites at all. Start there. Â The sprites are nothing without the code. The code can do plenty without the sprites.
- I have 10% of an idea of what I’m doing, and I love it. This is my kind of learning – I am outside my comfort zone, but not by such a large margin that I’m afraid to see what changing a parameter does.
- The “Undo” shortcut of Ctrl-Z works, and it is a lifesaver. Also: Â Copy & Paste work as intended.
- Programming is an algebra teacher’s answer to the age-old question of “When are we going to need to know this?” Only in this case, you’re telling PICO-8 to plot X and Y and oh, wait, now change those numbers to this and keep changing them and use  those numbers as the modifiers for changing themselves and no, you’re not plotting a line graph, I want a new image each time.
- This is fun.
More updates as I do more.
