PICO Wars

Assigned to us as a final project in my Game Engines class, Ajay Belaram, Morgan Storrs, and I decided to create a demake (simplified version of an existing game) of the strategy game Advance Wars within the (purposely) simplified PICO-8 game engine using the scripting language Lua. The PICO-8 engine provided a very limited set of capabilities to the developer, purposefully emulating the first generation of video games. 16 color palettes, pixel art, and 32 KB memory limits were imposed to make this so.

For our version of the game, I wanted to have a map editor alongside the campaign, to create a sense of replayability once our 5 main levels were completed. This became a difficult task with the limited specifications of PICO-8 as I could not embed the map data directly within the game itself due to imposed size limitations. In order to surmount this task and allow the user to create and save levels for later use, I relied upon using our demake to essentially run another PICO-8 instance that contained, in its code, all the data needed. This was quite a fun endeavor as I had to use the engine’s internal code and memory in order to accomplish this and I was rewarded with a working level editor in return.

This project was a lot of fun for my team to do and was a great learning experience on how to work with purposely limited resources and still make a fully functioning game.