Picotachi 39

This month was the last Picotachi of the year, featuring a few regulars and some people who just happened to be in town, for a variety of suprising projects. Read on to find out what they were!

First Joseph presented the latest developments with Pico-8 and Voxatron. Version 0.1.10 was recently released, including the glitchy reset revealed at last month's Picotachi and a number of exciting features. Multi-cart support makes writing games with a lot of data tractable, and the new extcmd allows taking screenshots or saving videos at times specified in code, which opens up a lot of possibilities for botmaking. Additionally he revealed a giraffe sorting cartridge that's an example of using Pico-8 to teach computer science concepts; more lessons, including both carts and printable material, are planned. Check the release notes here.

Dennis presented machinima videos he's made over the years, starting with with a Team Fortress video made for fun, progressing to a trailer for Alwa's Awakening that helped it get greenlit, and leading up to a trailer for the game his company is currently working on, X-Tactics. Check out his Youtube channel for reports on Pixel Art Park, TGS, and more.

Next up, Danny Nujen presented interlude.rocks, a web-based multiplayer game using smartphones as controllers for a large screen developed for a fundraising project. The basic idea is to use your phone as a kind of slingshot to aim at bubbles at the screen, popping them to release music symbols. While the implementation is completely different, the idea of using phones as controllers is a lot HappyFunTimes, a project presented many times at Picotachi in the past.

Finally, Changbai Li presented some personal projects. He's made a lot of things, including the low-poly Snake++, a 1v1 tapping game for iPhones, and, pictured above, The Circle of Pythagoras, a visualization exposing the geometric principles behind just intonation.

That was it for Picotachi this year - hope to see you in the next one! Ψ