First release : v1-alpha

“512px under” is a platformer with some puzzle elements. It has 32 screens, a main path, a few hidden bonus rooms and 18 collectables. The main path should take less than 10 minutes to complete for an experienced player.

The version is named 1-alpha. “alpha” because there may be still bugs in there and content (such as music, rooms layout or dialogs) may change in future versions.

This is the first version of my first Pico-8 game ever. It is also the first time I manage to actually finish and publish a game. I had a few attempts at puzzle and platformer games with game engines such as Unity and Godot.

I’m really happy with this first Pico-8 experience. Over the course of a month, I learned how to use the built-in tools to draw the sprites, the maps and write the music. Creators like Krystman (and his channel LazyDevs) or Gruber really helped me in the process.

I used an external editor (vscode) for the Lua code. At first, I didn’t mind the token limitations. 3 weeks of coding later, I dangerously approached the 8192 tokens limit and had to do some optimizations to fit in the last features. The first version use every token available. There may be some room left for bug fixes after more optimization.

For my next projects, I may look into custom deserialization techniques in order to allow for more content. But as a first experience with the console, it was really nice to make the most of the built-in editors. For example, exporting the full map allowed me to track the design progression and quickly sketch new rooms in an image editor. That would not have been possible (or not that easily) with a custom map system or procedural generation.

I hope you’ll enjoy this game as much as I enjoyed doing it. I’m looking forward to seing your best times and scores. :)