Also, Waluigi cameo:
https://mltshp.com/p/1A4RI
Ennuigi at the Retro Gaming Expo
Damn, I remember looking at the back of this monitor going, man that was/is a great monitor (I roll with the U3012). LIKE SHIPS PASSING IN THE NIGHT.
@johnr: for my part I found a couple of chapters of some older, freely-available Learning Lua type textbook online and got going that way. That worked well for me since I have a fair amount of programming experience, but something that is more explicitly a Lua For Beginners text would be a good idea if you don't have any background there.
Lua is a nice language, and an odd one in some ways; it's a lot like JavaScript design-wise, but also has some quirks (indexing arrays from 1 instead of 0) and some cool-but-super-wonky bits that you don't need to even know about for PICO 8 (stuff like metatables that programmers more serious than I think are amaaaazing and I still mostly just don't understand).
But to get going with PICO 8 you don't need much Lua; getting up to speed on the real basics of the language, like creating arrays and writing conditional if/then and looping for/foreach/while statements to create basic program structures is plenty to start building little game experiments.
Unfortunately I don't have any specific resources to recommend, but if you want to give me a quick summary of sort of where you are in terms of comfort with programming in general I can sort out a link or two for you. I'd also try searching around the forums at lexaloffle.com, since there's a lot of other folks wandering to the system for the first time who has asked for tutorial/start pointers too.
Lua is a nice language, and an odd one in some ways; it's a lot like JavaScript design-wise, but also has some quirks (indexing arrays from 1 instead of 0) and some cool-but-super-wonky bits that you don't need to even know about for PICO 8 (stuff like metatables that programmers more serious than I think are amaaaazing and I still mostly just don't understand).
But to get going with PICO 8 you don't need much Lua; getting up to speed on the real basics of the language, like creating arrays and writing conditional if/then and looping for/foreach/while statements to create basic program structures is plenty to start building little game experiments.
Unfortunately I don't have any specific resources to recommend, but if you want to give me a quick summary of sort of where you are in terms of comfort with programming in general I can sort out a link or two for you. I'd also try searching around the forums at lexaloffle.com, since there's a lot of other folks wandering to the system for the first time who has asked for tutorial/start pointers too.
@johnr Absolutely, no prob. A couple things worth looking at:
1. There's an "INSTALL_DEMOS" command you can run within the PICO-8 shell itself that will copy several demo programs into the system's directory. A couple are pretty complex (JELPI for example if it's still in the demos collection is a fully-fleshed-out platformer and so too overwhelming to make sense of) but most of 'em tackle a couple specific things and so you can learn a bit just from looking through the code.
2. There's some nice very-basic-game tutorial stuff in issues of the unofficial fanzine, which did limited print runs but has all issues available as a pdf for download, e.g.
https://sectordub.itch.io/pico-8-f...
Good stuff for putting together a super basic framework for a game to get started.
3. This, at a glance, seems like a nice brief walkthrough of the system overview looking at a specific demo cart to cover coding basic movment handling, using sprites, etc. Doesn't look like that person ever actually continued their implied series of posts, but the first one's not bad:
http://thenewstack.io/retro-ga...
4. This is I think the Lua text I ended up using; it's technically out of date (Lua is up to 5.3 now) but for PICO-8 especially there's nothing in there that is misleading or wrong at this point. Chapters 1-4 are really all you would need for PICO-8 use, and cover the ground there pretty well for language basics.
https://www.lua.org/pil...
1. There's an "INSTALL_DEMOS" command you can run within the PICO-8 shell itself that will copy several demo programs into the system's directory. A couple are pretty complex (JELPI for example if it's still in the demos collection is a fully-fleshed-out platformer and so too overwhelming to make sense of) but most of 'em tackle a couple specific things and so you can learn a bit just from looking through the code.
2. There's some nice very-basic-game tutorial stuff in issues of the unofficial fanzine, which did limited print runs but has all issues available as a pdf for download, e.g.
https://sectordub.itch.io/pico-8-f...
Good stuff for putting together a super basic framework for a game to get started.
3. This, at a glance, seems like a nice brief walkthrough of the system overview looking at a specific demo cart to cover coding basic movment handling, using sprites, etc. Doesn't look like that person ever actually continued their implied series of posts, but the first one's not bad:
http://thenewstack.io/retro-ga...
4. This is I think the Lua text I ended up using; it's technically out of date (Lua is up to 5.3 now) but for PICO-8 especially there's nothing in there that is misleading or wrong at this point. Chapters 1-4 are really all you would need for PICO-8 use, and cover the ground there pretty well for language basics.
https://www.lua.org/pil...
https://mltshp.com/p/1A4OL