pico sonic

There are many resources available for that, and also schools if you want to go professional. I was doing web programming before, but I started working on standalone games 10 years ago with resources like Game From Scratch (https://www.youtube.com/c/gamefromscratch/) and later, Brackeys (https://www.youtube.com/c/Brackeys/). I’m on the code side of things but you can find your own field(s) of speciality. But more importantly, stay with the community: in the case of PICO-8, looking at other devs’ work and talking with them about how they do it is very instructional.

Thanks!

(Note: some technical stuff below, I don’t know if you’re a PICO-8 programmer or just using it from the player side, but I put them in case you’re interested)

Ah, an enthusiast!

Let’s see… The biggest issue is the token limit. The most direct way to cut that is to remove all the backgrounds and foregrounds… I can try, but I’m fearing for the visuals.

The second issue is the “fast reload” patch. Unlike the token limit, it will not prevent you from running the game, but the game will freeze for up to 1s every time you change region (128x32 tiles). A true fix would be to store all the regions in Lua tables, and copy them myself instead of relying on PICO-8 reload. I believe it would be faster, not because of the implementation (Lua iteration may be slower than the engine’s C code even adding I/O operations).

An alternative could be to make a special reduced version of the level for vanilla PICO-8. This would fix the complex background code and the region loading issue (Bonevolt did it on Sonic 2.5 so I know it can be done, with the slight difference that my OOP code tends to be bigger).

For better results and in the spirit of PICO-8 I’d go with the second solution. Unfortunately I’m working 1 day/week on the project now (spending other days on new projects), mainly to complete the intro sequence, so I don’t think I’ll be able to make that happen any time soon.

OK! I cannot give you an exact license since it’s already fan art; just credit me and notify me when the game is out (consider it a kind of CC-BY-NC as mentioned in the itch game metadata, except that it only applies to my work of adaptation).

I don’t know if they will work in 4 colors though, you’ll have to try. If it fails, you can always ask pixel artists for help (I’m not 100% satisfied of my sprites, so if you find one maybe they can make nice sprites specifically for this color palette).

To extract the sprites:

• download the cartridge release (.p8.zip) and extract it
• open data_stage_sonic.p8 in PICO-8
• check the spritesheet and run export sonic_spritesheet.png

If you don’t have PICO-8 I can upload it directly on this page too.

Which platform are you using? Where are you stuck?

Basically if you press C 3 times on the keyboard, you should immediately show the menu, start the Start Cinematic and then skip it to immediately start the level.

For web only: make sure to enable Javascript. I removed the need to click on Run Game, the game is now automatically loaded on page load, so you just need to click on the embedded game with the Play icon.

bro they took pico as an 8 year old and mad him make this game

Was it in a slope like the first curve, or inside a loop?

If so, that is a known issue although hard to reproduce, I will add it to the list of known issues and try to fix it in a future patch.

If it was in another place though, please tell me where so I make sure to fix this location too.

Thanks!

You can get the background image in Firefox with right-click > View Background Image, but with Chrome you’d have to check the page source code. So I uploaded it along the game executables as “picosonic itch.io page background 4x.gif” to make it easier. Enjoy!

Thank you! I didn’t do anything special to support DS4 (I tested Xbox-like controllers though) so I guess the PICO-8 web template was just good enough. Reminds me of InfernoPlus saying he can’t play most games on Steam with DS4, but he managed to make Mario Royale work with it. Maybe web tech has just something that makes it easier (that said, I managed to use all of my controllers including DS4 on PC when using Steam Big Picture)

Were you playing on the web version, or did you have issues on standalone too? Web version definitely has audio lag, but I didn’t feel control lag (time between input and character motion), so what made it hard for you to play?

Otherwise, targetting 30 FPS would make it more stable indeed, but I’ll try to fix my inefficient physics and heavy background rendering first, I really want to have steady 60 FPS like the original games.

I feel the level it's based on Sonic 3 (yup, Angel Island Zone) , and the controls based from Sonic 1

Thanks! And good catch, I’ll fix the “Angel Island” in the stage result.