japhib
Joined 5 years ago
Joined 5 years ago
Its constraints steer you clear automatically of the biggest unsung villain of hobby game development: scope creep. (Wanting to make your game multiplayer is a variant of that.)
Its inability to import external assets forces you to engage with things outside your main strength, like making art/music/sfx, and the fact that everything is so lo-fi means unskilled art/music/sfx still looks & sounds decent.
Anyways, I highly recommend pico-8 to anyone looking to get into gamedev, or anyone frustrated with the big engines (Unity/Unreal/Godot etc)
> What happens to the plastic economy when plastics are no longer useful because they'll be decomposed too quickly?
We already use lots of biodegradable things for crucial applications, such as the wood used in framing houses. Just because wood can rot in a damp forest doesn't mean that the wood inside your walls will rot away just because. There are conditions where it can start rotting, and we're aware of those conditions and how to prevent them, at least enough for a house to last for decades.
It has basically all of the stuff about functional programming that makes it easier to reason about your code & get work done - immutability, pattern matching, actors, etc. But without monads or a complicated type system that would give it a higher barrier to entry. And of course it's built on top of the Erlang BEAM runtime, which has a great track record as a foundation for backend systems. It doesn't have static typing, although the type system is a lot stronger than most other dynamic languages like JS or Python, and the language devs are currently adding gradual type checking into the compiler.
Edit: on second thought, that doesn't really make sense and would be a great way to defraud the network of a ton of guaranteed money
Another option is https://typescripttolua.github.io/
It can take hundreds of dev-hours to port your engine to consoles yourself, so having another company handle it for you, for all 3 consoles, for only $2000 is a pretty good deal!