Retro Roam: A Fantasy Console (PICO-8) | The Original Celeste Game!
Hello gamers, I hope you are doing well.
Welcome to a new gaming series on Hive, Retro Roam. In this series, I will be sharing my experience of playing old games starting from the late 1970s up to the 2000s. I was fortunate enough to play a few of them here and there but there are so many good old games and entire series that I missed. It will be a nostalgic series for a lot of us.
In the last post of this series, I talked about some old Arcade games that started it all. The Atari 2600 or Atari Video Computer System (VCS) was a game changer and you can read more about that in this post.
Atari was a physical console that you could touch and see, and if things went south for you in a Pac-Man game, could be punched and broken. But not all consoles can be punched. I mean not all have physical hardware. These consoles are called Fantasy Consoles. And today we will talk about the most famous fantasy video game console, PICO-8.
It is quite limited in its capabilities as well. Only 128x128 pixels with just 16 colors, make the game developer challenge and come out with interesting and creative ideas for games. I will talk about arguably the most popular game on Pico-8, Celeste.
It is a great entryway for people trying to learn the flow of game development and have something tangible in quick time. You can just run it in the browser or upload it to a website so everyone can play and test it.
You can find more info about this console on Lexaloffle website. You can also play Pico-8 games on the website.
Celeste Original
If you play games, you must know about the popular Celeste game, a precision platformer on the Steam store with overwhelmingly positive reviews. This was the original game made in 2015 for Pico-8. You can play the classic game from the browser as well.
There are many updates and spin-offs made on Pico-8 because of the popularity of this game.
I used an emulation front-end, Retro Arch to play it. It took me some time to get these games and set up everything. But it was worth the effort!
Here is the gameplay of the game if you are interested.
Did you know this game was made by two friends in just 4 days during a Game Jam event? How cool! Now it is a worldwide phenomenon and so many people have played the subsequent games and enjoyed it.
I loved the game! It gives the retro feel of the 80s with improved and smooth controls, great music, a sense of progression and increasingly difficult levels which forces you to land that perfect jump.
The levels become harder and harder as you progress and climb the icy mountains. The ballons grant you another jump and they make the levels even more challenging. I hate the spikes too. But you can retry as many times as you want, you would get infinite lives.
I completed 20 levels in about 25 minutes, not bad at all. There are no save states in Pico-8 so it won't have too many levels. I would play it more and try to finish it the next time I play it.
There are thousands of games made for this console, and not all are as good as this but still I want to play a lot more games and share them with all of you. So many good games to choose from... I might take more time scrolling through the games than playing them...lol.
Thanks for reading...
Note:
- All the content is mine unless otherwise stated.
- Hive gaming text divider from Raizel posted in Hivegaming Discord Server.
Celeste is a very good game, I finished and I'm not the kind of people who finish games 😅😅😅
Hehe... yeah, it is an amazing game for sure!
Celeste is an impressive game, and if they made it in 124 it could have had much better graphics than those, but of course, I understand that with the speed of being in a game jam it is impossible to dedicate so much to it.
Draw conclusions, the pixel art that I do is in 64 x 64 and you see that they are of very high quality, now imagine in 128 x 128 what I can achieve. The level of detail is greater, but of course making these animations takes more work, which we were talking about in other posts recently.
This game is really good and I love it.
pravesh.is.gaming
There are so many restrictions on this. First, it just have 16 colors so having good lights/shadows is very difficult. There is also just 256 sprites possible for the entire game. You have to all of your animations with just 256 images! You know how hard it is to do that with this many images only.
Another restriction is the map size it must be divided into 128x32 tiles.
And on top of all this graphical limitation, the code for the entire game should not go over 65K lines and 8K token (variables/consants/numbers etc).
All these are very restrictive and that's why making a game look nicer is tough, they might do it but animating it with just 256 sprites is not going to be enough.
If the game is fun, then they did their job perfectly!
Yes, but with 16 colors I can work miracles, look, my catziger art only has about 8 colors or something like that.
There are techniques to perform miracles in 256 sprites, there are several games that are in 2 colors and they are beautiful.
Have you seen this one? take a look, by the way it's pretty good, it's only in 2 colors, they are geniuses at pixelart, the game is pretty good. There are some, i share with you:
Whos lila
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1697700/Whos_Lila/
World of horror
https://store.steampowered.com/app/913740/WORLD_OF_HORROR/
Pony Island (this one maybe u will love, is bizarre, is weird, is amazing!)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/405640/Pony_Island/
There are many others too, but as you see, these are examples that can be maded with the right pixel art tech. I master this tech, but i only use it as a last resort on my art (this technique is named "dithering").
I love the way they used this Dithering technique in Lila. It is done amazingly well but don't you need a bigger canvas size than 128x128 to have it look this beautiful ( like in Lila)? Their canvas size looks very big to me(maybe double of that).
I added all of those to my wishlist, thank you!
You do not need a specific canvas size to use the technique, it can be used in any size.
In lilac they used a canvas, I imagine it was 1280 x 720, so it was probably a job that took months. It was very hard to make that game, but it's total genius.
But it is proof that wonders can be done in 2 colors, you just have to figure it out.
I have all of these on my wishlist too, ur welcome, all these are pretty amazing.
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Interesting series. Will you be playing the games you're writing about or will it mostly be by memory?
Oh, I will be playing all, if not most of the games. There are so many of them. I am currently playing the old Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire (Gameboy Advance). I missed so many of those games in my childhood. This feels like a never ending series for sure.
I have been collecting a lot of ROMs for the past few days and making sure I have all the popular titles from some of the best consoles. (I have thousands of them now...lol)
Awesome. Looking forward to seeing more of this.
What a fun game, I really like the style it has and the way it has with the controls, it looks very fun and I also noticed that you have to be very accurate when jumping on the platforms, reminds me of some games of the Nintendo NES that you could return with balloons.
It is quite fun! I played more of it just now and climbed to the top of the mountain with just 400 deaths hahaha
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STOPI love how it shows the process that went into making Celeste what it is today. Thank you for sharing this.
It was surprising for me to know that this was the original game and gave rise to the PC version.
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This game was the first step into making 2018 Celeste, my favorite indie game ever and one of the most important videogames in my life, it's always nice to see people playing it, I play it through 2018 Celeste though, still dreaming about a not possible Celeste 2.
This one is very small I completed it in about 40 minutes and I liked it so much I had to do a rerun and record it. I was much better the last time and completed it in under thirty minutes. It is really fun and sadly, I have not played Celeste yet but I am really thinking about it right now.
So many games to play with just one life!!
I had no idea the original Celeste was first started as a Pico-8 game- it reminds me of Meat Boy being started as a flash game and eventually got promoted to a full PC game.
...I still have to give a shot at Celeste even after I had got it from an itch.io bundle, but its probably going to hook me strong after so much good stuff I've heard of it.
Thanks for sharing this! Might actually try this sooner than the full game only because its on the browser and probably a small but tight cut of levels.
It is quite a small game, jt has to be due to Pico-8 limitations and it doesn't have save states like many other consoles. But it is still quite fun and challenging at the same time.
I recorded a video of the entire run and will share a post about it for sure. (Had so much fun, completed it twice...lol)
Now, I am really thinking about buying Celeste.
So many games to play!