pico-boots demo

This project demonstrates the features of the pico-boots framework for PICO-8.

You can both try the demos directly by running the game (see "Build and run" section) and read the corresponding source code.

CAUTION: the current project is too big to fit in an official PICO-8 cartridge, as it has more than 8192 tokens.

Demos

• main.lua shows how to use the Flow system with gamestates. There is no specific demo for it, the whole app uses it, with 1 state for the main menu and 1 state per demo.
• main_menu.lua shows how to make a simple menu using the UI and Input modules. You will see the main menu when starting the app.
• input_demo.lua shows how to detect player input. In the main menu, select "INPUT DEMO", then press the different buttons (arrows and X/O in PICO-8) to see the input states change.
• debug_demo.lua shows debugging features: console and on-screen logging, profiling and variable tuning. In the main menu, select "DEBUG DEMO", then play with the toggles and buttons to show logs, the profiling window and the variable tuning window. Note that the codetuner toggle and window will only show when building the Debug config (not Release).
• render_demo.lua shows static and animated sprites. Press the button to toggle between different animations.

Build

Supported platforms

Mostly UNIX, and specifically Linux for some scripts.

See Supported platforms in pico-boots README for more information.

Build dependencies

See Build dependencies in pico-boots README.

Build and run

First, make sure the pico8 executable is in your path.

The most straightforward way to build and run the game on Unix platforms is:

• cd path/to/pico-boots-demo
• ./build_game.sh
• ./run_game_debug.sh

Instead of the last instruction, you can also enter directly:

• pico8 -run build/picoboots_demo_debug.p8

build_game.sh will build with the debug config by default, which means it will define preprocessing symbols to preserve debugging features. You will need this to try the debug demo from the main menu. However, to demonstrate how we can release a game stripped of extraneous features to fit in a PICO-8 cartridge, we also added a release config:

• cd path/to/pico-boots-demo
• ./build_game.sh release
• ./run_game_release.sh

Test dependencies

See Test dependencies in pico-boots README.

Run unit tests and headless integration tests

To run all the (non-#mute) unit tests:

• cd path/to/pico-boots-demo
• ./test.sh

Run rendered integration tests

Integration tests consists in actual game simulations in predetermined scenarios. Therefore, they are built with picotool and run directly in PICO-8. To build the integration test cartridge and run it:

• cd path/to/pico-boots-demo
• ./build_itest.sh
• ./run_itest.sh

Coding conventions

Strings that are used as keys and are never shown to the user are written as ':key' to imitate Ruby's symbol notation.