Stuff like this makes me utterly adore Pico-8. It's one of the most fun coding environments I've used since I first discovered the ActionScript in Macromedia Flash MX.
The retro IDE is a huge attractor for a lot of people but for me I just love the limited constraints at runtime. I wish I had a high resolution modern editor for code/sound/graphics to work with, but was still limited by resolution, cpu power, API, etc.
Check out Lexaloffle's new project, Picotron. You can _almost_ think of it as a "Pico-64" with desktop environment. Comes with a tracker, larger text editor, etc.
Creating within set constraints breeds unprecedented innovation and some really interesting stuff.
For about 25 years there's been a small but dedicated group of people making romhacks for Super Mario World, and the early stuff was pretty quaint -- mostly rearranging tiles and enemy placements to make new levels. But over the years people have done some incredible hacks with custom graphics, enemies, mechanics, you name it. I've played some of them on real Super Nintendo hardware with a Super Everdrive which allows you to load rom files to the cartridge memory from an SD card. It's amazing what some people have made.
Have you played with Mario Builder 64? I did a game jam with it last month and found it really delightful. You're pretty restricted in what you can do - practically no coding, just pulling in components from the Mario 64 base game - but in exchange it's really simple to get a whole level up and running in like an hour (our whole game jam was 2 hours long).
My level design skills are pretty weak. Being able to partially compensate for that by getting built-in nice character movement, enemy design, etc for free was really really nice. If I wanted to do more 3D stuff right now I'd almost certainly be using something like Mario Builder (I think stuff like Doom custom maps get at a similar idea).
Extremely tangential but I think relevant: some of the DOOM mods that are still being made are utterly phenomenal.
It's easy for people to think "Why would you constrain yourself to a DOOM engine when you could use Unity/Godot/Unreal/whatever and have better graphics and more freedom?!", but that's kind of missing the point. The point is figuring out how far you can stretch something, and how to get the most out of something limited.
Blade of Agony, for example, exclusively runs on GZDoom, which while more advanced than the vanilla DOOM engine, is still a lot more limited than Unreal or something, but I think that what they did to really stretch that engine to its fullest extent has made something that's extremely fun, charming, and gives it a distinct look and feel that you simply wouldn't have if you used a "modern" engine.
I am surprised I haven't heard of this one, doing a quick search it looks downright incredible and hard to believe that they managed to stretch GZDoom to handle it.
Yeah, it runs surprisingly well due to their optimizations. Sadly, you are still somewhat CPU-constrained due to the way BSP processing works (every single wall is processed, one by one, and the map is rendered a few triangles at a time)
You can actually set it up to do Pico-8 code editing in your normal editor, while auto reloading in the browser, then building the cartridge and deploying the game via GitHub actions. It's been a little while but I set something like that up in some of my Pico-8 explorations¹.
Yeah I agree. Being constrained to a relatively low resolution and memory makes everything a lot more approachable and more fun for me.
Obviously I could have as much flexibility as I want if I learned Vulkan and wrote all the graphics calls myself, but of course that's really hard and time consuming. Pico-8 being restricted makes it easy for me to quickly hack something together just for fun.
