1,077,048,618 bytes of PICO-8

The Humble Store sent us a receipt for our purchase of Lexaloffle's PICO-8 fantasy console at 9:13 a.m. EDT on Wednesday, September 25, 2019.

Today - Sunday, September 13, 2020 - we happened to select the "carts" folder and opened the "Properties" window to see how much we've done in that time.

For lack of knowing what to say, here are some subsets of that:

• 38 files, 2 folders, and 1.23 MB are made up of Lexaloffle's demos and various carts we downloaded off the Lexaloffle forums.
• 36 files and 1 folder are from making and modifying the Cave Diver cart from the Game Development with PICO-8 zine.
• 31 files and 2 folders are from the Mixed Feelings Jam we made Driftself for.
• 15 files and 2 folders are from the Games Made Quick Jam we made Truck Drive Test for.
• 232 files and 43 folders are from a single export of binaries for the Rain Gif cart.
• 78 files and 8 folders are from the rest of the Rain Gif files.
• 539 files, 11 folders, and 835 MB are made up of music compositions, exported .wav sound files of those compositions, and (mostly) .mp3 exports of those sound files made in Audacity.
  • Or rather, 522 files and 9 folders; the other 17 files and 2 folders are from a music cart work-in-progress adding visualizers to nine tracks.
  • We don't have a dedicated site or account for sharing this stuff, but some of it has been uploaded to our dragon.style Mastodon account under the #PicoBatMusic hashtag.
• 65 files and 1 folder are from various experiments with sound effects, mostly to support the composition stuff.
• 218 files and 2 folders are from other experimentation, including some bug testing.

...we've done a lot in a year. We have a lot more thoughts about the assumptions of PICO-8 and the limitations of PICO-8, for good and ill. We also have a lot more experience writing code, composing music, and drawing pixel art. We have several projects done and shared with the world, several projects that are incomplete and being worked on, and a lot more that we've left idle or abandoned.

It's hard to figure out what we should say about all this, but it's clear that dropping PICO-8 into our life has catalyzed a hell of a lot of reactions in us. It's been significant.