RC Pico-8 Shoot-em-up

Small arcade shooter built with at the Recurse Center with PICO-8 to try out using the Pico-8 fantasy console. It features a ship that can move and shoot lasers at falling enemies. The lasers have a limited battery and they need to charge after a bit, making the game harder. Complete the 10 levels with increasing difficulty to beat the game!

Running the game

Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/nadia-nh/rc-pico8-shoot-em-up.git
cd pico8-shoot-em-up

Run with PICO-8:

1. Using the free web editor

    Open https://www.pico-8-edu.com/, click on the play button to start and type ESC.

    Paste the contents of exported.p8 and into the terminal that opened.

    Type

  ESC
  SAVE game.p8
  LOAD game.p8
  RUN

    This goes back to the terminal, saves and loads the game so it can be interpreted correctly, and then runs it.

2. Using the desktop build

    Open the app and type FOLDER to open an explorer window where games are loaded from.

    Copy the exported.p8.png file to that folder.

    Inside the app, type

  LOAD exported.p8.png
  RUN

Controls:

• Left / right / up / down – Move
• X – Fire laser (hold)
• Esc – Quit PICO-8 menu

How the game works

The PICO-8 lifecycle functions are:

• _init() – Runs once on startup, used for setting up constants, and initial state
• _update() – Runs every frame, used for moving the player and the enemies, handling collisions, and tracking the player's laser charge and cooldown
• _draw() – Runs after each update, used for rendering the sprites, displaying the player's life and the laser's battery charge status

The logic is organized across small cart files:

• 00-main.p8 – Ties everything together, calls player's, enemy's and scoring's lifecycle methods
• 01-player_controls.p8 – Handles player movement, drawing the ship and lasers, handles collisions with enemies, and draining and recharging of the laser battery
• 02-enemy_controls.p8 – Spawns enemies, handles movement, checks for laser hits
• 03-scoring.p8 – Tracks level, score, and remaining health, draws the hearts and horizontal laser meters
• 04-utils.p8 – Defines palette IDs, sprite indices, button constants, small helper methods

Reference

• PICO-8 Manual – General API and cartridge structure
• Simple space shooter Pico-8 Mini Course - Loosely followed this tutorial for structuring the code and as an asset drawing guide