PICO-8 tile art tests
I've been playing around in PICO-8, working on some generative art ideas. Lua is a fun little language that feels a lot like something between BASIC and JavaScript. Lua isn't my favourite language, but it's fun at the small scale. PICO-8, however, is a fantastic little game engine (or “Fantasy Console”) that has all of the feels of the 80s.
First tests
I started with a Minecraft style terrain generator, but as 2D tyles:
It was a fun attempt and performed reasonably well that I filed away under maybe later.
My second attempt was a stamp generation tool, that defines some simple verbs and nouns for generating art, and applies it to coloured tiles:
The third test evolves on the previous and improves the performance significantly:
I'm working on taking the basic concepts from these tests and building a Swift/iOS version that adds some interactivity. We'll see how that goes!