Tic-80, an 8-bit game engine

[vividpixel]

Discovered "fantasy computers" recently and this might be of interest to other retro programming fans if you aren't too busy with QB64. Runs on probably all the platforms you'd want.

Tic-80 Site / Reference Manual

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• LowRes NX is a similar setup, though using a dialect of BASIC!
  

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Tic-80 can be used with Lua, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and some others. Lua seems nice so far, and I feel good about its usefulness in game development. I'm also working through tutorials for Defold which is an engine with much broader scope. Maybe I get comfortable using Lua in Tic-80, see if I can actually make anything substantial, and if I ever get tired of limitations, migrate to Defold and continue using Lua.

As a perpetual beginner who never completed a game and tends to get caught up in fine details, the limited ability & all-in-one nature of Tic-80 seems like it could be helpful to stay focused on the essentials, and the 8-bit sound and feel along with an optional CRT filter comes with the territory. 

I had fun making the beginnings of a game with AppGameKit Studio, but hesitant to spend further time learning that IDE and AGK Script. Kept thinking that if I'm going to use BASIC, might as well be QB64! QB64 can most certainly create anything my brain could imagine, but from my perspective it seems better for those who have the patience to recreate the wheel. Some folks enjoy that but not quite confident that I would, or could.

[mnrvovrfc]

I think I've tried this before early this year. It's confusing. The fonts it uses don't make it very inviting for programming in Lua or anything else.

I have a dilemma if I want to use this. There's a version for Windows, of course, but I'm not in the mood to pick that up to run it with Wine on a system which is not Debian-based. Otherwise disappointingly, like all other commercial "Ubuntu is all of Linux" hogs, only a DEB-suffix file is offered for any LInux. There's also a Raspberry PI version it seems. Installing a DEB into a non-Debian-based Linux is not recommended! Even with that utility for Porteus (based on Slackware). It might work if the library names match and other things aligned that cannot be seen in the sky and space.

EDIT: I didn't see the word-up for Lowres-NX. Sadly it also needs husband and wife. But it's friendly with older versions of Debian and Ubuntu which is good. I have to reinforce the warning about DEB-suffix files: on some distros "GDebi" program doesn't work properly summoning its GUI because there is a parse error with Perl. Must drop to the terminal and run that program asking for installation of the DEB. I had to do this for BespokeSynth and a few other things related to music. One of the distros based on Kubuntu offers a different program, I guess a fork of GDebi that works better with its GUI.

Oh yeah I could keep complaining right here. But this is an interesting project. I hope they could expand it to support other interpreters such as Julia and Python. Even if it's costly, ie. having to download source code to compile to support dynamic libraries taking many megabytes of disk space.

Somehow I press for KolibriOS to be like this, but there must learn its version of assembly language to really move forward writing games or any other type of application. Also I dreamed about coming up with something like TachyonOS, but I would need to write my own graphics, sound, HID support apart from "X-dot-org" and Wayland, cannot use QB64 nor Freebasic.

[vividpixel]

On the font situation for Tic, you are able to use external code editors with that $10 pro version, but I like the novelty of the the old editors and I wish it was as pleasing by default as QB64's font.

I was amused to find Pixel Vision 8 (Lua, C#) offering a GUI-based experience rather than purely a terminal, which I can see catching on even if I think the typing commands is part of the fun.