PICO-8: Top-Down Adventure Game Tutorial

Welcome!

This tutorial teaches you how to make a top-down adventure game in PICO-8. You don't need any prior game development experience to follow this tutorial. Some experience helps, of course, but it's not required. You will, however, need to have a copy of PICO-8. It's not expensive and quite worth the money.

The video for each step is just a few minutes in length, but feel free to pause the video and take as long as you like to really get creative with your game. This tutorial only shows the minimal things needed to get your game working. It's over to you to be as creative as you'd like to really make it your game.

Please use the Community link below if you have any questions or run into any problems. I will try to respond as soon as possible. I have also provided a zip file with a separate PICO-8 cart for each step of the tutorial. Feel free to use it however you would like.

If you'd like to learn more about PICO-8, feel free to check out the zine I wrote. There are a lot of fantastic resources for learning about PICO-8 and the community is amazing. Don't forget to share what you create!

Step 1 - Creating a Map

Step 2 - Creating a Player

Step 3 - Player Movement

Step 4 - Following the Player

Step 5 - Keys

Step 6 - Inventory Screen

Step 7 - Doors

Step 8 - Animated Map Tiles

Step 9 - Winning and Losing

Step 10 - Resetting the Game

Bonus Step - Adding Text

Bonus Step - More Tile Types