You're totally right and I realized it after posting. That's it, new trend, no more lowpoly rats, only hipoly mice

a full body rat character!

body confirmed! Arms.... sorta in progress.

I wanted to make a lowpoly rat but it has too many polys so I'm just gonna roll with it

As soon as I stop scope creeping! And optimizing, but I wanted at least 3 lights to be playable with so I had to go and refactor my whole vector library for more performance.

Oh yeah totally. I've been trying to figure out what I'm doing with this "dfect" line of games and I think demoscene stuff is easily one of the biggest inspirations.

A lot of what I'm wanting to do is push pico8 with interesting visuals, which can be tough to do given the limitations.

Of course I post that right before making it considerably more performant and responsive. Anyway here's what it looks like when the tiles are updated in order, making them super hella quick and less jittery

The people have spoken, so it shall stay in! Spent a little more time on it, now it has 6 shade values and... normal mapping?!

That's a really good point! I didn't even consider that one.

Eventually the speed will be totally configurable, but recording the fast moments is way more interesting!

I made an entire lighting system in #pico-8 just so that I can make this effect and I have no idea if I should keep it or if it's too distracting.

Guess I could dim it a little bit, though.

This is like a big list of all the games I've been wanting to try lol. Lumines looks so fancy I wanna give it a shot. And tekken it's been so long since I've played any (last I tried was like tekken tag? probably) and eeeeveryone tells me to play the yakuza stuff

I would've put it in the remake category but I have a stipulation that it has to be done by me! Besides the PSP version is pretty serviceable. But yeaaaaah! It's got so many little features that make it such a unique experience! Dynamic tracks! Aaaa you never see that with rhythm games, ever!

Oh man I miss classic plants vs zombies, I played it sooooooo much! Pretty much most of the popcap library I survived on as a kid lmao

This took like an hour for me to figure out and I'm still not entirely sure of my choices. Art style and favorite game were the toughest.

Anyway feel free to ask me about any of these and I'll yap about why it's there

Yeah for sure. Hmmm that does make it complicated. I believe in you!

Are you planning on getting this into godot godot, or just for your own fork? I'd be interested on keeping track of this cause it feels small enough to get my feet wet understanding the codebase.

Terrible mockup, showing a blue then green line after the line numbers

I've never used regions, but I'd be more interested in using them if it were a feature. I imagine the background is more proof of concept, but a line after the line number would be awesome. behold my terrible mockup

This Is Water David Foster Wallace Commencement Speech YouTube video by Jeffrey Danese

This is all to say, don't stop caring. I have to remind myself of David Foster Wallace's "This is Water", it keeps my head level when dealing with these sorts of situations, otherwise I'd probably just explode on people who just casually use AI.

To a lot of folks it barely personally affects them.

I feel like most folks who aren't very directly affected by this, will lean on the default bias, which is probably this nonchalant attitude.

It sucks, though. More people should care. There's so many problems we're facing right now that we wouldn't have if people just cared more, probably.

I feel like over my lifetime it's kind of been enforced by societal norms that it's "lame" to care about anything.

You can see it in every character who cares about things (Lisa-Simpson-like) being the butt of every joke in sitcoms and cartoons. The resolution winds up being "Deal with it, nerd."

Text set in a bold, round edged and slightly crooked sans-serif font. It reads: "A pixel font by Not Jam THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER A LAZY DOG. sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow. .ttf format CC0 licence". It's set in a bright green on a dark blue-green background.

Text set in a pixel art, monospaced uncial font. It reads: "A pixel font by Not Jam THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER A LAZY DOG. sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow. .ttf format CC0 licence". It's set in a bright green on a dark blue-green background.

Text set in a pixel font clearly taking heavy inspiration from the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. It reads: "A pixel font by Not Jam THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER A LAZY DOG. sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow. .ttf format CC0 licence". It's set in a bright green on a dark blue-green background.

Text set in a ultrabold, monospace pixel-art display font with sharp corners and clean straight lines. It reads: "A pixel font by Not Jam THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER A LAZY DOG. sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow. .ttf format CC0 licence". It's set in a bright green on a dark blue-green background.

Could I interest you in a free pixel font this evening?

There's 28 to choose from right here under CC0 :)

not-jam.itch.io/not-jam-font...

Thinking about how I'd approach it as like a mesh though....

Maybe some short cylinders with no end caps, randomly rotated, solidified, maybe some random vertex offset based on angle to center... Then some kind of cleanup/retopologizing after the fact to get rid of whatever abomination I've created

You're probably the first person I would think of to do it, though.

In my head I'd probably just slap some normal mapping on a sphere and call it a day but I imagine that doesn't really work for a stylized look

Continued progress over here!
bsky.app/profile/caaz...

Latest work on PONG DFECT! Been working on a logo!

I've also been tweaking the physics of it a bit, now the curving effect is strong at high speeds, but low speeds are closer to standard pong!

I've still got an button free for another mechanic...

#pico-8 #gamedev #pong #atari

I had a deck of the shorter ones, but I really feel like the contrast of height with the taller ones is an interesting format that will probably lead to more interesting designs to work around it.

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 435 - April 5th, 2026 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

Yeah that totally makes sense, I think people are a lot more forgiving to these sort of fixed perspective things too anyway since they already have to enter the magic circle by being in that perfect spot lol.

I've always wanted to try this out! Not that I have massive monitors laying around lol.

Really really really cool work!

How do you account for field of view here? I'm too used to pc gamer shenanigans so I'm really unsure of how you'd set up the camera settings to match like, real life.

I don't really have a solution for that one though, it's hard to feel like you need to "redo" work to make it better, but it's probably very worth it.

My current strategy is to just make a note of it so I don't forget and maybe I can come back to it when I've got the motivation for it.

I've been trying to take on more art roles when working with others recently, it's certainly let me learn my limitations lol

But yeah, I've released games where I feel like I certainly could've polished more, but when something's nearing completion I often really just want to be done with it.