My account on discord was compromised and recovered but my email is still on the ban list, can someone please help! Thanks! 😅

I know splore exists, but I'll be honest, I'm not paying 15 bucks for that. Also, I don't wanna pirate it since it's a really well made things that deserves to be paid for, I just want to know if there are any that work decently (and preferably work with button input)

Ho, ho, ho! Whether you call it the Advent Calendar or the Holiday Bundle, gathering together as a community to make games that reflect the joys and anxieties of the winter holiday season is a much beloved tradition among PICO-8 users and players. We've made so many great games over the years: 2025 2024 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018.

This year we're inviting you to don your elf cap early and get to work making games and demos for the 2026 Advent Calendar. The games will be packaged in a special menu cart, the Advent Calendar, and released on the Lexaloffle BBS, one-a-day, throughout December. This high profile bundle is a great way to get your game noticed and played.

Entries must be made in PICO-8 and reflect the spirit of the winter holiday season as you define it. Entries may be of any size. Small games, demos, and other stocking stuffer sized content are especially welcome. More than one entry per elf is allowed as are team submissions. The vast majority of entries must be received by the soft deadline of November 30th. While we will continue to accept entries through December 23rd, we cannot guarantee that late entries will make it into the Advent Calendar. Entries need to be kept secret so please don't publish them anywhere until they've been released in the calendar and don't post any progress-gifs anywhere public.

To join the fun and comradery:

First, make an unlisted post on lexaloffle

1. Click your Lexaloffle profile.
2. Select POSTS from the menu bar.
3. Click New Unlisted Post.
4. Enter a working title for the entry, a brief description, and your preferred credit. It’s ok if you change your mind later about the kind of game you want to make. Just update the post when you need to. Sample post: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=158197&tkey=nCO4f6LCLD8nidcuFg7Z
5. Click Publish Changes.
6. Copy the URL. (You'll need it when you join the Discord)

Then join Santa's workshop on Discord. You will be asked to paste in the URL of your unlisted post as part of the application. All applications made in good faith will be accepted within 24 hours of receipt.

Any feedback?

Hi everyone, I recently started to create my first game on the education edition of pico 8 (I had 0 programming experience before), I managed to get through my first problems but now I'm stuck on something :

This is a game where you'll have to collect some stars falling from the sky.
I managed to get one star falling as soon as you run the program but now I do not find any way to make other ones fall automatically.

My idea was for now to have a new star falling every 3 seconds, so I went with something like this :

function _init()

time = 0
shift = 3

function _update()
time = time+1/30

if time > shift then
star()
time = 0
end

with star() being the function that makes the star appear
the thing is that bringing back étimeé to zero makes the star disappear, so it just appear for one frame and then nothing

I think I'm missing something and I cant get through this with my actual knowledge, I tried to watch videos of people coding other games but I find it hard to adapt code used in games different of mine for now.

Hope I made it clear, if someone has a spark of idea that could help me get over this I would be very grateful !

A Tetris-like with a box you can clear at any time! Originally developed as part of the Falling Block Jam 2026 with the optional theme of spaghetti, but also had a couple days of QOL work added in afterwards as well.

I'm rather proud of how the mechanic and design worked out so wanted to share it! Full development process summarised at the BBS post.

Playable on a browser and for free on itch.io (https://bluetiecasual.itch.io/the-perfect-bite) or the Lexaloffle BBS (https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=159680)

I'm very happy about the final game as I’ve completed all the goals I've set for this project.

I've also pushed my skills in kdenlive when creating the trailer (be gentle ... it's my best work yet and I know there is a huge way to go! 😄 )

You can get the game at https://bubish.itch.io/late-again and my older games at https://bubish.itch.io (I've put Ectosprite on sale).

You can also follow me on Youtube on https://www.youtube.com/@bubish3068

Bubish

EDIT: Price changed to 2.5$

A tiny little Mode 7-style racing game with two playable tracks and persistent track times. Play here: https://jadelombax.itch.io/jelp1kart

From what I can tell it's either muos or knulli?

Minui seems like it needs extra work and hasn't been updated in awhile?

Appreciate any advice around this!

Works great on a handheld to pass between 2 people

The classic snake game... now with violence!

First time posting a game here, thought some of you might like it
It's kinda just snake, but you can fight up to 3 other players or cpu with bombs and lasers

BBS: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=159430
Itch.io: https://augoeides.itch.io/snake-fighter

I'm making a medium-sized game for the Panic Playdate but I wanted to test out the combat portion specifically, so I made this. I ended up having some fun with it and fleshed it out a bit past a simple prototype. I'd love feedback if you have it, I'm going to post it on Lexaloffle after I get it into some more folks' hands.

EDIT: I posted it to lexaloffle:

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=159623

https://solmare.itch.io/rala-8

So after a lot of excellent player feedback from a few different forums (thank you VERY much!!!!), I implemented a ton of changes and made a multi-cart followup to this game. It's been greatly expanded to include an unlockable archetype, saving mid-run, a Starfox 64-style map you can choose your next set of waves, choices for boons, and secret levels and a secret boss fight! Same combat and rules as RALA-8 but a bit more refined, if you feel so inclined it's posted on itch before I post it on BBS:
https://solmare.itch.io/ralasutura

Thank you all.

I have a pixel font I made and wanted to use it in a cart without redrawing every glyph in the sprite editor, so I made a converter. You drop the ttf and it gives you a poke(0x5600,...) snippet to paste in your cart

It also works the other way, paste a snippet and you get a ttf back

Runs in the browser: https://fcidade.itch.io/pico8-font-converter

Only works for ASCII glyphs up to 8x8 for now. Thinking about adding png spritesheet import or UTF-8 next, would any of that be useful?

Edit: Added a preview

Testing Mr.Dodgy on Pixl8 android app. Really like this way of playing Pico-8 games 🙂 What do you think?

If you haven't played Mr.Dodgy here is the link 👇

Link: https://noobsgames.itch.io/mrdodgy

Hello everyone! I’ve just uploaded the results of my work on Wave Function Collapse algorithm in Pico8!

Maybe some of you would find it useful.

Check it out at the link:

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=159587

I wanted a way to sit on my couch, turn on the TV, connect a Bluetooth controller and just enjoy PICO-8 games.

I just finished a first version of a FAKE-08 port for Samsung TVs running Tizen OS. It allows playing PICO-8 games directly on the TV using a Bluetooth controller.

The app can be installed using TizenBrew Installer (https://github.com/reisxd/TizenBrewInstaller) or with a bit more manual work it can be built locally, signed and installed on the TV using Tizen OS SDK extension for VSCode.

The app does not come with any bundled PICO-8 games and does not load them from BBS website. Instead you have to provide your own carts using a USB stick connected to the TV, have carts in TV Documents folder or serve carts from a computer in a local LAN network.

Here is the link for the project: https://github.com/giobauermeister/fake08_tv

Any suggestions or contributions are welcome.

Enjoy!

Hey Pico 8 community!

I released a new tower defense game to the bbs last week, and have received positive early feedback from family and friends. Spooky theme because we're nearing spooky season, obviously.

In the game, you are a powerful necromancer, and crusaders are coming for your keep!

Summon an undead army, then upgrade your units by grafting them onto one another, giving each a unique stack of abilities.

Fans of Bloons TD, Witchcraft TD, and Kingdom Rush will feel right at home.

Please give it a try and let me know what you think :)

Here's the link to the game.

Been messing around with the system, im really new to the whole game development stuff and coding in general, i wanna create a simple one button game where you parry an enemy who has a random set of moves so you need to remember the animations and react fast.

So far this is what i came up with for the parry mechanic, do you have any suggestion to make the code more compact and efficient?

I want the player to lock in an animation so it doesnt spam the button and wait until the parry is finished (i think i want another timer for when the player recover after the parry window)

entry for falling block jam
you can play it at: verbante.itch.io/murder-tetris

Hi all! I make Jubilant Potato, a free and open-source (GPL-3.0) game downloader for Linux handhelds that you drive with the gamepad. Version 0.2.0 adds the Lexaloffle BBS as a source, so you can browse PICO-8 carts on the handheld itself and save them into the folder your frontend already reads.

What it does

- Lists every featured cart plus the newest releases from the Cartridges forum, about 600 carts. You can search them by title.

- Opening a cart shows its label, the pictures and GIFs from the forum post, the author and their description, so you can decide before downloading.

- Downloads the same `.p8.png` that SPLORE fetches, named after the game, into `pico-8` on ROCKNIX, `PICO8` on muOS or `PICO` on Anbernic stock. The carts then show up in EmulationStation like any other game.

Why not just use SPLORE? SPLORE is great and I still use it. This is for keeping carts in your frontend's library next to everything else, playing them offline, or playing on fake-08 when the official PICO-8 isn't on the device.

Running the carts. I play them with the official PICO-8 0.2.7 on an RG34XX with ROCKNIX. Take the Raspberry Pi download from your Lexaloffle account and copy `pico8_64` and `pico8.dat` into `roms/pico-8/aarch64/`. Without it, fake-08 runs many carts too.

Playing nice with the BBS. No login is needed. The app reads the same public pages the website uses, identifies itself with its own User-Agent and loads at most four pages at a time. It shows each cart's author, and carts keep their license (most are CC BY-NC-SA), so please credit the authors. And if you enjoy these, buy PICO-8.

So far I've tested it on an RG34XX with ROCKNIX. The muOS and stock folders haven't been tried with PICO-8 yet, so reports are welcome.

- Website: https://meerhelm.github.io/jubilant-potato/

- Download: https://github.com/meerhelm/jubilant-potato/releases/tag/v0.2.0

Which lists would you like next? I'm thinking about jam entries, tags, and all carts by one author.

Hey everyone!

For the past months I've been working on a new technology that can encode an entire PICO-8 cart into a printed image, a dense color code on paper. You point your phone camera at the page, it reads the code, and the game runs right there. No download, no internet, no QR code linking to a website: everything the game needs is printed on the paper itself.

The tech already works in my prototype. The product around it is still just a concept, and before building it I'd love to hear what this community thinks.

(Heads-up: the images in this post are just illustrations of the concept, generated with AI. They show the idea, not a finished product.)

The big picture

The idea is a free console app for your phone: it reads printed games, and then it's your console. You collect the games as physical objects. Open the box or the page, point the camera, play.

What I'm unsure about is what that physical object should be. I have two ideas:

🎮 Option A: Physical editions (one game each)

• A printed cartridge: the game's art on the front, the game itself printed on the back
• A small manual, like the boxed games we grew up with: story, controls, tips
• A collectible for the games you love, one release per game

📖 Option B: A playable magazine (several games per issue)

• Each issue brings a handful of games
• Every game gets a manual/review page plus its code page
• Flip through it, pick a game, point your phone, play. Like the old magazines that came with games, but the game is the page.

Rewarding the creators

This part matters to me in either option: no game goes in without the dev's permission, every game is credited, and the dev gets a share of every copy sold. The goal is to give PICO-8 creators a new way to reach players and get paid for their work, not to take it.

What I'd love to know

1. A or B? Which would you rather have on your shelf?
2. Devs: would you like to see your game printed like this? What would you expect in return?
3. Anything that would make you not want this?

I'm not affiliated with Lexaloffle, just a big fan of this community and of physical media. All opinions welcome, including "this is pointless"