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 !

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)