SokoVirus

By Olivander65

Developed 3/20/23 - 4/12/23

SokoVirus was the first game I created in Pico-8.

To get the basic mechanics together, I watched some of the Lazy Dev Acadamy's Roguelike tutorials. The idea I had was to have a virus moving through different areas of the net messing things up through pushing different blocks into slots. hence SokoVirus (sokoban virus). I was still new to making games, so I picked a genre I could wrap my head around and tried to not have super complicated mechanics. I loved how the menus worked out and it gave me the confidence to try my hand at more unique game ideas.

Merchant Life

By Olivander65

Developed 7/26/23 - 8/11/23

My second Pico-8 game.

With this game I wanted to do something unique. I was inspired by Oregon Trail and delivery type games like Euro Truck Simulator 2 and Albion Online. It was fun to go through a bunch of ideas and draw out maps and UI elements on paper before trying to program it.

Pico-8's extreme memory limits helps restrict the amount of features you can add to a game and helps get games done!

Shallow End

By Olivander65

Developed 8/25/23 - 3/27/24

There were two games that inspired me during the development of shallowend: Lenna's Inception and Undertale. I wanted to do a game about following after a failed hero and the interactions the hero had with so called "evil bosses".

I was also reading Crime and Punishment at the time and really wanted to do something about subconscious processing. This led to thinking about sibling relationships and how those relationships change once those siblings reach adulthood.

Solar Collection

By Olivander65

Developed 3/27/24 - 4/27/24

Lazy Dev academy again helping with initial game mechanics. I wanted to make a fruit drop game in space where instead of shooting at enemies like in Galaga, you are chasing a sun trying to collect pieces to fuel your ship and collect points. I wanted there to be fun patterns for the stars as well as cool sequences at the end of levels. The patterns were made using Bezier curves. It was fun to learn about some random maths in the process.

Also, one of my favorite parts of this entire game was the main menu. I loved that it looked like a ships controls and the changing characters as you navigated around.

Tiny Epic Kingdoms - Demake

By Olivander65

Developed 6/30/24 - 8/23/24

Tiny Epic Kingdoms is one of my favorite board games. It's short, small, and gives you a fairly complete 4x game experience without taking all day. It fits very nicely with the ethos of Pico-8. I started thinking about the idea of making a Pico-8 version of this board game on a trip to Ireland. I was at a coffee shop waiting for our group to finish an activity and I pulled out the pocket version of this game and started playing the solo varient and jotting down ideas for how would go about coding it. That was enough to get me excited to start working on it when I got back home.

I ended up only having a limited number of factions, and there wasn't enough space left to try to make the animations clearer, but it is a complete recreation of the game with an AI opponent. I had a ton of fun playing this myself.

Idle Dungeon

By Olivander65

Developed 3/15/25 - 4/10/25

Idle dungeon was inspired by some of my favorite style of games. That being dungeon builder games like Dungeon Keeper and Dungeons 3. I also was playing UFO at the time and was enjoying Avianos. I wanted to implement the auto battling portion of that game. I was also wanted to have the creatures hang out somewhere on your screen once they were summoned, sort of like a tamagotchi pet. Similar to previous games, this game is a combination of things I enjoy in gaming. I loved the main menu art that I came up with and was overall very happy with how it turned out.

The Game - Face to Face

By Olivander65

Developed 7/26/25 - 8/19/25

This is another board game that I enjoyed in real life and thought it would make a fun Pico-8 treatment. The aesthetic was what drew me into trying this game. Most games have a story of some kind, but this one really didn't. It dark and a little bit creepy and left my mind wondering what the meaning of the game would be. The idea of souls in purgatory trying to escape through a game of chance came from a lot of inspirations with a few being High Stakes (probably in my top 5 Pico-8 games) and animes like Kaiji: Ultimate Survivor.

Network Operator

By Olivander65

Developed 1/23/26 - 6/3/2026

This game is a small homage to two things I really enjoyed as a kid: the Mega Man Battle Network series and the WarioWare games. The Battle Network Switch collection had just came out so I was back in the mood for some cyberspace action.

One of my favorite Battle Network games was a side game called Battle Chip Challenge. It focused more on building folders and sometimes helping navis with a well timed battle chip. I love the mainline series of games, but Battle Chip Challenge always felt closer to the anime in how it felt to play.