I made a little bullet-hell shmup in PICO-8! It can be played in a browser over at itch.io.
The game is a recreation of the final boss fight of Cave's ESP Ra. De., developed on and off through 2023, featuring vtubers Henemimi ๐ฃ and Mint Castella๐พ, with art by Rojeitox๐ฑ.

I've wanted to re-create the Gaara fight for a while, and Mimi's Touhou-style character sheet presented a neat game-making opportunity. It took a while, and scope creep really stalled the project, but it got done. PICO-8's harsh limits are a double-edged sword - the project scope has to be tight or it won't fit at all, but even small projects can be subject to scope creep, pushing up against the token limit. The release version took four refactoring passes to fit extra stuff, finally settling at 8110/8192 code tokens.
Updates?
For my own sanity I'm leaving this project alone for a bit, but I might make some updates in the future if I find any code tokens under the couch:
- revise the first phase (circles + snow) - The alternating circle pattern is a bit TOO dense for extremely new players, who should be able to last at least 10-15 seconds before getting asploded.
- revise the fourth phase (WAN WAN shotgun) - This also seems to be a massive wall for players
- formally implement GAME OVER in Strong mode (arcade) + bypass - It does feel weird that the "harder" Strong mode is easier than the "normal" (pointdevice) mode simply because one lets you facetank through the game while the other enforces perfect play.