i saw poom a while ago and honestly it is so mind-bogglingly audacious that i don't know how to properly convey it. i don't know if you can truly appreciate it unless you're a moderately seasoned gamedev who has made a pico-8 game
i stress that the pico-8 is not merely a game engine, it is a game """console""" trying to recreate the vague aesthetic of what it was like to make 8-bit games, except without all the bad parts.
like, the code is just lua, but there are fake costs for every lua operation, like the timing of cpu instructions, which is a thing you once had to care about. this ensures that games run basically the same on any computer, but it also puts a hard upper bound on just how much you can do per frame before it starts skipping draws
there's also a cap on the amount of code you can have in a cartridge. otherwise it wouldn't really be a cartridge, right?
also i stress that this thing has drawing primitives of the form "put a sprite here" and "draw a rectangle". ot is a 2D console
i guess the only way i can really hammer this home is to show you my pico-8 game. this uses all available sprite space, all available map space, crams more graphics into what's supposed to be audio rom, and uses every available byte of code space. and i still had to strip all the comments to actually get it to export. and the game is still tiny, it's nowhere near the size or complexity of the average game boy game
i pushed the console to its limits to make a mini platformer you can beat in a few minutes
and they put fucking doom on it
