Getting Started

The jspicl CLI streamlines your PICO-8 game development by taking care of the build process so you can focus on the implementation.

Features:

• Comes with its own build pipeline so you don't have to set one up yourself.
• Supports treeshaking, preventing unused code from being included and increasing your token count.
• Use a PNG file for the spritesheet, enabling you to update it using an image editor of choice.
• Live reloading of PICO-8 cartridge whenever source code or spritesheet is updated.

Installation (optional)

Depending on your use case you can install the CLI globally, locally or use npx to run it directly.

npm install jspicl-cli -g
npm install jspicl-cli
npx jspicl-cli [<args>]

Recommended use-case is to install it locally in your project and include it in the scripts section in package.json.

Usage

Let's start by creating a file with the following content:

function _draw() {
  cls();
  print("hello world");
}

That's it! Now all you have to do is supply jspicl-cli with your game file to generate a PICO-8 cartridge and run it in PICO-8:

jspicl-cli PATH_TO_YOUR_FILE game.p8 --watch

Assuming you have PICO-8 installed in your system you should see the following:

Any changes to the source code will reload PICO-8 automatically for you (only on Mac OS for now, other OS will need a manual reload with Ctrl+R).