I took the retro space game aspect in a different direction by looking towards space invaders but simplified the concept to having the enemies coming at you, like Galaga. The game uses a few states, the title, the game, and the game over state. It will cycle through all three, with the game over state triggering if the player reaches zero health, and the title retriggering after the game over state while also showing your high score so far. I tried to emulate the drift-esque movement of a space ship, by having the values of one direction go up as you push one direction and then go down as time goes on or goes faster if the opposite direction is pushed. It didn’t quite work the way I wanted and is the thing that I think needs the most revision.
If anyone else is reading this and is getting started with Pico 8, I would definitely try something like this or any simple top down game first. Platformers have a lot more physics elements to balance when making them, and something like pong will have some intimidating math for the ball bouncing (as silly as that sounds). I also would say to not use rectfill for your sprites, I was coming off p5js and that was the easier option for me there. It was also easier to focus on the game that way, but it actually strains the engine more and can cause flickering. I would definitely just make super simple sprites to start off with, or just get some online as there are a lot of free packs to choose from.
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