Fallen Kingdom: PICO-8 Port
I learned to program in the 80’s when the limits of the hardware determined the limits of your programs. We had to get pretty creative to work within the crazy constraints of that time. That’s what makes PICO-8 so priceless in an age of endless computational abundance. This fantasy console gives you a tiny 128×128 screen, 16 colors, four audio channels, and a hard limit of 8192 “tokens” of code. Those constraints present a welcome challenge. When such a limited canvas and palette, there’s only so much even the fiddliest of fiddlers can fiddle with.
The Inspiration
During one of my forays into nostalgia looking at recent ABBUC winners I came across Fallen Kingdom was written by Martin Simecek for the Atari 8-bit. This game took 2nd place in 2021. Turns out the game was based on Chessformer by Robert Alvarez. It’s a clever design with pieces limited to legal chess moves, the addition of gravity, and the same familiar chess goal:
Get one of your pieces onto the square occupied by the Red King.
Instead of a wide open 8x8 chess board you play on a 16x10 board with walls, floors, and other obstacles to block, catch, and interact with pieces. Floors can be passed through but still stop a fall. Knights do what knights do — jump to any reachable square. Floor Plates open up doors. The result is a straightforward puzzle that’s a lot of fun to solve in the minimum number of required moves.
You can read about (and download) the original over at the AtariAge thread for Fallen Kingdom.
One Day in December…
When I was first learning Lua I decided to write a little Chess program, not to play against, but just to enforce legal moves in a two player game. I built that pretty quickly — because Lua and PICO-8 are amazingly easy to learn! So I already had some chess code and graphics ready to go.
I put on the coffee, stopped sleeping for a few days, and soon my old code scrap had been reworked into a nice port. It was great to make such quick progress and have a completed game so quickly. It was important that this exercise be adjacent to the world of Atari 8-bit since that’s one of my planned destinations. I’d love to submit something for ABBUC. (But more on that in a future installment!)
Play Fallen Kingdom Now!
The cart lives in my PICO-8 collection as fallen.p8 (with fallen2.p8 and a fallen/ folder of Lua sources), and my latest version is embedded right here:
Click the screen to start. Move with the arrow keys (or WASD), O/X to select and confirm a move, R to reset the level, and Q to quit. On a desktop you can also plug in a gamepad.
If the embed above is too cramped, play Fallen Kingdom in a new tab — it scales up nicely to full-screen too.
Level Editor
I’ve also made a separate version with an editor that you can run from the shell to create your own puzzles and levels. Open the Fallen Kingdom Level Editor (opens in a new window).
Why I Keep Coming Back
PICO-8 rewards small ideas, allowing you to explore them right away and iterate on them quickly. There’s no build pipeline, no app store, no engine to wrestle — just a simplified toybox and the satisfaction of pieces falling into place. Fallen Kingdom is exactly the kind of game I love to create — turning a simple mechanic into a diverse set of puzzles.
Expect more PICO-8 experiments here as inspiration strikes and as I learn new tricks and techniques. If you give Fallen Kingdom a try, I’d love to hear how far you get and what suggestions you have to improve the game. There are some features of Chessformer not in this game, so maybe a future version will be coming along at some point to fill in those gaps.
The original “Fallen Kingdom” is by Martin Simecek based on “Chessformer” by Robert Alvarez — all credit for the design goes to them. This PICO-8 port is my own tribute, built for the fun of it.