by TJ Hayes | Oct 20, 2026 | Devlog
I love a chunky pixel. Pal8tro lives inside a PICO-8 cartridge, and the Galactic Zoo residents have their own 16-bit sprites. So it may come as a surprise that one of the two games I’m building right now doesn’t have a single sprite in it. That game is...
by TJ Hayes | Sep 25, 2026 | Devlog
It’s out. Pal8tro is live on itch.io. I’m writing this with a cup of tea that went cold an hour ago, because I keep refreshing the page to check it’s still there. Before the celebrating, here’s how the last few weeks went. The music problem Last time I said the game...
by TJ Hayes | Sep 7, 2026 | Devlog
Right. Last time I had a deck of cards and a scoring system. Since then I’ve built a shop, twenty mods, ten bosses, and I’ve hit the wall every PICO-8 developer hits eventually. More on that in a minute. First, the fun stuff. The shop Between rounds you get to spend...
by TJ Hayes | Aug 10, 2026 | Devlog
ok so I’ve started a thing. I’ve been playing far too much Balatro. Not “a bit” too much. Whole-evenings, one-more-ante, why-is-it-2am too much. Somewhere around my four-hundredth flush, a question wormed its way in and wouldn’t leave: could you squeeze the core of it...
by TJ Hayes | Jul 9, 2026 | Devlog
Every creature in my picture book The Galactic Zoo started life as a full-colour illustration. This month I wanted to see what they’d look like if they’d escaped into an old video game. So I redrew the residents as 16-bit-style game sprites, each with its own little...
