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 into a PICO-8 cartridge?
For anyone who hasn’t met PICO-8: it’s a “fantasy console”. It’s a pretend games machine from an 80s that never happened, with very strict rules:
- a 128×128 screen
- 16 colours
- four sound channels
- 8,192 tokens of code, and not one more
That last one is the killer. A token is roughly one word of code, so every variable name, every bracket and every “if” costs you. It’s like writing a novel where every word costs a pound, and you’ve only got eight grand.
That’s exactly why I wanted to try it. The limits are the fun part.
Week one: a deck of cards
The first job was the least glamorous one: make a deck of 52 cards, shuffle it and deal eight. In a normal engine that’s an afternoon. In PICO-8 it’s also an afternoon, but you spend the second half of it working out how to store a card in as few tokens as possible.
I landed on storing each card as a single number: rank plus suit times sixteen. It’s ugly, it’s clever, and I’ll have forgotten how it works by next Tuesday.
The cards themselves are tiny, about 12 pixels wide. Hearts and diamonds look almost identical at that size, so the red suits got slightly different shades. That’s the kind of decision you never expect to spend an hour on.
Week two: is that a pair?
Next came the hand evaluator, the bit of code that looks at five cards and decides what they are. Pair, two pair, three of a kind, straight, flush and so on, nine hands in total.
This is where I learned that straights are the devil. Is A-2-3-4-5 a straight? Yes. Is 10-J-Q-K-A a straight? Also yes. Is Q-K-A-2-3? Absolutely not, and it took me three evenings to stop the game believing it was.
Then I added the rule that makes the whole thing work: only the cards that make the hand actually score. If you play a pair with three random cards, those three are just along for the ride. It’s a tiny rule, but it changes everything about which cards you keep.
Chips × mult
Scoring is the heart of it. Every hand has a blue number (chips) and a red number (mult), and your score is one times the other. Blue box times red box. It’s simple to read, which matters when your whole screen is the size of a postage stamp.
The first time I played a flush, watched the numbers tick up and beat the target with one hand to spare, I actually said “oh no” out loud. That’s when I knew it was going to eat the rest of my year.
Where it’s at
- Deck, dealing, selecting cards: done
- Hand evaluator: done (straights finally behaving)
- Chips × mult scoring: done
- Blinds and a target score: half done
- Shop, mods, bosses, music: lol
Token count: about 3,100 of 8,192. That sounds fine until you remember I haven’t built most of the game yet.
It’s called Pal8tro, by the way. A Balatro demake for PICO-8. A tiny love letter, not affiliated with the real thing in any way, made by someone who should probably be asleep.
Next time: the shop, the mods, and the moment I run out of room.
– TJ (Taylonius)
