Something to help create more complex games in Pico-8 rather than just simple one-off demos. All this code is free to take, use, change, adapt, or whatever. Have fun.
Press Z to cycle through scenes and X to reset back to the default scene.
Scene 0 shows a clock running, scene 1 still shows the clock but doesn't update it, scene 2 rolls a random number every few ticks, and scene 3 just looks pretty. The whole demo weighs in at only 161 lines of code.
ABOUT
This cart contains a simple set of functions used to swap out scenes composed of layers made up of calculations and drawing instructions. For this release there's some basic demo data so you can reverse-engineer the thinking and maybe adapt it to your own projects. I tried to mirror Pico-8's default updatedraw style of functionality so you hopefully don't have to change the way you think about writing your games too much.
I made this tool for myself but I wanted to share it because it might help you, if you're like me and struggle with manifesting complex projects. I'm not very experienced as a programmer but I've spent a lot of time using drawing tools like Photoshop. Art tools often use layers to organize complex compositions. So I decided to adapt that way of thinking into Pico-8. I find this helps me keep everything straight in my head as I work. Instead of building monolithic behaviors inside the default _update and _draw functions, this scene manager allows me to create scenes built up of whatever components those scenes should have.
This has the added benefit of making it easier to jump back into projects after not looking at them for a while, because you don't have to completely rediscover your old thought processes in order to start playing around with new ideas. That has saved me a lot of time! I found my code became much more readable and easier to manage after making the switch to using this scene manager. A modified version of this very cart became the core of my Pocket Full of Sand