I've been working on my passion project for so long, I can't remember when exactly I started. 

I started teaching myself to code C# in late high school, and at the time I was so overwhelmed, I thought that making a game would require downloading a thousand assets from Unity, and copying a dozen tutorial videos from YouTube. That was certainly a great place to start, as there is no quicker way to get an idea of something than to watch someone else do it, but before long I wanted to move away from such large tools. They always felt a bit overwhelming - you can do anything, so I was trying to do everything. 

I moved to XNA/Monogame and started learning to make my own small engines. I was still using C#, so it was familiar, and I was learning to create things from the ground up - and in the meantime getting an understanding of how systems actually worked. 

When I first heard of PICO 8, I thought I would have to start all over by learning Lua. Turns out, not only was the language so incredibly intuitive, I had developed passable programming skills so learning something new wasn't as hard as I anticipated. 

Messing with PICO 8 turned out to be exactly what I needed - a break from my main game so that I could avoid burnout, and a restricted system that was the polar opposite of making something in Unity or GameMaker. 

Tomb Boom is not just my first try at making something at PICO 8, it is also my first COMPLETED product. It's not huge, and I had to leave a lot on the cutting room floor to get it out before my self-imposed deadline, but I am very proud to have actually gotten to the finish line. 

In the future, if people are playing, I may revisit to add back in the 2-3 other worlds I started but abandoned to keep my focus. 

I will definitely be making more games with PICO 8 whenever I need a side project to refresh my gamedev energy! 

dan