A step by step introduction to TIC 80, Part 2 Workflow

In Part 1, we went through the default cart of TIC-80. Now it's time to go through the general workflow of making games with TIC-80.

Note: This part of the tutorial is still work in progress.

Saving and loading

In the previous part, we created a new default cart with the command new. It might be a good idea to now save it! That's done with the command

save cartname.tic

After the first save we can just save the cart with plain save or by pressing CTRL+S. And similarly, a cart is loaded with command

load cartname.tic

(Tip: You can autocomplete commands: In the previous command, you could just write load c and press TAB and TIC will complete the command!)

TIC's file system

But where are the carts?

They are inside the TIC's data folder, the only folder visible to TIC-80. For easy access, the folder can be revealed in Explorer with command folder.

You can use file system commands akin to unix to navigate and manipulate the folders and files inside the data folder:

Commands ls or dir show the contents of your current working directory. Folders are shown in gray inside [brackets].

Move to a folder with command cd foldername. To go back to the parent directory, use command cd ...

Additionally, you can use mkdir foldername to create a new, empty folder. Similarly, del filename can be used to delete files or folders. Be careful here, though!

Adding demo carts

If there isn't any carts to see, we see the prompt

use ADD or DEMO command to add carts

add copies a cart from any folder to TIC's data folder.

demo is a more interesting command: it adds nine demo carts to the data folder.

Carts on TIC's website

A good way to see the capabilities of any tool is to see what people have made with it. So where to start?

Well, there are many carts hosted on the TIC's website!

Commands

help gives a list of available commands.

new loads a new default cart. It contains a very barebones Hello World example.

save cartname saves the current cart as cartname.tic.

load cartname loads the cart named cartname.tic.

The cartridges are stored in TIC's own data folder, you can open it with folder command.

To see the folder's contents, use the dir or ls command.

To play your game, use the run command. You can exit the game back to command line by pressing ESC. To resume your game, use the resume command.