TIC-80 is wonderful to play in. Besides being free/open, another advantage over PICO-8 is TIC-80 has native support for Fennel. i.e. you can code within the system editor in Lua OR Fennel (or half a dozen other languages!) You don't have to edit and transpile to Lua on the desktop as you would with PICO-8. This has some value in debugging with error messages and line numbers.

It's also just plain cool to rock the TIC-80 editor fullscreen with narrow font, coding natively in Lisp and publishing the result to a webpage you can share.

I wish the iOS (app) deployment story was a little smoother for TIC-80.

TIC-80 is great indeed, I had even ore fu with it than with PICO-8 and that's a high bar.

But there is one gripe -- when packaging apps into executable, TIC-80 pulls templates from the Internet.

On one hand, it's not that big deal, we are online basically all time nowadays. But on the other hand, I would expect that kind of software to be self-contained.

I found a quite simple (but definitely not frictionless) workaround though - you can build the templates yourself, edit source code to work with localhost instead of TIC website, and host the templates on local webserver.

As I said, it's not a frictionless solution, but I don't know C well enough to make more substantial changes to this behaviour.

Is this about Master of Blocks?

There are a lot of free-as-in-freedom alternatives to (and clones of) PICO-8, but TIC-80 is indeed the most popular one, by far. And popularity is important for any software ecosystem. I really like that it supports other languages, even if that kinda inhibits its ability to be embedded into small hardware.

Apparently the nightly release supports DCPM samples now. Dunno why.

I'm planning on doing a TIC-80 implementation as one of the first major pieces of software on an OS I plan on working on (I've already designed the OS on paper, I just need to actually do the hard part (actually implementing it))

It's just that pico8 has much larger ecosystem. There's a new great game almost every day. It is sort of annoying that it's not FOSS, but on the other hand the team/author has sustainable business.