picoCAD Competition

We’re hosting a picoCAD competition, from February 18th to the 27th!

Watch the picoCAD video (Internet Archive)

picoCAD itself is technically free, although it is encouraged during checkout to send a few $$$ to its creator.

Anyone is welcome to contribute to the competition free of charge, we have yet to finalize how exactly submissions and judging will go, but keep an eye out on this page / our socials, and we’ll be releasing those details later.

View the MUNCS beanie (Internet Archive)

For our best submission, we will be giving away a MUNCS beanie!

There will be a selection of different themes being released throughout the next week or so, each one being slightly vague / left up to interpretation.

We will also be accepting general submissions during the event as well!

Near the end of the competition, voting will open up for the best of each theme, but also some extra categories as well!

There are a selection of channels in our Discord server (prefixed with #picocad-...), to get help, and showcase your work!

Said themes are:

Feb. 18th: Color

View the Color theme image (Internet Archive)

Our first theme is likely our most abstract, for good reason!; feel free to just make something simple.

Even opening up picoCAD to make a pretty colored cube can be considered a valid submission for todays theme; or you can run with it and make a box of crayons, or a pretty rainbow.

The floor is yours!

Feb. 24th: Computer, and Memorial University

View the Computer and Memorial University theme image (Internet Archive)

We’ve been more silent than we planned, but we are back!

Not with one theme, but two!

Computer: a box with a screen!

Memorial University: a building, logo, animal, etc.

Feb. 25th: ???

Feb. 26th: ???

Where can I learn how to use picoCAD?

• picoCAD homepage: https://johanpeitz.itch.io/picocad (contains a download of manual in the format of a PDF document)
• Gamesfromscratch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNzL5QCHZj0
• Brandon James Greer on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMX0SI5Av-8 (there are a handful of great videos on their channel)
• The #picocad-help channel in Discord
• For texturing, you can use any tool you want; a good list of pixel art specific ones can be found on the lospec website.

For general inspiration, the #picocad hashtag on twitter is great!

What is picoCAD?

picoCAD “is a program to build and texture lowpoly 3D models”, which itself is written as a pico-8 program.

The program can be considered hard to master, but itself isn’t very complicated; the entire manual for the program (available over on its itch.io page) is quite small, and produces wonderful gifs such as:

and