My kids and I were loosely familiar with PICO-8 because of Celeste, and then when two of them got emulation-based handheld game systems they started dabbling. I've spent most of my life programming in a few ways but never actually made a finished game for someone else to play. But my kids and I started in early July 2024 and I figured it could be our summer project. It's our first PICO-8 game, in a pretty-well finished state, in just under a month.
It shouldn't be a hard one to pick up and play. Z/O is used to toggle the music and make menu selections, and the rest of the game is played with arrow keys/control pad.
Although a couple of my kids looked at and consulted on the code a bit their contributions were mostly ideation, with a bit of dabbling in sprites and sound design. Wyldstar did most of the sounds and a few sprites, and FlamingXP did several sprites.
Resources used include several YouTube tutorials by SpaceCat as primers, One-Off GFX by Heracleum for the title screen, and bikibird's Denote tool to convert a midi for the main music.