Fan makes 8bit version of Dota 2 in virtual Pico-8 console

How nice would it be to run the complex Dota 2 on a very small engine? One fan wondered, and he put his money where his mouth is by recreating the game in the form of an 8-bit game, using Pico-8, a “fantasy console.”

The ‘new’ game to be played in the browser is called Dota-8. The maker explains that he really enjoyed recreating a crunch-heavy game like Dota 2 in a tiny engine. He warns players that the game is not balanced in any way and thus playing can be a frustrating affair.

Most of the basic elements from Dota 2 are also present in Dota-8. For example, players can choose five heroes in their team, there are three lanes, waves of creeps, towers and experience points. The controls work by means of the arrow keys; the Z and Y keys are for handling the different abilities.

Dota-8 roughly follows the rules of Dota 2, although the necessary elements have been simplified. For example, in Dota-8 there are about ten different heroes to choose from and each has only two unique abilities. A round is not won by taking down the Ancient, but by destroying all the towers in a lane.

The game is based on Pico-8, an 8bit “fantasy console”, or virtual console. It is not an emulator of an existing 8-bit machine, but software that exploits the limits of an 8-bit system, as it were. All software for Pico-8 is open source. Pico-8 also uses virtual cartridges, where created games are packaged in their entirety in the extra data of that cartridge’s PNG image.