Thought for the Day Released

After less than a month of development, I am proud to release my first finished app for the PICO-8 fantasy console. This app was inspired by my munitorum.net clock and like it, it displays the current time of day in 24-hour format with the current Imperial date from Warhammer 40,000. Below that, it presents a truly inspirational quote from your local Departmento Munitorum’s Commissariat office — the Emperor be praised!

This app was developed completely in the PICO-8 development environment and includes a number of cool features like visual effects that simulate a CRT look, complete with scanlines and a magnetisation glitch. It will also remember what day it is across reboots, in order to show only one inspirational message each day. I am quite proud of this. And of the fact that I figured out how to calculate the Imperial date on a platform that only provides a quite rudimentary date function. At the moment, it includes 120 different Imperial proverbs. Excluding the proverbs and graphics, the whole app is just 337 lines of code.

If you want to try this app, here are some links to the PICO-8 cartridge, standalone binaries for multiple operating systems and to a web app hosted on this site that should work in most desktop and mobile browsers:

If you are interested in how it works under the hood, the source code is on GitHub under the MIT License.

As I plan to release more PICO-8 apps, and eventually also games, I have created a new Software section of the site. Keep that bookmarked for future reference!

I hope you like this little app. If you do, leaving a comment would make me happy. 🤓