After looking through the tutorials I referenced in my previous post on PICO-8 game development, I decided I needed to get a little more practice with less guidance to really learn how to make games on PICO-8. Luckily for me, someone shared the so-called 20 Games Challenge on a Discord server I'm in, which provides some inspiration for how to build up your skills without spelling everything out for you. This was exactly what I wanted, a little pointer without the hand-holding to get me going in the right direction. The first challenge in the list offers a couple of different options for a simple game to build to get familiar with the libraries and frameworks you've chosen, along with game development in general. I chose to build pong.
My implementation is overly simple, and not quite fully built, but it's enough for me to feel like I've learned what I can from this simple example and I'm ready to move on to more difficult games to build. Next up: breakout.