Pixl8 on your watch

Playing your PICO-8 library on a Wear OS smartwatch

Pixl8 runs on Wear OS watches — Samsung Galaxy Watch, Pixel Watch and others — so your games come along on your wrist. A 128×128 PICO-8 game is right at home on a tiny round screen. This page covers the three things worth knowing: how the watch app is laid out, how to get your games onto the watch, and how to play them.

How the watch app is laid out

Everything is built for a thumb and a small round screen. Your games sit in a coverflow — a carousel of cart covers you flick through sideways, with the one in the middle ready to play. Turn the rotating bezel or crown to spin through quickly, or just swipe.

There are three of these carousels stacked on top of each other. Swipe up and down to move between them:

• Featured — the games that ship with Pixl8.
• Library — the games you've sent over from your phone.
• System — Unlock Pro, Exit, and Settings.

To leave a game or the app, use the watch's usual swipe in from the left edge. A long-press on any cover opens a small menu — open its BBS page on your phone, resume from your last save, start fresh, or delete it.

Getting your games onto the watch

Games come over from the phone app — nothing is downloaded on the watch itself.

1. Install Pixl8 on the watch from the Play Store
2. If not done already, pair the watch to your phone.
3. In the phone app, long-press a game → Send to watch (or multi-select to send several).
4. They land in the watch's Library carousel, ready to play.

Playing — the on-screen controls

The whole screen is your gamepad, split down the middle:

• Left half — movement. Tap a direction for a quick step, or press and slide for a little joystick. Steer with one thumb while you tap a button with the other.
• Right half — the two buttons. X on top, O on the bottom (PICO-8's two action buttons).
• Bottom strip — pause. A tap along the bottom opens the pause menu. You can also flick your wrist to pause.

Don't want one of the pause options? Both the wrist-tilt and the bottom-strip tap can be switched off in Settings (you can't turn off both — one always stays so you can quit).

Fitting the game on a round screen

A PICO-8 game is square and your watch is round, so by default Pixl8 tucks the whole game just inside the bezel — nothing important gets clipped in the corners. If you'd rather fill more of the screen (and let the corners spill past the edge), open Settings → Screen game size and drag the slider — a red outline previews exactly how the game will sit. On a watch with a rotating bezel you can also adjust it from inside a game by turning the bezel while paused.

Settings & Pro

The System carousel holds the watch settings:

• Resume on tap — a plain tap on a game continues from your last save instead of starting over. PRO
• Auto-save on exit — quietly saves where you were when you quit, so the next launch picks up where you left off. PRO
• Tap to pause / Tilt to pause — the two pause-method toggles.
• Screen game size — the round-screen fit slider above.

You can unlock Pro right on the watch from the System carousel — and if you already bought it on your phone, it carries over automatically.

New to Pixl8 generally? The FAQ and the other how-tos cover the phone app. Spot something that should be on this page? Open an issue on GitHub.