ok @codl helped me realize i can use a loop and clip to pretend pico8 has scanlines and i made this https://computerfairi.es/media/WtiU5T1cEXdL_UH1cdA
now it has a crappy palmtree and against my better judgement i put it on the bbs https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=30532 https://computerfairi.es/media/zAsM_QYgpjEQQ4mNswA
@squirrel so you've got the moving water, all you'd need to add is some wavy text, some music, and cram it into an arbitrary number of bytes and you've got a demo!
@troubleMoney the code is so ugly any actual programmer would probably laugh at it
there's a lot of math that could be simplified but i'm not smart enough to even know what it's doing right now
i just fiddled with numbers until i got the results i wanted
@squirrel I don't know, the code looks reasonable enough to me, although then again I'm not an actual programmer
@troubleMoney you shouldn't calculate sines that much in a single frame
@noelle @troubleMoney i'm sure it'd look better if i actually stopped to think proper values to put in the sines instead of just random numbers
@squirrel it's a happy little tree