I'm a full time french indie developer working on a minimalist city builder game.
I need side projects to relax a bit though, and I decided to make a game for the playdate. I won't work more than a few hours on this every week, so progress will be slow, but I'll share the journey on this forum.
** # Concept**
You play as a sniper, and... you shoot things.
The idea is to make use of the crank to zoom in or out. The D-pad is used to move your cursor around.
To reload, you'll need to tilt the playdate towards you (using the accelerometer). Then you'll need to crank up and down several time to reload bullets one by one.
A button is to shoot, B button to pause the game.
# Prototype
Here's a small prototype I made to setup the playdate environment and see how I could use the crank to zoom in and out.
I don't know much about faking 3D in 2D. As you can see the zoom out and in is kind of strange. If you have good resources about this I'm all ears.
Also if your know of someone making a similar game for the playdate, let me know.
If you don't want to miss the next devlogs, be sure to follow me on itch (I'll repost over there).
Neat! The thick black art shrinks down well during zooming. Yes, there are inevitable artifacts, but nothing I find particularly weird for pixel art. I guess it depends how big you expect the art to be during normal play. The detail is lost when tiny... but the device IS tiny after all!
Chunky big pixels like yours do well at a variety of sizes.
Time to teach that air ambulance a lesson!
I'm not sure what kind of 3D you'll be going for, but you can get nice parallax by panning different "layers" different amounts. Distant things would move less. (Don't forget to use both white AND transparency in your layer art.)
(My upcoming game does zooming too... but for a totally unrelated purpose. NOT a similar game at all. "A hidden object" quest within a big photo. I use A and B for zooming since i need the crank for other things, and my zoom method is absurdly complex to get the effect I wanted.)
Thanks for sharing !
I think I'm missing something, using the white and transparency in the art ? :o
Really looking towards your game release then ! Actually my first idea was to play an assassin that must find its target in a big city by zooming and guessing who it is with clues. But... kind of a big scope for one person on a side project so I reduced it to simply zoom and shoot.
Well, say you have two layers of black buildings, and you want the far buildings to show through the gaps between the near buildings. But maybe you don't want anything to show through the windows: you just want those to be solid white. In that case, your artwork could have buildings made of black and white solid pixels, plus transparent pixels where you want things to show through from behind.
The SDK will accept PNGs that contain all 3 states.
