Can i animate a game card in pulp?

Pulp
1

i've noticed some playdate games have animated game cards in the menu, and some don't! is it possible to animate a game card in pulp? when i have animated tiles in a game card right now they don't show as animated in the game browser. thank you for any help!

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Yes, you can do this, but not inside Pulp. Unfortunately the process is somewhat involved:

First, install the Playdate SDK if you haven't already.

Now export your Pulp game as a PDX. Unzip and open the PDX folder (on Mac, right-click and select Show Package Contents). You'll need to edit pdxinfo and add a bunch of files and folders here. The exact format and contents are described under Game Metadata in the documentation.

But there's a wrinkle: the images have to be converted from PNG to PDI before they'll work. Normally this is done by pdc, our compiler. But your game was already compiled on our server when you exported it. So a better way is to make a dummy game containing your launcher images and metadata, compile it, and then replace its compiled code with your compiled game binary (the main.pdz file).

For a starting point, you can use the "Level 1-1" example in the SDK examples.

  1. Copy the PlaydateSDK/Examples/Level 1-1 folder somewhere else.
  2. From the copy, delete everything from the Source folder except pdxinfo, main.lua, and SystemAssets.
  3. Replace the contents of SystemAssets with your game's images and metadata.
  4. Edit pdxinfo to contain your game's info.
  5. Compile via pdc on the command line.
  6. Inside the resulting .pdx folder, replace main.pdz with the one from your exported Pulp game.

Hopefully that should work. I realize it's a lot! I'll file a request to streamline this process in the future.

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thank you for responding! that does seem super complicated, and a streamlined process would be appreciated. thank you again!

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Just for future viewers of this thread, we now have a help article up that describes the process for doing this: Article on editing Pulp game metadata using the Playdate SDK