@stepepson has been doing amazing work updating the art.
We have a new portrait for Stella and some some really nice looks dialogue boxes.
And @Drew-Lo has been instrumental in updating the lighting code.
I made it so you can drop the lamp and Drew was then able to attach the light to the lamp.
I think it makes the world feel more alive. Like you can touch it.
We hope to use this for puzzles in the future.
Love that leaving of the lamp, neat idea!
That lamp is definitely selling it for me 
oh man - oh man - i can't wait to play this!
My interview and hangout with @GantProdux on this week’s Tiny Yellow Machine was a lot of fun.
I got to talk about my early love and involvement in indie games, building a Winnitron, getting into the Netrunner community and finally working on Comet.
Check it out!
Tried to start it at an interesting spot
This was good stuff! Worth a watch.
I've mostly been fixing up bug lately and it's been REALLY fun!
Two main themes
Splitting up the state of the player so I can turn player sprite elements off and on at different times.
Implementing my own metadata system
Having a sprite that is two tiles means you run into a lot of edge cases where things look wrong. When you want to hide the player so it looks like they are behind a wall.
And then i'm wanting to place down a lamp in the world. But I don't want to place it if...
~the light level is 0 (Then the player can loose it)
~if the location you're placing it is solid
~if the location you're placing the lamp is "behind" something (As it would replace the tile)
The only meta data tiles have is solid or not. You can't define a tile as above.
I was planning to simply list many if statements for each "above" tile but @orkn had a better idea. So all credit to him on this one.
"So if the
solidfunction didn't exist, and we wanted some way of knowing if a tile is "solid" or not, and we wanted to check if a tile is solid or not in multiple places around our project, we might decide to make our own version of thesolidfunction. In the game script we add:on isTileSolid do if tile=="white" then tileIsSolid = 0 elseif tile=="black" then tileIsSolid = 1 end endand we can keep adding
elseifsfor every tile in our game. (As a potential optimisation we realise we could start the event withtileIsSolid = 0and then only add ifs for those tiles that are solid, but maybe we appreciate the explicit list of all tiles as it makes changing the metadata easier, idk!) Then wherever in our code we want to check if a tile is solid, we do this:tile = name x,y tell event.game to call "isTileSolid" end myTileIsSolid = tileIsSolidand that is functionally equivalent to the actually built-in
myTileIsSolid = solid x,yThe
isTileSolidevent is effectively a function with an inputtileand an outputtileIsSolid, it's just Pulpscript doesn't support event arguments and return values so we just have to be careful juggling global variables. Thesolidfunction does exist, so this isn't necessary, but if we want to add new kinds of "metadata" to tiles, like their "aboveness" in this case, then you could take this approach."
I took that and made the following.
In game I have
on isTileAbove do
tileIsAbove = "false"
if aboveTarget=="roof top" then
tileIsAbove = "true"
elseif tile=="other" then
// tileIsAbove = "true"
end
end
And in my on cancel event which I use tileIsAbove for checking if the player can place the lamp
on cancel do
if lampHeld=="true" then // holding the lamp | There's zero lamps on the screen
lampTargetX = event.px
lampTargetY = event.py
if playerLastMove=="L" then
lampTargetX--
elseif playerLastMove=="R" then
lampTargetX++
elseif playerLastMove=="U" then
lampTargetY--
elseif playerLastMove=="D" then
lampTargetY++
end
lampTarget = name lampTargetX,lampTargetY
lampTargetSolid = solid lampTargetX,lampTargetY
aboveTarget = lampTarget
tell event.game to
call "isTileAbove"
end
if lightRadius>0 then
if lampTargetSolid==0 then
if tileIsAbove=="false" then
tell lampTargetX,lampTargetY to
swap "Lamp"
lampHeld = "false" // not holding the lamp
lampRoom = event.room
if illumination=="dark" then
// re-illuminate the room so that the radius now centers around the lamp instead of the player
emit "darken_tile"
tell event.game to
call "darken_room"
call "illuminate_tiles"
end
end
end
elseif tileIsAbove=="true" then
sound "prohibited"
say "Can't Place lamp behind things" at 1,10,21,3
end
elseif lampTargetSolid==1 then
sound "prohibited"
end
elseif lightRadius==0 then
sound "prohibited"
say "I don't want to lose this lamp in the darkness" at 1,10,21,3
end
end
end
Been doing lots of bug fixes since I last updated everyone.
Two big changes tho.
The first is a static light system.
This was needed for the start of the game before the player has a lamp.
The second is a new pretty light system where we round the corner off on the lamp.
That raised the challenge of the pretty static corners and the player's pretty lamp corners overlapping.
Something like this...
Well with the help of @Drew-Lo we were able to make a system that worked!
The heartrate: XX is supposed to trigger a game-over if it gets too high? Maybe make it only count up from 60? With heartrate: 00 you'll be just as dead as you would be with heartrate: 300 
Oh yea this system is just a debug state right now.
I'll have some sort of UI to represent it eventually.
Long time no see people.
Not so long ago, I got my Playdate.
I thought Pulp Mill might be able to save it, but unfortunately, it was too buggy.
Some bugs were understandable, like not knowing about new Pulp functions.
Others were odd like north and south exits working but east and west cause a crash!?
I felt pretty low about the whole thing, but both @Drew-Lo & @Jongjungbu came in to support me.
They helped refactor which tiles were being addressed when updating lighting, moved lots of logic out of my draw event 
and advised on how I should be drawing Stella.
Performance improved but it still wasn't great.
17-20 FPS when standing still at night, 15 FPS when walking, 4.5 when cranking to change the light level.
We tested removing more of the UI but the result was the same.
And we think we could have improved how we handled cranking but even then, basic movement within the game would feel bad.
The frame based method to create my ring of light was still too much for Pulp.
It was clear that even stripped back, Comet wasn't going to work on in Pulp.
Now is a good time to say, that throughout my learning journey this year, @Drew-Lo has been endlessly kind, engaged and supportive of everything I've been doing. Comet-P (My ongoing name for the Pulp build of Comet) would be next to nothing without him.
I for sure had major help from people like @stepepson but there wouldn't have been a project for anyone to jump on to if it wasn't for the steady support of Drew. Both technical or otherwise.
So where did that leave me? @ncarson9, @Jongjungbu and I had a little Pulp crew huddle and I was sharing what was going on. And for some unknown reason, @Jongjungbu said that when he finished Castle Helios, he'd think about helping me bring Comet to the SDK.
Some time passed and then we started getting into it.
And that's where we are.
Now @Jongjungbu, @stepepson, Will & I are working together to make this lil game.
Progress is going well. We're working towards matching Comet-P's feature set, then moving into new area and elements.
We have smooth movement.
A true dark layer mask with our intended shape. (Blocky circle vs square with rounded corners)
LDtk integration & larger maps (Although in testing, not this large but much larger than Pulp.)
We now have some lamp placing action
And now animated tiles.
This represents a lot of work by @Jongjungbu in a relatively short period of time. So big shout out to him.
So happy for you that you can continue this project! The community here and on discord is so wholesome
If you're not in the Playdate Squad discord, come check it out.
Looks really cool! Pulp 2x2 retro res + full SDK effects!
Do we think this could turn into the record for longest devlog? Or maybe @orkn has that record cause the Resonant Tale is mighty massive 
It's really cool to see how much this has developed - now in the full SDK! Could there be a better using-pulp-to-get-into-dev story than that!
Great devlog! Thanks for sharing your effort and setbacks. I look forward to playing Comet when the game is out and when I have my Playdate
Loved reading all of this and following the journey. So cool to see people coming together like this to bring it to life. I'm here mostly lurking, but hope to try developing something simple at some point soon in pulp
Just scrolled through this thread after seeing you around lots of other threads I was reading, and this is some seriously amazing stuff! All the sprites look amazing. Such a cool concept, and cannot wait to see it come to fruition! 
Oh thanks. It feels like I've been stuck on Chapter 1 for SOOO long 
.
We're making some good progress now that lots of our systems are in place.
Hope to share some more info and details soon enough.
