Jumper - my first Playdate game

Almost done with my first Playdate (learning) game, just need to make it progressively harder and figure out how to save/load the high score.

playdate-20201111-140841

playdate-20201117-152600

I'm learning to program while making this game, I migrated from Pico-8 and it feels pretty familiar.

3 Likes

what's the trick to uploading an animated .GIF ?

I tried but it looked terrible :frowning:

Brian - this is SUPER!

Game & Watch Collector Here!
(On the right hand side 2nd from the top is Parachute :wink:)

Will you share the PDX?

Depending on how anal you are about getting this right, a lot is known about the Nintendo G&W these days.

The CPU is a Sharp SM511 label BM-501 556AA, and the ROMs for these games are dumped for MAME. The community behind understanding how these things worked is amazing, they actually de-capped and scanned the chips to work all this out.

If you really want to jump down the habit hole:

Here is the manual for the CPU:
[http://bitsavers.org/components/sharp/_dataBooks/1990_Sharp_Microcomputers_Data_Book.pdf](http://Sharp Microcomputers Data Book)
A bit of info on how the G&W works at a high level
Paul Robson on understanding the SM510
This is the go-to thread on emulation status

So, if you decide to try and work out what the original sequence of the parachuters falling, game speed increase and so on, you could (a) disassemble the original ROM and dedicate your life to it - or (b) write a simple image analysis program to detect LCD segment activation over time.

Something to note, when Nintendo was developing the initial G&W they found that putting a slight delay at the moment you're about to lose increased playability in a big way.

And finally, try this search term in Google:
"Here's the (currently) complete set of Game & Watch"

And here is my extremely modest collection:

Cheers,
-Richard

3 Likes

Thanks for the response, I also have a pretty good collection of Game & Watches - love them!

I'll share the PDX when I finish it, I still have a bug I just can't figure out :frowning: (sometimes the shark attacks twice and I'm stuck trying to fix it)

I'm not too anal about timing, etc. I just really wanted to try to get something up and running on the Playdate and had these assets from another version of Parachute that I made with Verge3D from Soft8Soft (a webgl game engine that I used to create a bunch of interactive apps for NASA)

Here's a few of my personal projects:
Verge3D Web Interactive A/D or on-screen buttons, click a button to start (click logo to move around in 3D)
Verge3D Web Interactive h for instructions
Verge3D Web Interactive works on desktop browser, VR on IOS and Android but movement (tap on screen to toggle fly forward/backward only working on Android right now)

So Parachute in webgl also isn't finished as it never gets harder, you can click the G&W logo to move it around in 3D and still play it (with buttons or A/D keys and it works great on a Android phone (for some reason the sound is messing it up on iPhone)

Brian

It should be as simple as recording and saving the GIF from the Simulator, and dropping it into the composer here.

(In between I optimise the GIF using gifsicle to reduce the file size, but that's optional.)

I did just that, but it looked awful :frowning:

If you're on mobile it may look awful regardless. You can tap to zoom which helps a little but it will never look 1:1 perfect.

OK, thanks, I'll have to mess around with it some more.