I am curious @ast-rsk how would you go about building a car like this in Blender?
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It's late but I took a crack at the F1 model. Here's about 5m sped up to about 1m, just the modeling part and no texturing though it would be super easy to texture since you can use a 1-bit texture to uv map in seconds. Of course I have your reference image so it's faster to accomplish and I made a bunch of mistakes because I didn't plan this out too well.
oops, gif cutoff. heres the mp4 of the timelapse
My thinking here is that if I were to adapt your process on windows, I'd use blender (I guess it would work on mac too) to setup a template file that has a camera animation where stock camera positions are setup as keyframes, and in sync with those keyframes would be the necessary part movements like wheel positions.
Using the template project you could model up and texture a car pretty fast and then just hit render to render out each frame. From there we would need some way to stitch the images into a sprite sheet but theoretically blender can have its render settings configured to output the right size per-frame, right color depth, even add in shaders that could filter for you, and the only step would be to stitch into a sprite sheet. I'm over simplifying the process because again, it's late. But that's just off the top of my head with your great detailed process explanation!
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Thanks for that! Very interesting.
All of my positions and distances are based on units that I know map well to a 32px sprite, so eyeballing it like you did gives me shivers. But I guess there's a way of entering specific coordinates into Blender? But that would perhaps slow down the modelling process?
Something for the weekend?
Here's another demo build of Daily Driver. It is a couple weeks old (dated 30 July) so whilst not representative of where I am right now with the game it does show my progress since the last build I shared at the start of June. Would love to know your thoughts!
Controls
- any combination of d-pad, A/B, Crank
- d-pad U/D, or A/B = accel/brake
- d-pad L/R, or Crank = steer left/right
Notes
- runs at 60fps on device (50fps in Simulator)
- pressing Menu twice will reset the current stage layout
- pressing Menu then Options will load the next stage
- 19 different stages (all cone layouts in this build)
- includes level editor!
Debug Keys for game (simulator only):
- E = open level editor
- F = toggle fps indicator
- J = jump!
- L = list all sprites
- N = next stage
- P = play replay data
- R = print replay data to console
- T = toggle telemetry
- U = toggle frame limiter
Controls for editor (simulator only):
- d-pad = move cursor
- A = place an object or increment object under the cursor
- B = toggle precision mode
- cursor moves in smaller increments (5px vs 20px)
- drag/move item under cursor
- A = delete item under cursor
Debug Keys for editor (simulator only):
- B = new blank stage
- D = dump stage JSON to console (for copy and pasting)
- E = exit level editor
- O = output stage as "m-edited.json" in game Sandbox directory
- Z = undo (deletes last item placed)
Downloads:
- july.dailydriver.pdx.zip (176.6 KB) for older system software 0.10 and older
- 0111.dailydriver.pdx.zip (175.2 KB) for system software 0.11 and newer
- will not work on Public SDK 1.9.0, Feb 2022 and newer (see here for latest build)
For 0.11 and newer I added some quick menus:
- telemetry on/off
- next stage
- reset stage
Feel free to share some levels on here if you dare.
Have fun!
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Sorry if I missed something obvious but is there anything I have to do before running it? I copied over the pdx and it crashes because trackData in loadTrack (scene.lua:57) is nil.
How strange! I believe others have been playing it fine, and I played it to take the GIF.
@veubeke Is there a chance it's unzipped wrongly? The error indicates it can't find the contents of the track subfolder inside the pdx.
Thinking about it a little more... you say "copied over the pdx" could you try opening it on the Simulator? assuming it works there you could choose "upload to device". This is how I install games on my device.
Thanks, I didn’t know you could open pdx files in the simulator. I had to delete folder in Data on the device, then upload from simulator, and it worked.
I wonder what the difference is between copying it over and uploading via simulator. I tried a few other demos and they worked fine after copying. 
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I'll investigate!
Glad you've got it working.
Hi Matt! How do you catch custom (debug) keys in the simulator?
Check the docs at:
Simulator debug callbacks
These callbacks are only invoked when your game is running in the Simulator.
playdate.keyPressed(key)
playdate.keyReleased(key)
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Thanks a lot!
It's amazing how I missed this in the docs.
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When you get a crazy idea that you'll never be able to use but you do it anyway, just to scratch the itch.
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Since I am targetting 60fps one of the things I can do is flash a black sprite every other frame to get a shade of grey. It only works at high framerates (50fps isn't high enough!) and only on device (taking a photo was... fun). I'm not sure I'll use it, as all other shadows are dithered and flashing them all will hit the framerate. But it was fun to try! One for another game.
grey shadow demo: https://devforum.play.date/t/matts-prototypes/826/87
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Had a productive chat with Gus at Flying Meat who make Retrobatch and with his help condensed my 3 sprite workflows into 1 smaller and quicker workflow!
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Accidental new game mode discovered?
"Cannonball Run" — collect stuff whilst a barrage of heavy balls bounce around the screen
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This looks like madness! I love it haha!
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Hey Matt - this looks utterly delightful. I received my Playdate dev kit today and immediately wanted to give this a go, but sadly the device says the demo is "too old" for the latest firmware (which I installed). Any chance you might have a new build? 
Also, sorry to be such a newb, but how does one uninstall a build from the device? I've managed to install to it using the Simulator (in Windows) but that's how far I got so far.
Thank you!
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Hi Jorg!
Good point regarding the old builds. That's unfortunate. I'll do a new build of the same version later today.
To remove a build, I don't think you can delete through system software at the moment. You'll need to use the Simulator to choose to Mount Data Disk to connect as a disk over USB. Then you can delete the game from that USB drive in your file manager.
Thank you! So excited! And thanks for the tech tip!