Solo Defender - a Sci-Fi themed Zuma clone

[JunX (Jun Xu)]

Solo Defender is a sci-fi themed Zuma clone for Playdate. I have been working on this project on and off for more than 6 months already.

I always want to make games for Playdate and PocketBM was sort of like a "side project" of my side projects. I like to play Zuma and I think it's nice to develop something I like to play for my first game for Playdate.

The game is pretty much feature complete and hopefully I can submit it to the Catalog for consideration soon.

Solo Defender Demo

p.s. I was surprise or not surprise to find another developer mattahj working on something similar and really was amazed by how much he achieved in just a month! Guess I am a slow developer

[mattahj (Matt Jennings)]

It looks great! Out of interest how did you define the curves for the levels and implement the ball movement? I used cubic bezier curves for that basically thanks to this article: The Ever so Lovely Bézier Curve. Bézier curves are, to me, one of the… | by Freya Holmér | Medium

I love the theme too! It looks really cool!

[JunX (Jun Xu)]

Thanks and your implementation looks great too! BTW, "Polku" is such a cool name!

I used "Catmull-Rom splines" instead of Bezier Curve. I think the only difference for them is that for Catmull-Rom splines, the spine will pass every single controlling point:
https://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/nsp/course/15-462/Fall04/assts/catmullRom.pdf

Thanks to the large internal memory of Playdate, I pre-calculate the spline and store the entire path in a big Vector2D array, each point is 1 pixel distance to the next point. To move the balls, I just look up the correct position from the array and place them there accordingly.

Like you, I also have a simple editor (written in libGDX) to layout the levels. I put in a Playdate image as the backdrop to make it looks nicer

[JunX (Jun Xu)]

Just did a title screen for Solo Defender and also sort of reuse it for the game over screen.