I'm fairly new to game development (and development per se). But for a while, I have been wanting to make some games. Then I remembered that Playdate exists, and when I saw Pulp and the SDK, I thought that I had to take this and make a new hobby. Here I am now. I am slowly working on the concept of a game, and that will probably take a few years, but while I learn, I want to play a bit with Pulp and make a few games my kid can play.
One idea that came, after a request to have a car wash game, was to make a small little game where you move a car inside a car wash, then you move the crank to wash the car, and once done, when you move the car out, it's a clean car.
I am certain I can pull this one off easily on Pulp. But I struggle with some concepts. In this case, who is my player? Is it the car? If yes, how can I combine all the small 8x8 sprites into a bigger one that will be a car?
In my head, it goes like this:
Initially on the screen, you see the car, which is dirty.
Using the D-pad, you move the car inside the carwash.
When you start cranking, the carwash moves and washes the car.
The Player in Pulp terms basically gets D-pad movement and can draw with transparency. So if you want to move the car with the crank, you don't necessarily want it to be the player tile unless you want to do some work to limit movement (either with ignore, which might be tricky because I think that disables crank input as well, or by making basically the whole field solid world tiles or sprites).
Whether or not you opt to use the player like that, you can indeed combine multiple tiles to create one image. Depending on how large you want to go, it may be useful to draw it in another program.
The other thing to consider is that making a Pulp game does not easily give you smooth movement. So if that's important to you, just know it will take a bit of doing.
Good luck!
Seems perfectly feasible and a good way to learn about some of Pulp's basics. If you're doing multi-tile sprites, then you'll definitely need to do a little bit of scripting, as you're going beyond the in-built single-tile player model that Pulp is designed around.
However, there's some good info around and plenty of people to help This post is a good starting point for multi-tile player sprites: Pulp how-to: two-tile-tall player
But in essence, you'll need to set up extra player tiles, draw these extra tiles at the right place whenever the player moves, and maybe do some of your own collision detection based on where the player tiles are. If you look at the pulpscript docs, the on draw event is where you can add code to draw extra tiles, using the draw command, for example.
everyone!
This post is a good starting point for multi-tile player sprites: