(Meow - Charlotte and the 64 meowers)
Here is my second finished game after TAZS. (and it’s still not a c++ game, sigh)
It’s a very simple platform game made in Pine2K, grown out of a few experiments.
- Touch every cats, rush to the door, repeat until you’ve finish the 10 levels.
- It is quite short : unless you’re stuck, you will never take more than 5 minutes to complete a single run. With a bit of experience you’ll finish them all in no more than 2 minutes!
- It’s relying almost solely on custom assets, except for the font which isn’t customizable anyway.
- It also features a timing / scoring system, with a per-level time tracking!
- Finally there is an ending and some SFX too.
You can download the release version here:
miaou.zip (51.6 KB)
- This version doesn’t contain all the original assets and scripts needed to compile the 565s/sprites/maps/res files.
- However it contains everything needed to run as a Pine2K game.
- The source repository isn’t ready yet, I’ll update this post after it’s finished.
Almost 99% of the gameplay is demoed in this GIF.
*
Splashscreen & banner.
Important!
- It takes a lot of time to load!
- Make sure you’re using the last Pine2K version.
- Do NOT run a game before it - you’ll end up with a corrupted score screen.
- You cannot exit the game without restarting the Pokitto for the same reason.
Everything below is a copy of the readme.md file inside the archive
Charlotte et les 64 Miauleurs
Introduction
Charlotte was walking back to her home.
That day, she decided to take a shortcut through the old industrial area.
It’s a district with a lot of abandoned buildings, made mostly out of bricks, devoid of life.
… or so she thought.
She heard a lot of meowing inside an old factory. Cats kept calling her.
After a short passage through the pet store, She decided to enter the factory. Well-prepared.
It’s time to feed those 64 cats!
But the old factories aren’t exactly a safe place…
Controls
- LEFT/RIGHT - Move Charlotte to the left or right.
- A - Charlotte will jump.
Gameplay
Guide Charlotte through 10 levels in increasing difficulty!
Each level will features the following elements:
- Charlotte is your character. She’ll appear out of a door.
- Meowing Cats are the one that should be visited.
- Just touch them briefly with Charlotte to do so!
- They’ll purr and sleep after a few instants.
- The Cat Door is your exit to the next level.
- It’ll open when all the Cats are sleeping.
- Just touch them after!
- Catnips are bonus items.
- They’re usually trickier to get.
- There are 13 of them to retrieve.
- They’re worth a lot of points!
- Pits are bad things to fall into.
- If you do, it’ll reload the current level, so you’ll have to redo it!
Scoring
A timer is launched when you first move your character in Level 1.
When you’re through the Level 10, you’ll have a summary about your times, collected catnips - and the resulting score.
- The par-time is 4 minutes for the 10 levels.
- Each 2ms below the par-time is worth a point.
- Each collected catnip is worth 5000 points.
- So you probably don’t want to spend more than 10s getting a single catnip!
Falling in a pit will not reset the current level’s timer!
Important Notes
- The game will take a long time to compile in Pine2K.
- 13s on my own device, we’ve seen 40s as well. It depends a lot on the SD card.
- On the Pine2K version it’s designed to run for, it’ll use 2040 bytes of PROGMEM.
- Needless to say, chances are it might break in upcoming Pine2K updates.
- The game cannot be run after another game - some corruptions will ensue.
- Because of that, it cannot run itself again either, so the only way to exit it is to restart the Pokitto.
Tech Notes & Tools
- FemtoIDE, Aseprite, Tiled were used to create this game.
- It was really challenging to pack that many features into 2K of compiled bytecode (PROGMEM).
- The whole code relies a lot on the weird pointer arithmetics that can be done in Pine2K.
- A lot of weird tricks were also used, on the basis that they would save 4, 8, 12, 16, 24 or more PROGMEM bytes.
- Such as converting a
if (a && b)into two if. - Or moving around the
vardeclaration out of their loops because somehow it saves a bit. - The Character Entity is always at the end of the entities array, and it saved a lot of bytes to do so (a fixed pointer costs less than a pointer as parameter).
- Such as converting a
- The same animation structure was used wherever the entity was animated or not.
- The collision detection is based on the tile identifier - if it’s above or equal to 20, it’s colliding.
Special Thanks
- @FManga (https://github.com/felipemanga/FemtoIDE) for making Pine2K and FemtoIDE.
- @torbuntu (https://github.com/Torbuntu) for playtesting it and his everlasting enthusiasm.
- @jonne for the amazing device that is the Pokitto (https://pokitto.com - get this cute little device!).
- The Pokitto Community for their general support and enthusiasm.
- The Aseprite team. (https://www.aseprite.org/)
- The Tiled team. (https://www.mapeditor.org/)
- Anyone who contributed from faraway to the involved tools.
References
- Github Repository - https://github.com/carbonacat/miaou-p2k (Not yet available)
