[WIP] pokifactory

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Made good progress on my mario bros game&watch clone: pokifactory!
I left behind the other game I was planning on doing, but at least this one is likely going to be done quickly and it’s helping me shape the tile-based engine as I go.

Sometimes I stop and wonder what the original game & watch processor was like.

PS. the gif was recorded with the pokittoemu, this stuff already runs on the hardware and looks like it might be fun to play : )

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I am waiting for to play this :slight_smile: As a kid I was playing this kind of game.
Edit: I think it was something about saving people from the house in fire.

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Something like this?
a2027236da20178de9810866e217f296a1e53161

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Not exactly that. It could have been some other than Nintendo.

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One of the best variations on that theme that I played was in Creatures 2 on the C64.
Here is a video of one of the levels that they released as a demo. It was a very gruesome game for how cute it was. They don’t make them like that anymore!

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The units are based on a 4-bit CPU from the Sharp SM5xx family, that include a small ROM and RAM area and an LCD screen driver circuit.

I find the idea of a 4-bit CPU quite amusing.

That’s the sort of thing people like building in games that have logic gates, like Minecraft, Scrap Mechanic and Garry’s Mod (with Wiremod).
(I’ve partially designed one myself before, but I never got the control bus working,
so it had to be operated manually.)

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Want to play!

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If anyone is up for a very punishing early version of pokifactory:
pokifactory.bin (73.1 KB)

There’s no gameover yet, and no win condition, it’s really just an early version : )
Haven’t tried it yet on my pokitto, but bare in mind it has no loader screen so you’ll have to manually re-flash a loader after playing it.
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Great, but why the loader should be reflashed? Usually reflashing it is not needed after flashing any bin. The loader stays in the upper part of the flash memory

He means you need to flash a bin that calls the loader, since this one skips straight into the game.

Oh, it’s in the “dev” mode and skips the startup screens. It would be convenient to have the startup screens.

yes absolutely, I will enable the loader menu on the next version.

I tried it on the pokitto and it looks like I need to fix the background tiles draw code.

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Hello! Sorry for not completing this project, I hate myself whenever I start something and can’t see it to an end. But, with what little time I have at disposal nowadays, I decided to do the grown up thing and invest everything I have in projects that can help me sustain myself economically (as an indie dev, it takes pretty much every bit of energy, time, soul).

I also hate myself for reinventing the wheel on this project, because of my custom pokitto lib this project got very messy very soon, and it will be hard for anyone else to pick it back up, I’m afraid.
Never the less, posting the whole project here, free of any right, so if anyone wants to reuse and change anything from it (hopefully not my indecent code ; ), please go ahead!

If any brave soul will venture into this thing, feel free to give my a shout anytime and I’ll try and help you understand where I left things.

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Does it have a licence?
If not, have you considered releasing it under an open source licence?

Also do you have a GitHub/GitLab account to host it on?
(I’ve found that dropbox links tend to die after a time.)

I have multiple directories full of unfinished projects.
It’s a common programmer ailment. :P

Hi Pharap! sure thing I can host it on git, surely it will survive better the course of time.

There’s no license attached, I’m totally happy for anyone to tear it apart as they please. If one day we can play that thing on our pokitto I can only be grateful really!

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In that case, please consider releasing it under either CC0 or MIT,
depending on whether or not you want copyright/credit.

Without a licence, technically nobody else is allowed to modify the code.

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