This is pretty neat! TIGSource just ended the Assemblee compo, a two-part challenge where people posted art/sound assets one month, and the second month people had to make games out of the posted assets. Forum member oryx posted some amazing 8×8 sprites:

I thought these were great, and then it occurred to me: 8×8 sprites? Those can be rendered on a Meggy Jr RGB! So I took out the Meggy, installed the drawing program, and drew some of Oryx’s sprites.

Well, it turns out that FrozenCow on the TIGSource forums made a game based off the rendering style of my camera-captured Meggy Jr, using some of Oryx’s sprites! It’s reminiscent of Petri Purho’s Post I.T. Shooter. It’s called Led’s Get Shooting!, and you can download it here (Windows).

So yeah. I didn’t end up making a game for Assemblee like I had planned, but someone else stepped in and did the next best thing. I love it when I indirectly provide inspiration for a game.

I was messing around with my MeggySeqSynth tonight and decided to record my improvisations. Here you go:

Something I’ve heard for a while now, maybe it was from Chaim Gingold, or from Will Wright, and probably a bunch of other people is this: you should make the toy first, and the game later. Basically, you prototype the core interaction. Not as a game, but more as just a sensual experience.

If you’d like to see the level design tool I made for the Meggy roguelike, Jeff just posted something on the IGDA Tools SIG blog, The Toolsmiths, about my state-of-the-art level editor and why sometimes the simplest tools are the best for the job.

I have multiple dungeons working now. There’s also a fun “feature” — I handle the dungeons by just incrementing an offset on a big bitmap with all the dungeons in it. If I offset past the last dungeon, the game interprets random areas of memory as a dungeon. Which is pretty cool.

Apologies for the flickering — the refresh rate of my camera and the refresh rate of the Meggy LEDs do NOT get along.

Next steps? The player should be able to see their inventory by holding down B and scrolling left/right. I may also add a leveling system and a status screen that they see in their inventory UI. I’ll design some more levels. And I’ll add new monsters, or scaling difficulty for monsters. This may involve an overhaul of the combat system — I’m not looking forward to it, as combat is the most complex code I have right now.

I made a bunch of changes to this build, mostly in the way the code is structured to be a lot more object-oriented. Oddly, making things more OO somehow reduced the code footprint, which I wasn’t expecting. But then, I know next to nothing about compilers and OO.

I did add a few new features.

There can be multiple monsters. Monsters spawn randomly and now move around the maze. If you beat a monster in combat, it dies and doesn’t come back.

There are potions that randomly spawn. You can pick them up, and to use them you press A on the map to restore 1 HP.

There’s a new game over screen, adapted from Skull-A-Day.

Overall, it’s really starting to come together as an actual game. I still need to figure out how the player will advance to subsequent maps, and I might implement a character leveling system — though that implies stats for a character!

I’ve implemented a bare bones combat system. You encounter the monster (red), and after a random delay it beeps. If you press the A button during the beep, you hit the monster (and he dims a little). If you hit him again, you win the combat. If you don’t hit the A button in time, you lose 1 HP. To prevent button mashing, you also lose 1 HP if you hit the button too soon.

If you lose all your HP, game over. HP is indicated by the 8×1 LED array at the top of the Meggy.

Hey, whaddya know, you can now pick up a key and unlock a door with it.

Here we go. The roguelike is coming together.

Right now I’m prototyping. For this prototype, the level is not generated, it’s just a bitmap dump. There will be working doors and keys. I’ll have combat in it, but I’m not sure if monsters will be mobile. Really, I just want to get the feel for the core gameplay and see if I like it. Kind of a vert slice, if you will :P

Look, I put it together, and it works.