Find the poops! My first Playdate game made in Pulp

My journey

1. Contemplating my viewers
2. Recognizing my talent vary
3. Making ready the room and tiles
4. Inserting the 4 player-adjacent tiles
5. Inserting the poop tile at a random location
6. Revealing poop when it’s one tile away
7. Resetting the adjoining tiles
8. Including a touch
9. Why will not this finish?
10. Embracing the bug
11. Making the title card
12. Excellent bugs
13. Celebrating my accomplishments

Contemplating my viewers

• My son: a 3.5 12 months previous boy
• Who loves speaking about poop, toots and different gross bodily actions
• And who enjoys fiddling round with my Nintendo Swap and iPhone

Recognizing my talent vary

• I can swap tiles
• I can reply to participant motion occasions
• I can generate random numbers
• I can place textual content on the display screen
• I can generate messages
• I can establish adjoining tiles

I can do that!

Making ready the room and tiles

• Make the room all black
• Swap the colour of the participant
• Make the participant’s background pixels clear
• Create a poop tile
• Create a poop-in-the-dark tile

Inserting the 4 player-adjacent tiles

First, producing the X and Y coordinates:

px = occasion.px
py = occasion.py
above = py
above -= 1
under = py
under += 1
proper = px
proper += 1
left = px
left -= 1

Inserting the poop tile at a random location

Producing the coordinates:

poopX = random 0,24
poopY = random 0,14

Briefly revealing the placement:

inform poopX,poopY to
  swap "poophidden"
finish
wait 1 then
  inform poopX,poopY to
    swap "black"
  finish
finish

Revealing poop when it’s one tile away

That is half pseudo-code, since every of the 4 conditionals may be very related:

if [within the room's bounds] then
  inform X,Y to
    if X==poopX then
      if Y==poopY then
    swap "poop"
      finish
    finish
  finish
finish

Resetting the adjoining tiles

In participant, a customized reset occasion is emitted on every replace occasion.

The reset occasion is hooked up to each poop tiles.

It merely swaps the tile for black.

Including a touch

Whereas play-testing, I’d miss or overlook the place the poop is.

So, I made the A button briefly present the poop once more:

on verify do
  inform poopX,poopY to
    swap "poophidden"
  finish
  wait 1 then
    inform poopX,poopY to
      swap "black"
    finish
  finish
finish

Finish after gathering a number of poops

I added an on acquire do occasion to the poop tile.

Inside it, I known as fin with a game-ending message.

Why will not this finish?

I play examined within the pulp browser simulator.

All the things labored as anticipated.

The sport-ending message appeared after gathering the poops.

I downloaded the PDX file.

I opened it within the Playdate Simulator.

I collected the poop.

The console spit out a cryptic error.

I spent an hour trying to deal with the error.

I could not determine why the sport crashed when it tried to finish.

Embracing the bug

I made a decision the sport simply would not finish.

As a substitute, the participant simply collects poop that seems in several areas.

Right here is my up to date poop tile acquire operate:

on acquire do
  poops++
  say "You discovered {poops} poops!" then
    inform occasion.recreation to
      name "movePoop"
    finish
  finish
finish

movePoop is the code you have now seen a number of instances, with a brand new poopX and poopY generated prior.

Making the title card

I exported the font and imported it to be used as World tiles.

I created just a few rounded-corner tiles to make the poop look…cooler?

I duplicated and inverted the three letters, ‘THE’, to seem contained in the poop.

Excellent bugs

• The sport would not finish
• If the poop newly seems actually near the participant, it will not correctly swap the poop and poop hidden tiles instantly
• If the poop seems in the identical place because the overlaid textual content, it’s invisible however nonetheless collectable

Celebrating my accomplishments

• I constructed a recreation nearly completely from scratch in pulp!
• I debugged a problem the place the participant could not transfer to the highest or backside rows. And obtained caught in place!
• I labored round a game-non-ending bug!

I confirmed my son the sport.

Sadly, it did not maintain his consideration for greater than 10 seconds.

Oh nicely. It was nonetheless an awesome studying expertise making it!