Eli decided to gather some folks for a spring edition of #Decadv, I only just finished the proof-reading of No Bears None, I'm aching to do a bit of gamedev and I'm always willing to jump on an occasion that forces me to document things. So let's go!

I'm hoping to make a whole new implementation of Donsol with Rek's gorgeous new sprites. I'm tired of the NES look n' feel of our first implementation, I want something that has animations and effects and lives up to the capabilities of Varvara.

https://rabbits.srht.site/decadv/

#DecemberAdventure

Starting more seriously on the interface now, I think I got everything down where I want it. Through all my years of programming in #Uxn, I've managed somehow to never learn much about emulating larger numbers and just lived within the boundaries of 16-bits, but I do skirt pretty close to the boundary sometimes. For example, if I want a little progress bar 0x32 pixels wide, to display a value between 0 and 0x15, I have to do a little bit of finessing to have enough resolution in a short to emulate what in other languages you'd use decimal points for.

https://rabbits.srht.site/decadv/

#DecemberAdventure

"You drank the white mage"

There has got to be a better way to phrase the flavor text for top tier healing cards.

https://rabbits.srht.site/decadv/

#DecemberAdventure

A day of implementing animation tools. The mileage on that little smoothing animation function.

https://rabbits.srht.site/decadv/

#DecemberAdventure

We're putting final touches to the assets and gameplay. The game finally has fail/success ending screens and animation handlers for nearly every object drawn on the screen, it's beginning to feel juicy. We've inspired ourselves from our favourite Playdate games and tried to add all the little details that make these games feel alive. I think we're getting there, there's still a few effects to put in, a camera shake here and a particle effect there.

Working at the intersection of fully event-driven and catlang programing makes writing animation code so much fun, I hadn't fully understood why it felt so nice until I realized that it's the concatenative nature of the language that makes it possible to pause out of an event, and jump anywhere in the code to resume evaluation.

https://rabbits.srht.site/decadv/

#DecemberAdventure

Tomorrow is already the last day of this edition of Marchember Adventure. What a glorious couple of days it's been, between boat maintenance, the sun shining, seeing friends and drinking plenty of water(!), I think we've managed to cobble together a gorgeous little 1-bit game.

My sixth day was some testing, some optimizing, lots of removing magic numbers, a bit of animating, spamming uxnlin donsol.tal, trying to crash the game, punching buttons during animations, picking the wrong cards, trying to die, trying to live, drinking too many potions; but yeah, I think, we've got a game on our hands, and a fun one at that. Tomorrow is hooking up audio systems, help pages and final touches.

https://rabbits.srht.site/decadv/

#DecemberAdventure

All the game's systems are tested and working. I've written an automatic tester to help me find memory leaks, weird game states and made it play hundreds of games; all signals are green. Decadv is over, the game is done but we don't have a build, now I have to hook up sounds, soundtrack and start testing on the Playdate. But for now I'm signing out, 'til next December.

https://rabbits.srht.site/decadv/

#DecemberAdventure

@neauoire Happy Marchember 😊
@rezmason It's hayling, but also the cherry trees are in bloom! 🌸

@neauoire
March-Ember! Throughout the hemisphere, now down every road, wild noble pachyderms appear, duly dragging their palm leaves to the square, past bright-eyed human faces young and old, those broad rugged fronds laden with fragrant heaps of flower blossoms, and woody gourds, orange, green and gold, a symphony of sight and sound and smell too elaborate for words! Not to mention it's remarkably absurd.

March-Ember! down, down, all carried to the square, onto tinder made of hippo's hair, to set alight, for one and all, to cleanse the air, to make it right, to flap the bugs from out their ears, from Fall to Spring, (or was it Spring to Fall?,) elephants marching, trumpeting and tall,

(It's March-Ember!) to banish fears, and forgive everything, because we never forget anything, infamously elephants remember all, so every half a year, in front of human City Halls, the towering parade who every deed recalls, chooses to overlook arrears, to elect another king, to deputize the knights, to play Pachisi, and to imagine ancient foes and fights like little embers drifting glowing lifting going drifting in the night

This entire post was unintentional, but demanded I complete it. Now I'm free

Y'all, you know you're a lightweight when only one hour in, you've invented semiannual elephant yom kippur on the fediverse and it kind of rhymes
@neauoire you know we used to play a game called The One Bit game, a game where all the things you say must have just one bit. It can be quite fun to play. But at times makes you mad.
@neauoire Does this function like uxn on playdate in basically something like an emulator? And if so, does that mean there could is an Uxn emulator for playdate that runs as a romcart (or whatever they call it on playdate)? Would love to read more about your process here.
@exquisitecorp that's exactly what I do, @bd wrote a uxn emulator for playdate which I use to publish our games with. But Donsol is not native to playdate, this rom will run on any uxn emulator, that way we're not platform-locked.
@neauoire such a wonderful screen
@neauoire It’s looking fantastic! Interested to know your favourite Playdate games, too =]