Mini Running Ant

lightningst 2024-10-07 00:08

Screenshot 2024-10-06 170740.png

Great job! Programming this low level is always a headache for me. I'm amazed you were able to make this in 7 (+3) hours!

jacobwinters 2024-10-07 00:24

I thought I knew every Nintendo console.

I was wrong.

High score 264

richjbaron 2024-10-07 00:30

Also never heard of this console but love to learn something new lol

oldzombie14 2024-10-07 18:45

wow, it's amazing how you could finish this in 7 hrs. It's rlly cute.

andrewkennedy 2024-10-07 18:53

This is pretty good for such a short amount of time spent on a niche development environment.

I was really determined to get over 100. Got *so close* with a best score of 98. I think it mostly came down to luck with the rock placement.

Screenshot 2024-10-07 114506.png

Nice work, it's really cool to see a project that's able to run on obscure hardware. And kudos for the work you did on the documentation. I think that's a really great contribution especially in a game jam that has education, sharing, and open source as part of its core values.

P.S., it might be nice to link directly to a download page for the emulator. I had to search around a bit to find one, and it might put some people off from trying your game out.

bubblemian 2024-10-07 21:05

It’s rlly cute!Great job!

captaindreamcast 2024-10-07 21:09

I got the hit box down now, I'm just whooshing around the rocks:

230.PNG

(The emulator I used was Pokemini (https://sourceforge.net/projects/pokemini/), which worked reasonably well out of the box, in case anybody is scrolling through the comments looking for emulator recs.)

This is very cool stuff, tying the hardware into the theme is truly next level. Amazing idea! Feels great to control too, I never would have guessed that this was only seven hours and your first project on the hardware. Plus with annotated source code and everything! Really awesome stuff! Great work on this game, I enjoyed it a lot!

mal 2024-10-08 07:28

Best I could do was 147, thanks for introducing me to the pokemon mini lol

jfb1337 2024-10-08 07:53

really cool! my high score is 210

iamgreaser 2024-10-09 07:10

I couldn't be bothered hunting down a Pokemon Mini emulator so I ended up porting the code to Linux instead, using Xlib.

drludos linux port 001.png

The sprite format was a pain and I had to actually look at the reference but otherwise... this is nice code. Didn't even have to *actually* modify the code to compile it, I only had to, uhh, implement a suitable fraction of the Pokemon Mini in a cheeky way.

Anyway, it's a pretty simple game and quite nice to play.

Also here's the wrapper source if anyone's interested, it's quite rough but it works fine on, uhh, a high-end machine? https://gist.github.com/iamgreaser/0887892e6e8290c7c0c92c470362b447

desibragg 2024-10-09 16:36

This is awesome! Also, thanks for sharing.

koningmathijs 2024-10-09 19:17

Wow I had never even heard of this! This is so cool, well done man!

sudocoffee 2024-10-10 18:30

If anyone's looking for emulation info, the [emulation wiki](https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Pok%C3%A9mon_mini_emulators) is always my goto source. I got the game running on the PokeMini Windows executable on Wine on Linux.

Booting it up, it's really impressive for something made from scratch for a game jam! If the ant could get a bit closer to the edges, that might make it easier to avoid unwinnable situations (by giving more options to the player).

My high score:

mini.png

samuli 2024-10-12 09:18

Really nice to see niche platforms in Ludum Dare. I checked the code and it looked really nice as a learning resource too. Thanks for including that.

Game itself is extremely luck based, but with enough persistence I got a golden seed! antscore.jpg

wendel-scardua 2024-10-13 01:20

I don't think I even knew this console existed until I saw your entry as the only one in the [Nintendo (other)](https://ldjam.com/tags/platform/nintendo) platform 😅

Although I have already too many unfinished NES stuff I should work on... I'm kinda curious about this thing, maybe I'll try playing with it someday (I'll bookmark this page just in case, your source code and references will be helpful).

PS: My best score was almost 90 points.

drludos 2024-10-13 19:10

Woaw, thanks a lot everyone for the great feedback, and for taking the time to try the game! I'm happy you enjoyed it, and I hope it'll help some of you making their own Pokemon Mini homebrew game in the future.

This weekend, I managed to beat my own highscore, and reached 347 points on real hardware. I've updated the page with a new highscore photo, and also a short gameplay video of the game running on real hardware.

For now, the **current record holder is @samuli with 413 points**, congratulations!

Thanks @andrewkennedy for the wise suggestion to put an emulator link here, I've updated the page to do so.

Thanks a lot @iamgreaser for taking the time to port the game to Linux, this is very impressive! That's what I love with Ludum Dare and all the game being open-source, the community always comes up with interesting and unexpected ideas and enhancements! :) And yes the sprite format is a bit odd, with the first bytes of the tile data being "masks", but this technical choice makes the consoles quite easy to develop games for, as mask and graphics data are stored together and thus easy to update when animating sprites. Really thanks for your contribution, it's really motivating to keep doing games! :)

And @wendel-scardua I recommend making games for the Pokémon Mini, it's a very fun experience for me. The console is actually quite close to a Game Boy or a NES in its spirit. It has a "PPU" (here called the DPC) capable of displaying one plane of scrollable background tilemap *(various sizes available, I used 12x16 tiles here, so 1 screen width x 2 screen height)*, and up to 24 sprites handled through an OAM table like other machines. Everything being made of 1-bit graphics is a strong limitation, but also speeds up development time IMHO :). The whole SDK being available in C really helps to get started (although developing in assembly is possible too of course, with the same toolchain).

I'll try to keep working on a post-compo version of the game, at least to try to add some sound in the game. And I'll see if I can tweak it to improve gameplay too! :)

Thanks again everyone for your great feedback, you're awesome!

mithoskuu 2024-10-13 19:14

This might be the coolest entry I've seen. Rate more games so yours gets shown to more people, you deserve the ratings

srynetix 2024-10-14 18:52

Wow that's amazing! Nice use of the jam, playing with niche hardware like this, plus you made it in a relatively short time, it's impressive. Well done!

moonlightbomber 2024-10-15 07:07

The effort you took to make this game for a portable console that's not the Game Boy or PSP is nothing short of amazing. I gave this game 5s across the board.

rincs 2024-10-16 14:08

I never got more than 70, but this was pretty cool!!

yancharkin 2024-10-16 18:55

You nailed the theme! My only complaint is that it seems in some situations it’s impossible (or nearly impossible) to survive.

ant.png

kyrio 2024-10-16 22:22

score.png

I don't think I've managed to get much farther than this :laughing:

I always love to see old console games in the jam, having tried my hand at a GBA game myself in a previous LD. I had heard of the console but it's my first time trying a Pokémon Mini game. It's obviously very simple but I think the only thing it's truly missing is sound - though I don't know if Pokémini games had any music.

Regarding the game itself, I felt that the ant's peculiar shape made it tough to figure out its hitbox. It looks like it doesn't kill you to hit something with your legs, but I think I sometimes died because my behind hit a rock? It's a bit hard to gauge in motion. Otherwise the main issue is that you sometimes have to choose whether to stay in the left or right lane, but if you're unlucky, the path you've chosen might be a dead end and there's no way to know in advance. I'm also not sure the the random rock placement is guaranteed to always leave room for the player, as I sometimes found myself in front of a barrage like this:

barrage.png

Congratulations on making something in such a short time! Especially if you had to learn the basics of making Pokémon Mini homebrew along the way.

samuel-fine 2024-10-25 19:33

I'm baffled at how much you were able to do in so little time...on a 20 year old pocket gizmo. Incredibly impressive, and absolutely delightful!