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[Siegfried Croes]

Hello everyone

The last few weeks I've been working on a game for Arduboy (Arduino based, creditcard sized, gameboy inspired handheld https://www.arduboy.com/).



The game is called Arduventure and it's an attempt at making a minimalistic RPG for this system. The Arduboy specs are as follows:

16Mhz processor, 32KB Flash Memory, 2.5KB RAM, 128x64 Monochrome display (a pixel can be black or white, no grey).
The game is programmed in C++.

The screenshots and videos below show my progress so far













https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGZP7WMhIPU

YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/siegfriedcroes
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SiegfriedCroes

[BomberTREE]

Really cool project man! Definitely keeping an eye on this 

I will say that having the name Arduventure kills rpg immersion right from the start 

[Siegfried Croes]

Really cool project man! Definitely keeping an eye on this 

I will say that having the name Arduventure kills rpg immersion right from the start 

Thanks a lot I'll sure to keep this topic updated.

You're the first one to comment on the title ^^' It might not sound all that great for an outsider but within the Arduboy community people seem to get it/be fine with it

[jctwood]

The arduboy is something I have had my eyes on since its announcement. How is the development process? How are you creating for it? The art looks really wonderful!

[Siegfried Croes]

The arduboy is something I have had my eyes on since its announcement. How is the development process? How are you creating for it? The art looks really wonderful!

I really like how easy it is to make games for it. It uses the same hardware as the Arduino Leonardo so you can use the Arduino IDE to program for it. So you just set everything up, connect the Arduboy to your PC through USB, write some simple lines like:

arduboy.drawBitmap(10, 10, image, 16, 16, WHITE);
arduboy.display();

Then you just click a button, wait a few seconds and you'll see the result on your Arduboy.

Thanks :D I think it's really fun to work with these graphics limitations ^_^

[UmutD]

Super cool, posting to follow.

[absenter]

This looks awesome. Keep it up!

[Siegfried Croes]

Super cool, posting to follow.

This looks awesome. Keep it up!

Thanks guys :D Currently not making much progress cause I'm stuck with an Arduino IDE glitch, at least that's what I think it is... Hope to continue work soon!

[Siegfried Croes]

Made a new video showing off shopping and saving

[Jasmine]

Wow! This is sooo neat. When you say minimalist, what elements do you have in mind? More so exploration, rather than narrative driven?

[Siegfried Croes]

Wow! This is sooo neat. When you say minimalist, what elements do you have in mind? More so exploration, rather than narrative driven?

Thank you very much 
It will be simple and limited because of the limited memory the Arduboy has. So there won't be much narrative or big world to explore. The creator of the Arduboy plans to make an updated version of the system in the future which would include an SD card so that would open up the possibility to make the game bigger For now it's more like an experiment to see how much I can do with the limited memory.

[mushbuh]

this is cool :~0

[Siegfried Croes]

this is cool :~0

Thanks :D

It's been a while since I posted it but as I just received my Arduboy I'll be continuing this project :D



I'll be optimizing the code more and also improve the graphics along the way:

OLD


NEW

[EvilDingo]

This is interesting, but does the memory limitation ruin it? How do you load more games if it doesn't support a SD card?

16mhz for a black and white display with that resolution wouldn't be taxing the CPU much and only use a tiny bit of memory for a frame buffer (if it uses one.) So you basically end up with a system that has enormous (comparatively) processing power, but not enough memory to make anything really compelling.

I love the idea of using an Arduino for a game machine and I have parts scattered all around my desk with my own attempts but I feel the memory bottleneck is severe. I'm not sure how easy that is to fix though. SD card support with a tiny SDRAM might have sorted it out. GameBoy games could be megabytes in size. But you're kind of stuck with slightly better than Atari level memory size.

As for your game - excellent! It really looks the part. Could have easily passed for a GameBoy game.

[Siegfried Croes]

This is interesting, but does the memory limitation ruin it? How do you load more games if it doesn't support a SD card?

16mhz for a black and white display with that resolution wouldn't be taxing the CPU much and only use a tiny bit of memory for a frame buffer (if it uses one.) So you basically end up with a system that has enormous (comparatively) processing power, but not enough memory to make anything really compelling.

I love the idea of using an Arduino for a game machine and I have parts scattered all around my desk with my own attempts but I feel the memory bottleneck is severe. I'm not sure how easy that is to fix though. SD card support with a tiny SDRAM might have sorted it out. GameBoy games could be megabytes in size. But you're kind of stuck with slightly better than Atari level memory size.

As for your game - excellent! It really looks the part. Could have easily passed for a GameBoy game.

The Arduboy can only store one game at a time. It's just meant for fun and to learn programming really. Later they might release an updated version with SD card slot.

The limited memory makes it more fun, I think it's cool to try and make an RPG with very limited resources. If all goes well the worldmap won't be as small as I initially thought! I hope to get it as big as this image (rectangles are the size of the Arduboy screen, the black square is the size of the player):



Thanks a lot :D

[Alec S.]

This is a really cool project.

[maruki]

whoa! This is the kind of project I'm usually fan of. Super cool!
One thing only: I liked the bed sheets as they were before, checkered.

[BomberTREE]

One thing only: I liked the bed sheets as they were before, checkered. smiley

I agree with this, and I prefer the original character sprite Oh opinions

[Siegfried Croes]

This is a really cool project.

Thanks :D

whoa! This is the kind of project I'm usually fan of. Super cool!
One thing only: I liked the bed sheets as they were before, checkered.

Thank you very much :D I felt like it was a bit out of place, I might see what it looks like and if I like it I'll keep it checkered

One thing only: I liked the bed sheets as they were before, checkered. smiley

I agree with this, and I prefer the original character sprite Oh opinions

The new player graphics are reused from my Ludum Dare game because it had a better walk cycle. Is it mainly the face you like more?

Here's a new video showing of how large the world could/will be The final world will obviously be more than just random trees

[BomberTREE]

Whoa, that's actually a lot more space than I expected!

Is it mainly the face you like more?

I prefer the longer hair from the original character!