drludos

Sorry for the late reply, but I thank you a lot for your feedback and comments! I'm really happy you enjoyed the game, as I honestly had no idea if the game idea would be fun to anyone besides me! I'm taking note of all your feedback and ideas for a possible future updated / enhanced version of the game :). I'll try to keep working on it after the end of the competition. Well, I'm sure there isn't anything "magic". I'm really glad you enjoy my game ideas, but I also made a lot of games that nobody seems to like! (for example try Math Smashers - I spent about a year on this project, and I seem to be the only one to enjoy it :p) But I'm happy to share my experience if it can help. I think one the hardest thing to learn when you are creating games is to size your project scope according the time / skills / resources you have at your disposal. That's why many "first projects" are never finished, especially for amateurs. For example, I still haven't finished the 3 or 4 first game projects I started, and likely never will because they are way too big for a single person. It took me a long time to realize this (and by long time, I mean maybe 15 years of amateur game development). What helped me a lot is to participate in game jams. More specifically, I participated a lot in the "Ludum Dare" game jam (http://ldjam.com/), where you have to make a new game from scratch according to a theme in... 48h. For your first participation, you'll usually end up with nothing finished, or even drop out of the contest because you didn't find a good idea in time (been there...). But with time, you'll learn how long it takes you to make things like music, coding, art, etc. And so you'll be able to make a brand new game in maybe 20 or 30 hours. I was also heavily inspired by Derek Yu (of Spelunky fame) article about "Finishing a game": https://makegames.tumblr.com/post/1136623767/finishing-a-game So, I have no "secret" per se, but you should really try to participate in game jams or coding contests that spans over a few days (and not a few months) to train yourself to make a complete game in a very limited time. And then I think ideas will come naturally, as you'll need to come up with a lot of different game ideas to participate in all those game jams . Because, in the end, the best way to have a "good game idea" is to try loads of different ideas. The only way to see if it's fun or not is to make a prototype. And the faster you can make a gameplay prototype, the more game ideas you'll be able to try, and thus have the higher chances are of you finding one that is fun to play. For example, my 2019 Lynx competition entry started as a project I made for a Ludum Dare game jam. I designed the first version of Growing Ties from scratch (ideas, code, graphics) in 72h. You can try the original version here for reference: http://www.ludoscience.com/EN/games/884-Growing-Ties.html While the "prototype" version was born in 3 days only (and was definitively playable), it took me something like 2 full months to make the way better Lynx version. But at their core, both versions play the same. The main difference is that the jam version is barebone (a single level focused on the core gameplay, limited gfx and audio) while the Lynx version has way more polish, more levels, more graphics, more sounds, etc. What I mean is having a very restricted time limit forces to focus on the idea / gameplay, and is definitively a good way to train how to make game / to find new game concepts that could became larger games projects with more time.

Thanks a lot for your articles about retro gaming and general support for homebrew. MO5 Mag is my #1 source of info to discover homebrew releases :)! On my end, I've posted about the contest on Reddit (on r/retrogaming and r/atarilynx), I hope it'll lead some additionnal players to discover the games and the contest!)

Good choice! For a physical release, I think that @karri, the creator of this cool game, still have some copies of the beautiful cart + box edition of the game for sale.

Hi Everyone, Here is my entry for this year's Lynx Coding Competition hosted by AtariGamer: Timeloop is a fun game where you play future soccer against your past self(s)! You'll control a blue robot who have to push the green ball into the goal to score points. Move with D-Pad and press A or B button to Dash. Sounds simple? Well there is a catch: the whole game plays inside an endlessly repeating timeloop! Every 6 seconds, the timeloop will reset the game. Your previous avatar will turn red, and it will move exactly like you did during the previous timeloop. You will play as another robot, always in blue. Up to 8 robots can play at the same time: your current avatar, and 7 of your previous incarnations. So, in this game you'll face the ultimate opponent: yourself! There is an increasing "score limit" to reach on each timeloop to be able to continue the game. It starts easy, but quickly become challenging. My current best score is 40 points. Can you do better? You can download the game roms and the full commented source code here: https://itch.io/jam/lynx2020/rate/717099 I hope you'll enjoy it! If you'd like to make a physical version of it, the talented @KevinMos3 created a beautiful label for the game: N.B.: The competition depends on public votes, so be sure to rate my game and the other wonderful entries!

I'm a bit disappointed by the number of entries too, and I'm sad that all the efforts @Igor made to run this great competition didn't attract more people. With 29 participants, even if not everyone would have been able to complete his entry, I was expecting at least 20 games. But, hopefully, the quality of the releases submitted more than counter-balance the quantity of games! These are very varied games, and all are enjoyable to play. I haven't been able to try them all yet, but for now I'm really enjoying Asteroids Chaser. Once you've read the instructions, the game is very simple to play and quite addictive! I love board games like Carcassonne where you have to arrange tiles, and this one reminds me a bit a of it with a touch of Othello for the "mine surrounding" mechanic. The game is a perfect fit for the Lynx. It's also very polished with rewards, menu and a very professional looking graphics and presentation. Honestly, it feels like it could be released on cartridge in its current state! (and I hope it will!). Congrats @Fadest! I'll try the other entries and share my impressions too!

I second that, your game is beautiful Karri! It feels like a Bitmap Brothers title, congrats! And the "bouncing" bullet mechanic seems interesting too! @marss The games seems to appear the competition now (the tag is displayed, and clicking it shows the "jam entry" page). Very mysterious entry with no description, I wonder what kind of game it is!

Wonderful for your entry, I love the graphics and general mood - I will try it ASAP alongside the others :)! For the gameplay the process is actually quite simple. First I do a video capture using the Mednafen emulator, of a rather "long" play (several minutes at least, in order to be able to choose the most meaningful gameplay sequence). Once you have the .mov video capture made by mednafen, I'm using the good old virtualdub (http://www.virtualdub.org/) to export a part of this video to GIF. Careful, the video capture is at 60fps, which is too fast for most browser to display GIFs. So before exporting the GIF, I'm reducing the video framerate to 30fps so it plays at a normal speed in browsers. At first, I tried to use tools that record directly to gif, such as Licecap, but I found difficult to be able to record a short interesting and sequence with them. So I find the "make a normal video capture, then export gifs from it" easier and better now.

Hi Everyone, so I've released and submitted my entry too! Timeloop is a fun game where you play future soccer against your past self(s)! You'll control a blue robot who have to push the green ball into the goal to score points. Move with D-Pad and press A or B button to Dash. Sounds simple? Well there is a catch: the whole game plays inside an endlessly repeating timeloop! Every 6 seconds, the timeloop will reset the game. Your previous avatar will turn red, and it will move exactly like you did during the previous timeloop. You will play as another robot, always in blue. Up to 8 robots can play at the same time: your current avatar, and 7 of your previous incarnations. So, in this game you'll face the ultimate opponent: yourself! There is an increasing "score limit" to reach on each timeloop to be able to continue the game. It starts easy, but quickly become challenging. My current best score is 40 points. Can you do better? You can download the game roms and the full commented source code here: https://drludos.itch.io/timeloop I hope you'll enjoy it!

Karri, your entries are always the most appetizing of all! More seriously though, I'm very excited to play all your entries! I'm very curious about Fadest one, the teasing looked very promising. A board game is a very unique genre for the Lynx, and a very good fit for the console. Anyway, I'll try to finish my entry and submit it before playing your games, else I'll never finish mine! Hopefully, it'll be ready tonight or tomorrow!

Good teasing :)! I think I know what game it is thanks to Karri's hint - Looking forward to play it as the first one was already very cool!

Yes, the name is definitively a clue. The game is titled "Timeloop." @LordKraken I'm big Speedball fan too (and also of Skateball on Amstrad CPC, and Hyperblade on PC), but my game is nowhere as rich as this masterpiece or close to a real sport. You have robots, a ball, a goal, and it plays like a chaotic and frantic version of soccer due to the "unique" something in the game mechanics Actually, I only have a original Lynx II, and the palette does look good on it too. Although it's a bit "washed out" of course, it's still pleasing to the eye IMHO. But obviously Sweetie16 is not a "generic palette", it's meant for colorful / cartoon graphics. For a more multi-purpose palette, I think the "definitive" one is the famous DB16 palette: https://lospec.com/palette-list/dawnbringer-16 Thanks, coming from an actual pixelartist that means a lot (great work on Odynexus BTW)! I did the pixelart myself, as with all of my games, but I did use the Grafxkid image gallery for reference / inspiration to draw the robots in this game.

Woaw, I've been without Internet for about a week, and I've missed a lot of cool updates! Congrats everyone on your entries, they look great and varied! On my end, I'm putting the finishing touches on my entry: This is a simple / small arcade game loosely inspired by soccer, with robots. There is also a very unique twist in the gameplay mechanic inspired by the "future" theme, but you'll discover it in a few days Regarding palettes, for my entry I'm using "Sweetie16", by GrafxKid: https://lospec.com/palette-list/sweetie-16 Although I'm not an artist, this is one of the most beautiful 16 color palette I've seen, and it's very well suited to make colorful / warm pictures.

I'll also recommend you the "linked sprite list" approach, as it's way faster to draw a single chain of SCB than to make many tgi_sprite calls. You can read many details about this topic in the following post, where Nop90 managed to greatly improve the framerate of his game by using SCB links:

You should ask for more space-time crystals! More seriously though, it's great that you already managed to complete one game! Is this the one you were working with Retroguru, or a solo entry? And yes, it's best to focus on a single polished entry, and save the second one for another competition (and I can feel you won't have to wait for long!)

Space-time crystals you say? I guess that's what Karri, Fadest and Nop90 use to create so many games in so little time! Joke aside, that would be a funny coding competition theme: "create as many different Lynx games as you can in one month" (or one week).

AFAIK, the Pocket is solely FPGA based, so it means that they had to write their own Lynx emulation core in Verilog or something like that. For their previous products (NES, Genesis/MD, SNES), they had legendary programmer Kevtris to create cores for them, so I'm somehow confident they will manage to produce a faithful Lynx core too! But I'm curious to see how they managed to get over the bootrom requirement though. Maybe by creating their own "non-proprietary" bootrom code?

Not that I'm not intrigued by the title screen of your new entry, but scrapping everything to make a new project from scratch 15 days before the deadline seems like quite risky move to me. It'll lead to a high chance of not being able to submit anything, which would be shame! Honestly, I think your shooter could easily fit within the theme with a simple modification of the sprite to set it in the future. For example, instead of a plane, the player could ride an hoverboard (I mean, "Back to the Future II" is the perfect incarnation of "90's future") or something like that. You could even keep the current plane sprite and justify it with a backstory: there could have been a big crisis in the world that prevented electronics to be used anymore, and so a biplane could be 2040's most sophisticated way of flying. Or anything else you can come up with. To quote the official compo website about the theme: "Of course this leaves it very open ended and you're only limited by your imagination!"

Woaw, very impressive entry Fadest too! I love the general look of the game, the palette is very well chosen and the graphics are beautiful. It feels very professional and reminds me of 90's computer games (ST/Amiga/MS-DOS era). It looks like we'll have a wide variety of games this year too, I'm eager to play them all!

Sorry about your power issues, but this first screenshot look great! I like the pixel art, and a shoot'em up is always a good choice on the Lynx!

Your place is really wonderful Karri! There is no way someone could stay inside coding a game with a beautiful landscape like that to explore nearby! Oh, and will your game be about cooking then? I'm eager to see everyone's entry (and I'll bet we'll have a lot of "small game because I didn't have enough time" entries :p)

Less than month before the deadline! So, how's everyone doing? On my end, I started very late due to "real life obligations". But I did found a tiny game idea that I hope will turn into something fun in the end! I don't have anything to show (yet), but I finally made some decent progress and coded the "core engine" of the game. So now is the turn to make some actual gameplay happen, and then I'll continue working on graphics and audio. If I'm able to keep working at this rate until the end, I'll definitively be able to submit something for the compo! (but it'll be a small scope game, as usual with me).

Thanks! Out of curiosity, what is your workflow to compose Lynx Music? Do you compose anything directly inside chipper? Or do you use another tracker and simply use chipper to import/convert music? In the latter case, do you have any tips / guidelines to get good convertion results?

Awesome! This is very beautiful rendition of a well known theme, with an extra bit of "metal" feel to it! Thanks for making it and sharing it, you are arguably one of the best Chipper composer :)!

Outstanding! I remember enjoying the SV version, and this one is even better, congrats on the great work! The game is very beautiful and very fun to play! It reminds me Gates of Zendocon (one of my favorite Lynx games!) but with more beautiful (and matching) artwork! The game is challenging but not too much, so a perfect balance for an average gamer like me. And I love the details and polish (the screen transition, the smoke when the ships dies, the cool music, etc.) I'm quite impressed by the high number of things moving onscreen! Is it coded in C or assembly? I'm looking forward the next version!

Have you tried to use the LD65 -m mapfile option? That should generate a mapfile according to the docs: https://www.cc65.org/doc/ld65-2.html#ss2.1