This is awesome and I need to get it onto my emulator cabinet.

Stoked to see someone else developing their LD entry for obscure 8-bit hardware. :heart_eyes:

The bee drinking from flower animation is adorable and the movement feels really good.

Well done!

my score!


Fun game and very cute ^^ Only made it to lvl 4 but I'm not stopping yet

@clyde Thanks! Hoping to add some more levels, better sound and tune the collision detection when I get some time.

Very cool niche shit! Winner in most obscure category

This is incredible and currently in my top two favorite games of the compo (far above my own submission of course) and its hard to believe that you did all of the sprites and all of this in this weekend (I 100% believe you its just super impressive). What a great game! I loved the sprites like the bee and also the wasp who is just lounging there like Burt Reynolds. It also worked perfectly with my arcade fight stick with no configuration which made it easier I think. The game is so classy :) :cool:

How in the world did you do this? Could you point me(us) in the direction of how you learned to do this? Is there a "hello, world" for making (or I guess re-making or repackaging idk) a pacman rom?


P.S. my top score so far is 19570 I got to level 6.

@fabdynamic Level 6 is very impressive!

For working with the hardware I found this pdf the most useful. I obviously had a head-start because I've been making C64, 2600, and Channel F games for three years so a lot of the same principles apply.

https://www.lomont.org/software/games/pacman/PacmanEmulation.pdf

I first got the idea for writing games for Pacman hardware from this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOm_Wk6xqDA

...which also included source code, so I ripped out all the game code and used that to get a basic skeleton for the startup vector, vblank etc. By using the same assembler I could take advantage of the 'savebin' commands which takes your code and splits it up neatly into the correct roms. If I get time I'll put together a hello world example.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B12mPLloTZFKNl9vMUV4VWRsSzA/view?resourcekey=0-gFaJl_1EuZ_YfKHXQ5UejQ

As for graphics, I got lucky that I had an acquaintance from the C64 community who had previously made a game for Pacman and asked them what they used, they had a script to take NES CHR roms and convert them into Pacman tile & sprite formats. So that gave me the choice of loads of powerful gfx editors to use for the project.

In the end I had a make file that on pressing F7 would create the Pacman GFX roms from the saved Chr file, assemble the code and launch it in Mame.

Sound was a crapshoot that I just about got some bleeps out of with minutes to spare, but I've since implemented the Pacman sound driver into my next project and can now create custom SFX and tunes.

@madbeagle what a great write up and description of the process. Its so cool that any of these tools exist let alone the whole setup to let you (with a lot of setup in advance ofc) press F7 and build a rom. Thats so cool!

Oh! great entry! I really loved the sprites, and game feel. 5/5

A very cute game! The style of play on an old console is very different. Due to inertia, the bee will bump into thorns or monsters if not careful.

Wow, I played NES games for Ludum Dare on the real hardware before but that's something else entirely! Sadly, I couldn't play you game on the original hardware. Wow, this was hard! Only made it to level 4 because of the momentum I couldn't get used to, though I might get better at it if I kept at it for several days. Very worthy arcade experience, loved it!!

@philstrahl Thanks for the kind words....yes it's quite hard, gotta keep those quarters coming in - although with a little more time I'd have made the collision detection a little fairer.

At least you'll be quite good at it if it gets chosen for the next stream on Sunday!

respect for using such an old-school method!

Damn, asm? Insane! The art is aesthetically pleasing too. I like this game.

Pretty cool that you made the game for arcade hardware with assembly. The game was hard to play because the bee was really "floaty" and hard to control. However, the graphics was neat and sfx as well. Good work!

This is awesome, such a great interpretation of the theme too. I like how the flowers popping up and down really encourages going around the level (and it's, of course, mega difficult as I would always expect of arcade-style games- you would have ALL of my coins). I like how the physics added to the difficulty- you would have to "undo" some of the momentum of the bee by moving the other way, felt more like true bee flight!

Wow, this is on another level of cool! I will definitely add it to my emulation setup :D The gameplay is simple yet addictive, the arcade feel is spot on. A good addition for the future could bee a 2-player coop mode. I hope you will get your 20 votes! Amazing job!

What an awesome game and idea! I'm really happy I found this right at the end. Incredibly hard (like the true retro games that it evokes) but it gets easier as one gets the hang of the movement and momentum. I still died a lot!!