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Pokemon Mini style games

Posted: October 27th, 2013, 05:50
by palkone
Hi everybody, I am new to this forum and thought I would show some games I made a couple of years back. These games are not made for the pokemon mini system they are only windows programs made in game maker. When I made these games I was new to programming and some day I would like to actually make a game that can be used on the pokemon mini hardware.

I made two games, the one I spent the most time on was 'Pixel Memory' and the game that had the most potential was 'Psychic seeds' which in my opinion would have made an excellent addition to the pokemon mini library. I never finished making these games as my interest and programming ability got the best of me.
pokemon_mini_screenshots_zps72b357dc.gif
pokemon_mini_screenshots_zps72b357dc.gif (7.86 KiB) Viewed 20772 times
Pixel Memory (puzzle game, top) requires you to remember patterns and then redraw them within a certain amount of time.

Psychic seeds (puzzle platformer game, bottom) requires you to group all six exeggcute and head towards the finish while trying to find the hidden pokemon in each level.

I will add a download link to these games if there is enough interest.

Re: Pokemon Mini style games

Posted: October 27th, 2013, 09:23
by YasaSheep
Psychic seeds sounds cute. :D

Also, even doing just the graphics for a game would be a good start. It seems like you can make nice ones.

Re: Pokemon Mini style games

Posted: October 27th, 2013, 21:11
by KR155E
These look great! Excellent graphic work and the game concepts are interesting as well. 8-)

Re: Pokemon Mini style games

Posted: October 28th, 2013, 12:46
by palkone
Thanks everybody :)

I had some great ideas for Psychic Seeds, maybe some day I will keep working on it.

Here are various sprites and animations from Psychic Seeds.

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Re: Pokemon Mini style games

Posted: October 29th, 2013, 06:32
by YasaSheep
Cute. :D I'd love a platform game like that on PM.

Re: Pokemon Mini style games

Posted: November 5th, 2013, 19:01
by scyther
Looks great!
Especialy the Psychic seeds one!
I hope you to release the links, and work on it, because it sounds like a fantastic idea.

Re: Pokemon Mini style games

Posted: November 9th, 2013, 06:09
by JustBurn
Anyone got interested of making new homebrew for the PM?
I think I've crossed an alternate universe :shock:

Developing into handhelds or old systems is an entire new league compared to GameMaker, if you think C/C++ is somehow hard, you have no idea of what you will be expecting!
Extreme difficulty apart (I don't want to scare you to death before you even start the porting), the end result is something unique which made all the effort worth it. How cool is that seeing your little game working on a tiny handheld?
  • Check the PM Hardware Wiki or the hardware documentation that comes with the PokeMini dev package (which is a mirror of the same info).
  • Pick what you wanna use for the port, there's 2 solutions atm: PM C Compiler and PM Assembler.
    I'm sure you (and anyone else) will pick the first one, but keep in mind that the compiler is extremely limited and not suitable for big projects, the biggest problem you'll face is the no banking support which make you limited to 28KB/60KB of code (graphics can be setup to the full ROM size though).
  • If you still want to use the compiler, you can find the PM C Compiler here, i have to remind you that the assembler and emulator included there is quite outdated.
  • I've wrote some PokeMini libraries which make development much easier for games, there's libraries for the sound, graphics, input, math, debugging, numbers display, etc. The catch is that you have to do the coding in pokémon-mini assembly only. It's found inside the PokeMini dev package which also includes the debugger emulator, assembler, documentation, tools, examples and an IDE.
  • Play around with examples and simple tests on the pokémon-mini using the emulator or the real hardware if you have it, making a few graphics show on screen should be your first milestone.
Suggestions for GameMaker while your porting:
  • I'll suggest to finish your games in GM first but having the PM limitations in mind.
  • Don't use the drag & drop "things" at ALL! Make everything with scripts!
  • Don't use the objects for rendering and moving around, manage the rendering stuff yourself on a script inside a Draw event with sprites so you have a better understand of what you need to do "behind the stage".
  • If you need to move sprites around, use it with logics, variables and code. That will match more closely of how you gonna do on the PM.
  • Don't use too much memory, PM RAM is very limited, avoid big arrays unless they are read-only, in that case you can abuse a little but try to not exceed more than 32KB each, for RAM you're limited to aprox. only 1,5KB.
  • Don't use float numbers, you don't have support for them in either the PM C compiler or in ASM (there's no lib for soft floats yet).
  • Avoid integer numbers bigger than 16-bits, PM C compiler doesn't support 32-bits and in ASM there's very limited support (ADD and SUB is easy but MUL and DIV is another story).
  • There's no pixel perfect collision (it's possible but should make the game completely unplayable), your best solution is to make tile collisions with themselves or with a point, circle colision is possible but you have to manage big numbers and software square root is quite slow.
  • Make sure all the graphics meet the hardware limitations so you don't need to adjust the graphics too much during the port.
  • Leave out the sound for last (or completely out), the PM audio hardware is very limited, 1 channel *beep beep* ... so it should be your lowest priority.
  • Multiplayer support across the IR... yoooouuu really don't want to go there!
    No emulation so you need 2 real pokémon-mini and 2 flash cards, there's no helpful library yet so you have to write some managing and handshaking code for the IR communication, handle properly any interferences or interruptions in the communication... etc.
    If you still want to provide a multiplayer solution without the hassle of the IR comm your best solution is to make the players take turns on the same device.
If you have any problem, question or need assistance you can always ask me ;)

Re: Pokemon Mini style games

Posted: November 10th, 2013, 09:19
by palkone
Thanks everybody for the positive feedback.
scyther wrote:Looks great!
Especialy the Psychic seeds one!
I hope you to release the links, and work on it, because it sounds like a fantastic idea.
Here is a link to download Psychic Seeds.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/bp82v ... _Seeds.zip
I am having problems with Pixel Memory so I won't be uploading that one.

When you download Psychic Seeds it contains an EXE, DLL, TXT & BMP.

There are only two levels, excuse the difficulty of the levels, these were only put together quickly. There is a hidden pokemon in each level.

Various things in the game are not implemented such as timers, counters, pause screen controls.

You will need to use the magnifier tool to see the game properly, I could never get scaling to work.
JustBurn wrote:
A response from a member of Team Pokémé! :D

I couldn't have asked for a more helpful response. I am aware that tackling something other than a simple game maker project is no easy task and is completely out of my league. I am not expecting to port Psychic Seeds or any other game I have made but I will definitely try to get something working. As you said, getting some graphics to show would be quite an accomplishment. Getting a character to move left and right would be even cooler!

"How cool is that seeing your little game working on a tiny handheld?" This is what keeps me going.

I really appreciate your extremely helpful response. This will definitely get me started in the right direction. :)

Re: Pokemon Mini style games

Posted: November 11th, 2013, 05:42
by JustBurn
That's actually a pretty good concept and has nice graphics, I can see the game being presented in the same level as the commercial ones.
The difficulty is okay, I like the concept of building a stair with exeggcutes to reach high places (that's a good method to be used to get some hidden pokémons!) but maybe that's better left for Intermediate difficulty.
Careful to not design early stages on the game like this ones, it's very easy to get completely stuck, if any exeggcute accidentally drops a hole while all aren't awaken then there's no way to complete the level, for beginner difficulty this sound like a cruel punishment which force you to Retry and start all over for such small mistake... e.g. I've got stuck on the 2nd level when i realize that not all 6 eggs were awaken and already moved two into the hole, since the Retry wasn't implemented i had to close and start the whole game from the start.

I don't see why you shouldn't port Psychic Seeds to the PM, the game is not really that complex to be ported into the PM, if you decide to use ASM + PokeMini libs you can check the mapview example.
I'll also recommend to use cstyle as it gives you some libs to handle some stuff for you (they are listed on my prev. post), so all you really need is to focus on gameplay mostly.

Sadly I didn't released an example of how to use sprites together with the map and make all of them move together with the camera which is controlled by the player's character (sprite), it may sound complex but with the libraries it's feels automatic and quite simple!
Wrote this code some time ago which I've used to develop the cspr lib but never managed to clean it up, make some proper sprites images and turn it into another example... still... if your interested I'll post some code snippets and explain of how to make it work with minimal effort.

Re: Pokemon Mini style games

Posted: November 11th, 2013, 10:11
by palkone
Thanks, I am glad you like it. To save me from some frustration while developing the game I added a reset button (F1). Yes the level design is very bad I admit, a sign pointing down to the hole that causes the player to fail instantly is very cruel. I didn't put much thought into the level design at all, but levels can be built very quickly.

As far as porting goes, I have no idea how difficult it could be to implement things such as jumping, locking the character onto a grid, etc...

I don't think camera control is one of my biggest concerns at the moment but its nice to know that you have a way to do it :D I will get into learning pokemon mini development over the upcoming holidays and see where it takes me from there.

Thanks again for trying my game.