Hi there. My name is Brett, and I created the LameStation.

What Is A LameStation?



The LameStation is a game console that you build and program yourself. You get a box of parts, and a soldering iron so you can assemble it. Then you get a complete set of game development tools—everything you need to write your own games. The included book walks you step-by-step all the way from soldering your first component to playing your first game. The LameStation teaches hardware, software, and everything in between. For kids, students, and educators, it is the ultimate introduction to electronics and programming all in one box.

If you really want to see what the platform does, check out our first game trailer to see it in action.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNA_C--MipA

Why Am I Here?

I want to make this kit as fun as possible from the moment you open the box. As you all know, art can be one of the most daunting tasks when you start on a new game. That's why I want to include as much royalty-free content as I can in the kit. I've already written several games and created numerous sprites and tilesets for the kit, but I want to add some completely new content, that will inspire and take this kit to the next level.

Submission Guidelines

The console has a 2-bit 128x64 screen, with most sprites sized as multiples of 8. I need sprites for any and all types of games, side-scrollers, top-down RPGs, real-time strategy, platformer, whatever you've got, I can use. There is no style of game that it needs to conform to. This is a library of content to help students jumpstart their own games. Since these kits will be used for education, keep it PG. The console only has three color shades: black, grey, and white. Any high-color submissions will be down-sampled, so your drawing may not render the way you expected it if submitted otherwise.

Here's some examples so you can see exactly what we're talking about.


Why You Should Care

If chosen, your submissions will be released under a Creative Commons license within the free and open-source software library included with each and every LameStation kit, and will likely find their way into lots of games made by many different people. If you're looking to leave your mark on an exciting new educational product, and show lots and lots of kids what a sweet pixel artist you are, this is your chance.

So, how about it? Send your submissions to demos@lamestation.com and let's make something awesome together!

Ahh, all good questions. I'll go down them one-by-one.


Yes, so the LCD itself is monochrome, so my driver blinks certain pixels to create gray like you described. I limited it to three colors for a couple reasons:

• Multiple shades of gray are less convincing on this type of LCD, and just don't look very good.
• Using only 3 of the four available color values allows the fourth to be used as a transparency value; any more shades of gray would have bumped the color format up to 4-bit to use transparency, wasting lots of space.

Oh, and yes, some of the older sprites I used two shades of gray on accident, but the image conversion tool for the platform filters to the three-color format anyway, so I never got around to fixing the source images.


So, the LameStation is powered by the Parallax Propeller, which is an 80MHz, 8-core microcontroller, with 32kB of main RAM and 2kB of dedicated RAM per core. So you get a lot of power for the size of the display.

The console uses a double-buffered display, so there's no hard limit to how many sprites can be on the screen at once. It's up to the programmer to decide how far they want to push it.


The drawing library is written in assembly and goes really fast. The real limitation is how quickly the LCD itself can update, which is comparatively slow, so animations really don't have to be that great. For a given animation, I try to avoid using more than 2 or 3 frames, because too much animation is difficult to distinguish anyway.


Since the system memory of 32kB is shared between graphics and game code and all other types of media, it's best to keep things as small as possible.

That said, the piXel game shown above fits in under 20kB. It contains:

• 1 128x64 star map image


• 8 8x8 icons for health, lives, bullets, etc.
• 1 64x32 tilemap containing 32 8x8 tiles.


• 2 16x16, 1 8x8 enemy sprites.


• 1 40x32 player sprite with 10 frames.


• 1 48x48 main logo sprite.


• 1 128x48 bitmap font with 8x8 characters.


• 1 64x64 last boss sprite.

And that makes up a complete game with room left over. I hope that gives you a better idea of how much space you have to work with.


Currently, there's no mirroring support in-engine, so you should include it in image. That's a pretty good idea though, so I'm going to see what it would take to add that.


The library has no built-in concept of animations; only different frames and the programmer is responsible for creating animations.

You can read more about how frames work here:
Drawing Sprites - A Crash Course In LameStation


Well, I'd like to cover all the bases, even ones I haven't thought of yet.

I'd like to throw in graphics for just about any type of game you can think of. Ships, planes, monsters, animals, people, items, health, top-down style, platformer style, graphics for puzzle games like decorative boxes, gems, maybe some graphics for the classics like tetris, breakout, asteroids, missile command, jetpac, etc.

Really, the skies the limit. LameStation Nyan cat? LameFlappy Bird?

Here's a good way of thinking about it.

If you were a student, and someone handed you a game console to build and program for the first time, what would be the first game you'd want to make for it? Whatever your answer for that is, I'd like there to be at least some graphics for it in the box.

Please let me know if you have any more questions and I will do my best to answer them.