I saw this Kickstarter posted on another forum and couldn't help but think of how Pixel Joint always works wonders with low-spec pixeling.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/903888394/arduboy-card-sized-gaming



I saw their example games on that page:




Just seeing them ripping off existing games, or else using simple line graphics, I couldn't help but think "man, I could probably do better than that!" I'm not a pixel art pro but I always enjoy the challenge of trying to make good, readable sprites in monochrome or limited greyscale, and I thought some others might be interested as well.

I've always had one foot in the pixel world and the other in the coding world, so I'm anxious to make some stuff for this. Priority one will be seeing if it's fast enough to toggle pixels on and off each frame in order to do greyscale. But it can be fun working in just monochrome too.

I'm looking at the old two color game challenge for inspiration at the moment. Trying to remember if there were any other community monochrome challenges or anything like that.

I wanna make games for this... looks to be right up my alley!

Well if anyone wants to make something but they're more confident in their pixeling than their coding, I might be able to help. Though I have my own ideas for games I'd like to make!

Another thing I could do is make a simple gallery program for displaying monochrome pixel art, and potentially 1 or 2 color greyscale if the device is fast enough. That'd be kind of awesome, a Pixel Joint community gallery.

The specs of this thing are super limited, but to me that's part of the draw. I think when all is said and done we'll have about 28 kB to store programs and graphics, and a fullscreen monochrome 128x64 image takes up 1 kB. Greyscale would take up 2 kB.

Nope, it's just something I found. I know, I'm excited enough that it looks like I'm a shill. :) And I see that it was my first post. I thought I had posted here before, but apparently not, I spent some time at Pixelation ages ago...

One thing that's a little shady is that on their kickstarter they sort of market this as a Game Boy type device, but it is really nowhere near as powerful. They show off that Pokemon clone but there's no way you could fit Pokemon on this thing. I believe the original Pokemon was 512 kB, and this is 32kB, 6% of that. And you have to code your own rendering routines, sprite handling etc. So a lot of people who don't understand the specs of low level hardware have unrealistic expectations. I don't think there is any malice behind it, the guy designed this device as a cool business card to begin with, and people shouldn't expect more than that.

Just know that a gallery could hold about 28 full screen images, or 14 if I can get greyscale working. Or full screen animations of that many frames.

Yeah, there have been other Arduino-based little game systems in the past. Another one is the Gamby. The Arduboy seems like the first one that has gone to the extent of trying to look like a nice finished product with a plastic/metal case and all.

As you say, other game systems have kind of crappy LCD screens with bad ghosting effects. The Arduboy has an OLED screen with a really fast pixel response rate, so it should look a lot better in motion.

I've been talking about it in IRC with some other prospective coders. Unfortunately it sounds like the display only runs at 40 Hz (refreshing 40 times per second), and with the fast pixel response time it's unlikely that we will be able to flash pixels rapidly to achieve greyscale. 40 frames per second just isn't fast enough, you can see too much flicker. I'll see if I can post an example later. We might be limited to monochrome, but heck, you can still do pretty cool stuff with that.

The creator of the Kickstarter has said that in the future he wants to release another version that might have an SD card or a better screen, etc.

I don't get it, they say:

It looks so much fun! If I were to own one, I'd make a mini version of dropboy :)