Having a mini DIY game console to play games on The Bitbox console is very cool and making games on it with nothing but your C compiler is a great feeling. However, I found that some people would like to create games on it but lack the know-how (or the patience) of setting up a build chain, learn C, gdb, the bitbox SDK and 2D game dev (while all very simple steps if you know the majority of them, having to go through all of them at once is a little daunting)...
So I built this project to let people be creative and start making some simple games quickly, while :
- Requiring few if no programming to start doing something
- Ability to customize and edit the game mostly graphically / visually
- Being compatible with many tools (ie not needing special uncommon tooling).
- Be simple to modify a game, transmit it and play it !
0xFF is the project I created to cover this. The idea is to create a side-platformer/shooter/.. games using only a single 256x256 8bpp image as game data and program (hence the name, since 0xFF is 255 in hexadecimal and all data in those games can be expressed as a number between 0 and 255 : colors, positions x and y, tiles, ...), which is able to run on a PC, a Bitbox console (loading from microSD) as well as a micro bitbox (embedding several games in the internal flash).
The kind of games we're talking about here is 2D, tile and sprite-based games.
This single image will embed :
- the tiles
- the tilemaps of 4 levels
- all sprites
- all enemy definitions (how they move, what they do whan colliding the player)
- level info (gameplay-wise)
- and finally, music and SFX
This idea of a game encoded on an image is not mine, it originates from the SIP (Single Image Platformer) idea by Siegfried Croes.
Let's see how a whole game can be coded in an image in 0xFF in the Tutorial , or check the Reference
