How do you make games for the Tiny Arcade?

[mike_ekim1024]

I see links to games to put on the SD card, but how do you make games for the Tiny Arcade?  There's a link to setting up the TinyScreen+, but that would just wipe out the game loader.

[Ben Rose]

Mike, games would typically be developed without the game loader- you can reload that easily, since it's just an Arduino program.

Unfortunately we don't have good documentation up yet since we've been focused on shipping hardware- but if you check out the game pages on our website, they have a link to the source code for the available games.

We definitely want to have a guide shortly to get people started.

[TuxedoCatGames]

I am very interested in this too.  During the Kickstarter campaign I didn't have the time to put in to make games, but I'd like to try my hand at it now.

[MagnusRunesson]

I've been meaning to write up a summary of how I made Tiny Shooter but haven't gotten very far yet.

If you don't know how to make programs/games for the Arduino platform then that's where you should start.

Until I've written anything down you can at least look at the source code for Tiny Shooter, it's available at https://github.com/MagnusRunesson/TAGE

[zet23t]

I have developed a library that comes with a few features that ease developing. By now, it works relatively well. It's not well documented and suffers bad design in a few places, however it comes with some neat features:

• Development does not require a TinyArcade connected, games compile to a windows executable
• Intgrated asset pipeline
• Image converter to C code
• Tiled sprite editor file import, converted to C code
• List based rendering, memory usage lower than with complete offscreen buffering
• 8-bit Depth buffer
• Various blend modes for sprites (additive, subtractive, others)
• Bitmap font support
• Text rendering - with support for vertical and horizontal alignment and word wrapping

The project can be found here: https://github.com/zet23t/td2play.

Dependencies:

• GLFW-3
• Lua, lua-gd, lua-fs

[dulsi]

zet23t thanks for td2play. I don't have the TinyArcade but have been thinking of writing a simulator for the tinyscreen video game kit. I was able to hack yours to mostly run space invaders and another sprite demo I found. It's not pretty.

Of course the space invaders demo program is horribly written. I've tried getting your tiny invaders running on the device but all I get is a star field and then nothing. I haven't tried hacking it to run in the simulator since TinyScreenC.h would need to be replaced.

EDIT: zet23t: I've forked your simulator code. My version is available at https://github.com/dulsi/tinyscreensim. I wanted to focus on only the simulator so I didn't grab the rest of your library.

[bfarmer@tinycircuits.com]

For those interested, check out this tutorial on our website for how to create a basic game for the TinyArcade. It is written entirely in the Arduino IDE and should be easy to follow for getting up and running with creating your own game. https://tinycircuits.com/blogs/learn/how-to-develop-a-game-for-the-tinyarcade-new