For LD23, I decided to go full-retro, and make a z80-based game that runs on Pac-Man arcade hardware. I’m not going to lie to you, I didn’t even come close to completing it, and I’m totally fine with that. You can see the “finished” product here. From there you can get the romset (mspacmab – bootleg spaceman, for reasons I won’t get into), the source, and the link to the google code repository that has my Z80 kernel which I used for it. Fact of the matter is, I wanted to do a Z80/Arcade rom game for LD, I did it, and I’m happy that I did. I think I may do this for future LDs as well, learning from each (failure) along the way.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to finish something in time for either the regular compo or the jam, but I wanted to see how much I could get done in time, without going out of my way to devote all 48 hours on it.

I was coming home from a work trip, so if you watch the time-lapse off of the link above, you will see that I’m actually working on it in an airport (in Atlanta, Georgia) as well as on an airplane, along with on the couch at home and at an office desk. I squeezed in as much time as possible.

The main thing that prevented me from getting (a little) further is that I was planning to spend evenings on the work trip i was on, in re-aquainting myself with the tools (assembler, z80 kernel, etc) that I haven’t really looked at in about 5 years. I also wanted to add support in my “Llemonide” z80 IDE/emulator, for building and better debugging. Instead, for various reasons, I was unable to have any downtime at all on the work trip to devote to this project. I was essentially going in to LD completely green on the subject. I spent a lot of time creating the project, remembering how my z80 kernel works, basics like that which should have been old-hat.

So what did I learn? Spend A LOT of time getting familiar with your tools. Do practice jams. Try to minimize the amount of boilerplate stuff you’ll be recreating to save time. You need to spend your time making your game, not fumbling with your tools.

Better luck and progress next time!

As a sidenote, all of the source for mine is available at the page for Tiny World ’82, along with links to the tools/kernel, and the romset. I have included instructions to running it within the Google Chrome browser, in case you don’t have MAME handy. Check it out and review it if you like. I’m just hoping for an non-zero score on this one.

Tags: ld23, pacman, postmortem, retro, z80

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2012 at 7:52 pm and is filed under LD #23. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.