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Playdate Game Zero Zero: Perfect Stop
- SahAssar 2y agoTechmoan has made some videos on similar games on dedicated consoles, really enjoyed those. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do-ZBPWhhbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do-ZBPWhhbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VzT2e8rvY0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VzT2e8rvY0
- RajT88 2y agoSeems quite a lot like Densha de Go! I am sure it is inspired by the series.
- hbridges 2y agoI love Densha de Go. DDG Final is one of my top 10 fav games of all time. When I got a Playdate, I had a vision of using the crank as a train's master controller and I was compelled to see it through...
- aquova 2y agoI've been following development of a 3D racing game for the Playdate - https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@2DArray/113070310047102734 https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@2DArray/113070310047102734. The console is presented as being 2D-centric, but I'm curious to see what cream-of-the-crop graphical titles come out for the system within the next few years, it feels like it's really gaining steam.
- nosrepa 2y agoDo check out Secret Agent, Diora, and Snow! as well.
- danpalmer 2y agoI can't find any of these, are they Play Date games?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nosrepa 2y agohttps://dioragame.com/ https://dioragame.com/ https://twitter.com/risolvipro https://twitter.com/risolvipro Snow! doesn't seem to have a home outside of discord, but it's a port of their existing pico8 game: https://freds72.itch.io/snow https://freds72.itch.io/snow
- omoikane 2y agoDevelopment log here: https://devforum.play.date/t/zero-zero-perfect-stop-train-sim/6669 https://devforum.play.date/t/zero-zero-perfect-stop-train-si... Looks like the game was pseudo-3D up until 2023, but sometime before 2024-05-19 they switched to a video-based approach.
- syntaxing 2y agoWhat does pseudo 3D vs video based approach mean for these games?
- throwaway0665 2y agoYou draw the 2D projection of 3D objects manually instead of drawing 3D geometry and the hardware draws the 2D projection to the screen. The other is the gameplay is a video of a 3D scene that has been prerendered on a more powerful machine.
- MBCook 2y agoSo essentially an FMV game, but used to provide better 3D than the system ever could natively instead of video of actual people. For a game like this where the path is limited and known that’s a very smart approach. Neat.
- playworker 2y agoReminds me of MegaRace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaRace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaRace
- hbridges 2y agoThat's exactly right. The issue I ran into is that the Playdate's CPU doesn't have a lot of juice, and spends a lot of time every frame just filling the screen. There's no specialized blitting hardware or GPU. Hence realtime sprite scaling is not feasible. I tried making some pre-scaled sprites, and the ROM footprint had to be pretty large to afford enough size steps for reasonably smooth motion as the train moved past objects. Even then, all that sprite drawing was starting to dip the frame rate. So, I experimented with a pre-rendered approach, and that was a huge unlock. Eventually I was able to wrangle it into something that I think worked even better in the end! The pre-rendered video based approach allowed way more elaborate detail and I didn't have to worry about frame rate anymore.
- nosrepa 2y agoBeen following this in the Playdate Squad discord. While it's not my type of game, it definitely looks great.
- chaostheory 2y agoThere are a lot of nice indie surprises on the Playdate. I was not disappointed by it. There’s still new titles on the way too
- batiudrami 2y agoIt’s definitely more a curio than a competitor to, for example, the Switch, and the cost to entry is pretty high but I like mine a lot.
- TylerJaacks 2y agoimmediate buy for me
- hi_hi 2y agoMany, many years ago (20+ eek) I worked on a 3D simulator for the New York Subway (even though we were based near London, UK). They were upgrading it from the legacy video based system to an interactive 3D sim. There was something deeply fulfilling about having the legacy videos running side by side with the realtime 3D view and having them almost perfectly in sync. We were running on inhouse designed and built, industrialised graphics cards, using 3DFX chips. It was a magical time to be involved with the cutting edge of 3D graphics as the industry tipped from Silicon Graphics and Evans & Sutherland "big iron" to consumer hardware.
- lxgr 2y agoWas this for internal training purposes, or was it ever released publicly?
- teqsun 2y agoI was also interested, but according to MTA Train Operators the computer that runs it is often out of service, and some who did felt it required a very exact placement: https://old.reddit.com/r/nycrail/comments/1ezw72n/does_mta_have_something_like_this_for_training/ https://old.reddit.com/r/nycrail/comments/1ezw72n/does_mta_h...
- hi_hi 2y agoInteresting. It's a shame there's no images or more info. I never saw the sim deployed, so I'd love to see if what they were discussing was the same I'd worked on. For the previous question, it was an internal training sim, not public.
- jonhohle 2y agoSega CD used this technique a lot to fake 3D environments. Silo here is a great example of a game that looks like it could be a real time 3D game, but it cleverly interweaves FMV with sprites.
- hbridges 2y agoDo you mean Slipheed? Because that game is insane
- steezeburger 2y agoWas curious and looked it up. I think everyone's auto correct is a bit hardcore this evening. It's Silpheed
- hbridges 2y agoYes, that's the one! I can't blame autocorrect, just a regular typo
- hbridges 2y agoHi everybody. I'm Hunter, the developer of the game. I saw an uptick in sales over the past few hours and managed to trace it back here. So pleasantly surprised to see Zero Zero on HN! Thank you so much for the support and I hope all you Playdate owners out there enjoy the game!!
- infotainment 2y agoGreat job, I’m glad someone finally made a Densha-De-Go-like! Such a great gameplay concept! Question: is the route accurate to a real train, or is it fictional?
- hbridges 2y agoIt's loosely based on a 6-station stretch of the Fuji Kyuukou line in Yamanashi. Not sure my environment art really did the real life area justice, but that's how I derived the stations and spacing between them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujikyuko_Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujikyuko_Line
- rob74 2y agoInterestingly enough, until a few decades ago cranks were used to control the acceleration and (electric) braking in trams, electric locomotives etc. (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrschalter#/media/Datei:Gmunden_GM10_Fahrschalter.jpg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrschalter#/media/Datei:Gmun...). The rotation axis was vertical and not horizontal, and the feel and clicking noise of all the contacts opening and closing while you turn the crank would be lost, but still a Playdate would be great to simulate driving such a "classic" tram.
- WhereIsTheTruth 2y agoCongrats, always great to see stuff built for handheld consoles I'm surprised at the file size though, you'd think having a device with such a low res and without colors, you'd be able to shrink down assets more Comparing to a Densha de Go rom from n64, the difference is huge and yet it had colors and 2x the res
- Uptrenda 2y ago[flagged]
- npinsker 2y agoDon't have a Playdate, but I'm really enjoying the soundtrack (https://hunty.bandcamp.com/album/zero-zero-perfect-stop-original-soundtrack https://hunty.bandcamp.com/album/zero-zero-perfect-stop-orig...). The instruments for the departure melodies are perfect -- they sound just like the Tokyo metro!
- PixelForg 2y agoI think I found my new ringtone :)
- Animats 2y agoAw. Check out BVE and OpenBVE, the train simulators. Exactly the same problem - stop precisely at the stations and keep to schedule. Subways and railroads in Japan, the US, and Korea are modeled in great detail.
- smusamashah 2y agoThis immediately reminded of Cab Ride for Pico-8 which was shared here on HN once https://powersaurus.itch.io/cab-ride https://powersaurus.itch.io/cab-ride
- jaderobbins1 2y agoWell, that was some time I'll never get back. What a fun little game.