My journey

1. Considering my audience
2. Recognizing my skill range
3. Preparing the room and tiles
4. Placing the four player-adjacent tiles
5. Placing the poop tile at a random location
6. Revealing poop when it is one tile away
7. Resetting the adjacent tiles
8. Adding a hint
9. Why won't this end?
10. Embracing the bug
11. Making the title card
12. Outstanding bugs
13. Published on itch.io
14. Celebrating my accomplishments

Considering my audience

• My son: a 3.5 year old boy
• Who loves talking about poop, toots and other gross bodily activities
• And who enjoys fiddling around with my Nintendo Switch and iPhone

Recognizing my skill range

• I can swap tiles
• I can respond to player movement events
• I can generate random numbers
• I can place text on the screen
• I can generate messages
• I can identify adjacent tiles

I can do this!

Preparing the room and tiles

• Make the room all black
• Switch the color of the player
• Make the player's background pixels transparent
• Create a poop tile
• Create a poop-in-the-dark tile

Placing the four player-adjacent tiles

First, generating the X and Y coordinates:

px = event.px
py = event.py
above = py
above -= 1
below = py
below += 1
right = px
right += 1
left = px
left -= 1

Placing the poop tile at a random location

Generating the coordinates:

poopX = random 0,24
poopY = random 0,14

Briefly revealing the location:

tell poopX,poopY to
  swap "poophidden"
end
wait 1 then
  tell poopX,poopY to
    swap "black"
  end
end

Revealing poop when it is one tile away

This is part pseudo-code, since each of the four conditionals is very similar:

if [within the room's bounds] then
  tell X,Y to
    if X==poopX then
      if Y==poopY then
    swap "poop"
      end
    end
  end
end

Resetting the adjacent tiles

In player, a custom reset event is emitted on each update event.

The reset event is attached to both poop tiles.

It simply swaps the tile for black.

Adding a hint

While play-testing, I would miss or forget where the poop is.

So, I made the A button briefly show the poop again:

on confirm do
  tell poopX,poopY to
    swap "poophidden"
  end
  wait 1 then
    tell poopX,poopY to
      swap "black"
    end
  end
end

End after collecting one or more poops

I added an on collect do event to the poop tile.

Inside it, I called fin with a game-ending message.

Why won't this end?

I play tested in the pulp browser simulator.

Everything worked as expected.

The game-ending message appeared after collecting the poops.

I downloaded the PDX file.

I opened it in the Playdate Simulator.

I collected the poop.

The console spit out a cryptic error.

I spent an hour attempting to address the error.

I couldn't figure out why the game crashed when it attempted to end.

Embracing the bug

I decided the game just wouldn't end.

Instead, the player just collects poop that appears in different locations.

Here is my updated poop tile collect function:

on collect do
  poops++
  say "You found {poops} poops!" then
    tell event.game to
      call "movePoop"
    end
  end
end

movePoop is the code you've now seen several times, with a new poopX and poopY generated prior.

Making the title card

I exported the font and imported it for use as World tiles.

I created a few rounded-corner tiles to make the poop look...cooler?

I duplicated and inverted the three letters, 'THE', to appear inside the poop.

Outstanding bugs

• The game doesn't end
• If the poop newly appears really close to the player, it won't properly swap the poop and poop hidden tiles immediately
• If the poop appears in the same position as the overlaid text, it is invisible but still collectable

Published on itch.io

• I registered
• I made a game page with description, cover image and links to download
• I published that page

Celebrating my accomplishments

• I built a game almost entirely from scratch in pulp!
• I debugged an issue where the player couldn't move to the top or bottom rows. And got stuck in place!
• I worked around a game-non-ending bug!
• I published it on itch.io!

I showed my son the game.

Sadly, it didn't hold his attention for more than 10 seconds.

Oh well. It was still a great learning experience making it!