Eniko | Kitsune Tails out now!

not only can you use the free and open source tiled map editor to create custom levels, but you can create your own games in lua using the same simple framework we used ourselves for all the minigames in the game. this gif is me making a sample game i call "ghostzilla" from scratch

oh right, and we've prepared an arcade and over half a dozen minigames for you in the game. one's even 3D! check out the full trailer here:

wishlist & more info at kitsunegames.com/kitsunetails

Spent some time talking to @tomforsyth about the two chips he designed for the Mega68k fantasy console, the blizzer and bronze (which I believe are a lot like the Amiga's blitter and copper)

I gotta say, with those two chips able to parallelize drawing to the special framebuffer layer the system has, a LOT of cool stuff is possible that would be extremely hard on traditional 16 bit consoles. Think isometric perspective games or 3D like DOOM or maybe even stuff like Star Fox

And the best part is the framebuffer is treated as a third plane by the VPU which composits everything together so you can get even more power out of all of this by cleverly combining the framebuffer with tile layers and sprites

Loads of potential and possibilities if you dig deep enough, very exciting

i think i'm gonna use 3:2 isometric since i've never tried that before. it has advantages over 1:1 and 2:1 in that it doesn't look as weird as 1:1 and it doesn't make walls obscure as much behind them as 2:1

my plan is to upload the ground tiles to the console's VRAM, and draw everything else (walls, objects) using the framebuffer. this means when i have to redraw the framebuffer i don't have to redraw any of the floor tiles, which will be a major perf boost

unfortunately 3:2 isometric tiles don't play well with a tile grid, so i'm gonna have to draw the floor on the cpu, then chop it up into a full-screen buffer's worth of tiles and yeet that into VRAM. on the plus side, if i'm drawing the ground then i don't have to keep it flat, and i only need to use one of two available tile layers, which means i have one to spare for other stuff (like gui maybe? idk)

While the console has a framebuffer, it is much more flexible than a framebuffer on something like MS-DOS. It can scroll by single pixels horizontally and vertically and has registers you can set to make it repeat on both axes as well

The upshot of this is that it's much easier to make a 2D game with a scrolling framebuffer, because all you have to do is update the scroll registers and draw the newly revealed parts of the map, which is usually only a few rows of columns of pixels