Hi friends. Lots to share since my last update! I jumped back into game dev and am having a real blast. The first thing is that I finished my book Make Games for Playdate with Lua! It’s about 200 pages and written for beginners wanting to learn to code games. It took me 18 months and I’m proud to share it’s complete!

I made a little website for the book with the full details and links to all of the retailers: pdbook.net

I’d love it if you checked it out and bought a copy! Or read the free sample. Playdate is such a fun little device and great for beginners. The community of players and developers is really supportive too.

As part of finishing the book, I made a free and open source turn-based role-playing game to help people who want to see how a bit larger project could be structured and coded. It can be played here: https://brettchalupa.itch.io/1-bit-fantasy and the source is on GitHub: https://github.com/brettchalupa/1_bit_fantasy

Bomberfrog: Alpha

After I finished the Playdate book and was waiting for it get approved by various online retailers, I started making a shoot-em-up game called Bomberfrog. And I released an alpha version of it for free. It’s spicy. But fun. The core of the game design is that you collect chips by defeating enemies, which builds your bomb meter. If you get hit by a bullet, you auto bomb. So your bomb is your live! You can play aggressive and use your bomb, then you put yourself at risk.

The feedback has been surprising positive, especially amongst regular players of shmups. Seeing people post their fastest clears has been so incredibly motivating and rewarding.

Play Bomberfrog: Alpha here:

Bomberfrog: Alpha by Brett Chalupa

Horizontal wave-based speedrun shmup; single-stage alpha version

I love shmups. They’re essentially all I play aside from Monster Hunter. Having very limited free time, it’s great to just jump into a shmup and have a good time. I can’t really imagine playing a hundred-hour-long JRPG or something these days. Bomberfrog will bomb again! I’m going to expand it into multiple levels and add more bullet patterns.

Usagi Engine

Bomberfrog isn’t the only thing I’ve been cooking. The game is built in a free and open source game engine I’ve been making called Usagi Engine. It’s for rapidly making 2D pixel art games. I’m almost done with version 1. A handful of people have been checking it out and giving me feedback too. I’m having a total blast making games with the engine (and working on the engine itself).

Games are coded with Lua. And the engine itself is coded with Rust. The engine embraces limitations and provides a lot of common functionality so that developers can focus on exploring game ideas.

The engine’s website, with install instructions, are here: https://usagiengine.com/

Videos

I’m back making videos for my Brett Makes Games YouTube channel. It’s a surprisingly good way to get the word out about my projects and share what I’m working on. I left the channel dormant for a few years, and much to my surprise some of the videos have 10s of thousands of views. Kind of neat!

Here are a couple of highlights:

• Introducing Usagi, my blazing fast 2D game engine for rapid prototyping

• Can I make a JRPG for Playdate in 2 weeks? - 1-Bit Fantasy Playthrough & Code Review

Thank you!

I appreciate you being interested in following along with what I am up to. I hope you’re doing well! I’d love to know what you’ve been up to or have been enjoying.