in Gamestyle.

Been working on this for a while. It’s a drawing and animation toy. I designed it to look and function like an old school LCD electronic toy from the 80s/90s.

https://walsh9.github.io/super-micro-paint/

You can create 2-color, 16x32 pixel, four frame animations and export them as gifs.

Like this:

And this:

It’s pretty fun. Check it out.

It’s also on Twitter.

Just put this kit together.  This device is fantastic.

Problem: LED USA flag sign looks like this.

Let’s open it up and look inside.

Beautiful.

Okay. Let’s test along all circuits for continuity by poking with our Hi-tech LED Testing Tool.

Sorry. This post was not intended as any sort of buzz marketing. Any brand of battery will work, I promise.

The tool can test 3 or 4 LEDs at a time. Some of the bad LEDs break the circuit, and others just don’t light up. For now, mark all the bad LEDs.

Permanent markers are a great repair tool.

Okay, now snip out all the bad LEDs and solder in new ones.

There were a lot of bad LEDs. I saw some dents on a few of them. I think what happened was the sign took a hard fall at some point.

Apparently, this type of short stubby LED is sometimes called a ‘straw hat’.

The new LEDs are a little brighter than the old ones, but from a distance it should be fine.

Looks good!

Play in a browser now.

Well, this was my first time doing the 7DRL Challenge. In fact, it was my first time making a game. I didn’t plan anything for this in advance, and was actually caught by surprise when I realized it was 7DRL Challenge week, but I decided to go for it. And it seems like it turned out okay.

Chitinous Crooks is a very traditional roguelike in both gameplay and aesthetics. But you have no experience levels or items to help you, just a random set of god-granted abilities. Each dungeon level, you can use up to three of these, and every time you pass a level your health is restored and you gain additional abilities to choose from.

Special thanks goes to rot.js and the tutorial at the Coding Cookies blog.

Good Points

• Fight lobsterfolk and crabfolk in an underwater fortress.
• You can win or lose.
• A variety of special abilities.
• In game help screens.
• I added touchscreen support on the last day. It’s not perfect but it even works on some tablets.

Room for Improvement and Things I Had to Cut for Time

• I wanted some dungeon decorations. Lobsterfolk statues, moulted exoskeletons and other things to give the Sunken Citadel more atmosphere and less boxy-roomness.
• Some nice lofi tile graphics would also have been nice.
• Tweaking difficulty. Sometimes it feels pretty hard but other times it feels too easy. I wonder if I could even that out.
• I’m sure there are bugs I missed. There are always bugs.

(Originally posted here)