Playdate Game Zero Zero: Perfect Stop(play.date)

175 pointsby adrianhon2 tahun yang lalu50 comments

https://play.date/games/zero-zero/

52 comments

hbridges2 tahun yang lalu

Hi 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!!

rob742 tahun yang lalu

Interestingly 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: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.

infotainment2 tahun yang lalu

Great 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?

hbridges2 tahun yang lalu

It'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

WhereIsTheTruth2 tahun yang lalu

Congrats, 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

Wowfunhappy2 tahun yang lalu

The PlayDate game is larger because it's using prerendered video.

M95D2 tahun yang lalu

Hi.

I saw that there are scoreboards on the website. Does this mean that the game includes some form of user tracking? Does the website (play.date) know how often a user plays, when, for how long, how good he/she is at it, etc.? Is there a unique user ID or device ID that they can pair with past&future aquisitions in the shop?

I don't own that game and I probably never will. I'm just asking this to educate myself about what's possible in terms of invasion of privacy by using a low power console such as this one.

Thanks.

nosrepa2 tahun yang lalu

I'll answer just in case you're actually interested in having a conversation. All of the scoreboard info can be found in the API docs:

https://help.play.date/catalog-developer/scoreboard-api/

Don't want scoreboards? Don't connect to wifi. It baffles me that someone would be paranoid about this.

MD872 tahun yang lalu

Presumably you need to be connected to wifi to obtain games, so that's not a great answer.

I also found the scoreboards surprising. I wouldn't expect a Gameboy-like device to be reporting things back to a server. I don't have any particular privacy concerns about it myself, but it is surprising, and I can see why people might object.

It also seems to contradict their privacy policy (https://panic.com/privacy/):

    Panic apps and products _do not_ send out _any_ private information. This includes
    ...
    Usernames
    ...

But the scoreboard API seems like it's tied to usernames...

iamjackg2 tahun yang lalu

Given the context around that line, I interpret that as applying to their actual Mac applications that deal with usernames/password/hostnames, especially since the sentence that precedes that is

> Except as described above

And further up there is a carve-out for Playdate logging.

They also don't really need to send out your username for the API call -- they already know who you are because your device is tied to your account.

I do find it surprising that there is no way to not participate in leaderboards.

M95D2 tahun yang lalu

> Presumably you need to be connected to wifi to obtain games

Not only that, but the API link provided by the author specifies that scores are stored in the device if Wifi is offline and uploaded later, so aparently, there's no way to block uploading unless the device is hard-reset (is that even possible?) before connecting to Wifi to get another game.

The only good thing I see is that the score board is not mandatory and it seems pretty benign if no other data is attached by the OS when scores are uploaded. But then, if scores are supported, 90% of the tracking infrastructure is already there.

iamjackg2 tahun yang lalu

You might want to read the Usage Analytics section of their privacy policy.

https://panic.com/privacy/

M95D2 tahun yang lalu

I really am interested and it baffles me that nobody else has privacy as a priority in their life, but down-voted my question instead.

playdate.scoreboards.addScore sends just the rank, player and value data, or is there a device ID added in the background? If not, how do they prevent spamming/cheating? Is player value user-defined? For this game only or all games on the device? Is it sent with https or just http?

Thank you.

omoikane2 tahun yang lalu

You are probably being downvoted for derailing. This is a post about a particular game, but this thread is turning into an ideological battle unrelated to the game. Discussions regarding people's priorities and privacy concerns would be better off as a separate post.

M95D2 tahun yang lalu

Oh. Ok. I'll keep that in mind next time.

iamjackg2 tahun yang lalu

You read that wrong. What you're referring to is the response you get from the server in the form of callback parameters. The function signature is

    playdate.scoreboards.addScore(boardID, value, callback)

So you only send the boardID and the score. You get the player name back as part of the callback.

hi_hi2 tahun yang lalu

Many, 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.

lxgr2 tahun yang lalu

Was this for internal training purposes, or was it ever released publicly?

teqsun2 tahun yang lalu

I 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_h...

hi_hi2 tahun yang lalu

Interesting. 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.

omoikane2 tahun yang lalu

Development log here:

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.

syntaxing2 tahun yang lalu

What does pseudo 3D vs video based approach mean for these games?

throwaway06652 tahun yang lalu

You 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.

hbridges2 tahun yang lalu

That'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.

vardump2 tahun yang lalu

> Hence realtime sprite scaling is not feasible.

Playdate got STM32F746 (ARM Cortex-M7F) at 180 MHz. 320 kB SRAM (and 16 MB of other RAM, maybe PSRAM?). DSP and saturation instructions are included.

The display is 400x240 1bpp.

Surely that's more than enough juice for sprite scaling? (Might need to copy graphics data to SRAM and even to do it in tiles for better performance.)

Although your video based implementation is pretty cool.

nickisnoble2 tahun yang lalu

I double dog dare you to port doom

omoikane2 tahun yang lalu

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41013159 - Doom on Playdate (2024-07-20, 39 comments)

two_handfuls2 tahun yang lalu

I'm impressed the video fits!

MBCook2 tahun yang lalu

So 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.

playworker2 tahun yang lalu

Reminds me of MegaRace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaRace

aquova2 tahun yang lalu

I've been following development of a 3D racing game for the Playdate - 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.

nosrepa2 tahun yang lalu

Do check out Secret Agent, Diora, and Snow! as well.

danpalmer2 tahun yang lalu

I can't find any of these, are they Play Date games?

[deleted]2 tahun yang lalu

nosrepa2 tahun yang lalu

https://dioragame.com/

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

npinsker2 tahun yang lalu

Don't have a Playdate, but I'm really enjoying the 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!

PixelForg2 tahun yang lalu

I think I found my new ringtone :)

smusamashah2 tahun yang lalu

This immediately reminded of Cab Ride for Pico-8 which was shared here on HN once https://powersaurus.itch.io/cab-ride

jaderobbins12 tahun yang lalu

Well, that was some time I'll never get back. What a fun little game.

RajT882 tahun yang lalu

Seems quite a lot like Densha de Go! I am sure it is inspired by the series.

hbridges2 tahun yang lalu

I 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...

Animats2 tahun yang lalu

Aw.

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.

SahAssar2 tahun yang lalu

Techmoan 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=4VzT2e8rvY0

jonhohle2 tahun yang lalu

Sega 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.

hbridges2 tahun yang lalu

Do you mean Slipheed? Because that game is insane

steezeburger2 tahun yang lalu

Was curious and looked it up. I think everyone's auto correct is a bit hardcore this evening. It's Silpheed

hbridges2 tahun yang lalu

Yes, that's the one! I can't blame autocorrect, just a regular typo

nosrepa2 tahun yang lalu

Been following this in the Playdate Squad discord. While it's not my type of game, it definitely looks great.

chaostheory2 tahun yang lalu

There 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

batiudrami2 tahun yang lalu

It’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.

TylerJaacks2 tahun yang lalu

immediate buy for me

Uptrenda2 tahun yang lalu