Mini Running Ant (Pokemon Mini)

For the Ludum Dare 56 compo on the theme "Tiny Creatures", I'm happy to present you a brand new (tiny) game for the Pokémon Mini console: Mini Running Ant!

The game is simple. You play as a ant, a must go as far as possible without touching a rock. Use Left and Right to avoid rocks. Press and hold any button to run instead of walk. Here is the game running on real hardware, but it works the same on emulators:

The gameplay is simple, but hopefully it'll entertain you for a brief moment! And if you are looking for a challenge,  my current highscore is 347 points!

Emulator recommandation

You can use any Pokemon Mini emulator to play this game, such as Pokémini, available for a wide variety of platforms (Windows, Linux, consoles, etc.): https://sourceforge.net/projects/pokemini/files/0.60/ It’s even available as a RetroArch core, so you can use it on almost a wide range of retro emulation devices too!

And of course, if you have an actual Pokémini mini at home (+ a Flashcart), you can course use it on real hardware too!

About

The game was made from scratch in about 7 hours, with an extra 3 hours spent on downloading, installing and configuring the SDK to create Pokémon Mini games. So that's about 10 hours in total that I was able to dedicate to the Ludum Dare compo this time. It's less that I would have hoped to, but I'm still happy to have managed to submit something, and to have been able to try my hand at making game for a new retro console.

I've been toying with the idea of making a game for the Pokémon Mini as soon as I received the Pokémini Flashcart from Inside Gadgets, but I never made the jump. When I discovered the "Tiny Creatures" theme, I immediately thought about Pokémon. And from that, I soon got the idea to finally try to make a game for one of the smallest game console there is!

Regarding the game itself, it was **developed 100% in C**, usingthe wonderful "S1C88 compiler" maintained by the wonderful Pokémon Mini homebrew community. The sample program was great to have a working basis, and the various tools hosted on this repo will help you convert graphics to Pokemon mini format.

I also heavily leaned on the community wiki to learn how the machine works: https://wiki.sublab.net/index.php/Pokemon_Mini

The Pokémon Mini is a very interesting machine, with a dedicated graphic chip that can display 24 16x16 pixels sprites and a scrolling background plane on a gorgeous 1bit screen gathering 96x64 pixels (the theme said "Tiny"!).

The current game has no sound, as this part is more complicated and I didn't have the time to work on it. Maybe in a post compo version?

In order to help fellow game developer making their own Pokémon Mini games, I've tried to comment the source code as much as possible. And also feel free to ask me any question you might have about it.

Well, that was a fun ride, I hope you'll enjoy the end result!