Meow Train Devlog 1

Meow Train is a concept my kiddos came up with for a game jam last year and both immediately agreed on revisiting (a rare compromise!) when I said I was doing Spring Lisp game jam this year.

The general idea here is you will help people get to their train before it departs while they say things like “I need to get there right meow!” 

The first day or two of the jam have been getting started up using my Playdate Fennel Starter project, getting build to publish to itch, and copying over camera movement logic I keep forgetting to put in it from previous projects. Now I can get the actual game started in earnest, with the first step being player running.

It is surprisingly hard to make a satisfying movement mechanic on such a small screen. I started with some obvious stuff like generic speed up from 1pixel to 2pixels to 3pixels of speed per frame, but this feels too jerky. I’m going to have to figure out how to do partial speed that applies every few frames without drawing at partial pixels.

Goal for today - make a satisfying run mechanic! I think if I can get that we’re half of the way to a playable game.