Play C64 game
Lily Lander C64's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Audio | #42 | 3.150 | 3.150 |
| Graphics | #47 | 3.450 | 3.450 |
| Theme interpretation | #49 | 3.300 | 3.300 |
| Overall | #50 | 3.200 | 3.200 |
| Innovation | #72 | 2.800 | 2.800 |
| Gameplay | #96 | 2.650 | 2.650 |
Ranked from 20 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
GitHub repository URL
https://github.com/burnsauce/lilylander
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Comments
This game does take a while to load in browser. It wasn't immediately clear to me I should hold space to jump further. Pretty nice graphics, especially backgrounds.
Very interesting game! I wonder if I can play on the new C64 MAX lol
You absolutely can! In fact, you can play it in either NTSC for a faster game or PAL for a more relaxed pace. Both modes work on The C64.
Ribbit
A very nice game and extra points for making it in C64! I'm a ZX Spectrum player myself but mainly because I could not afford the C64 :)
Excellent game quite enjoyed it. Good to know people are still making C64 games! My best score was 579 after several tries. Great idea for the jam theme interpretation and great job on the pixel art for a Commodore game.
I didn't really expect a genuine Commodore 64 game here!
The gameplay is very simple, the only thing you do is jumping from one lily to the other, by holding a one button for different amount of time, to achieve different amount of jump power. It is very easy to play, and playing itself can be fun, however, there isn't much content in the game. Now, I don't know how hard it is to develop a game for C64 these days, so I'm not going to be too harsh on the lack of content, but that has to be considered, should you continue the development of this game.
However, despite the C64 limitations, I must admit, that the graphics and sound effects in this game, are hella well done! The main menu image, alongside the scrolling backgrounds, look very pretty, and the sound effects give a nice feedback as to what is happening. The music, is also great! It doesn't get annoying, is nice to listen, and considering this melody has been created for this game, I must say, you did a great job!
Perhaps the gameplay isn't the finest, but everything else has been well crafted! It is a very good game, and even if it wasn't made for the Commodore 64, it would still be great!
Our artist is delighted at all the good feedback about the song. She worked very hard on making it tolerable to listen to repeatedly.
And your instinct was right: I simply couldn’t fit any more background detail into the game! 64k is not a lot! I rolled my own RLE compression just to get what we had there to fit!
I could not get it to work...?
If you can’t get in running in the browser (after waiting some time for the LOADING… to complete), you can download the disk image from the game page and run it on your computer in VICE or another Commodore C64 emulator.
For VICE, just drag and drop the .d64 image onto the running VICE window.
Ah, doh! Didn't wait long enough!
Lily Lander is very fun, and challenging. It is fascinating that you're making this game with Assembly. I've written for the 68hc11 before. I can't imagine writing a whole game. The code is fascinating. Do you plan on porting it, maybe to a phone app?
Thanks for playing and your kind words! This was my first time programming in assembly, so I’m pretty happy with the result, that I could get everything working.
We have no plans to port this to anything :) We’re going to stick to making software for the C64 for now, but anyone who wants to play our games on their phone can run an emulator (hopefully, I don’t know iOS).
Sweet, it looks like a cool platform. One of the things I like about making games is learning new languages. Just thought I'd mention since Vice appears to run in browser, you could probably drop it into Apache Cordova without needing to do iOS stuff (not sure, just heard of it).
I got stuck on the loading screen! I wish I could have played more, the art and screenshots on your submission page look really nice.
It takes a long, long time to load in the browser. Once it’s loaded to the title screen, click on the window and press space bar. Maybe double click in some browsers.
You can download VICE to emulate a C64 on your PC and download the D64 image from the game page and get a much better experience.
Plus then you can play so many great C64 games. 😁
Well, this one took a bit of work to play. I ended up downloading the game and then using the same C64 emulator as your in-browser one, but yours was quite buggy for some reason.
Gameplay
Nothing outstanding, as far as one-button games go this feels pretty standard. Sometimes the jump hitboxes feel a bit small.
Graphics
Well you built graphics from scratch and they look better than my own game, so I don't really know what to say... it's a bit of a shame that the sky is more detailed than the water (which is the main part of the game) but I assume that from a technical standpoint filling with a single color was much easier than drawing a sprite over a background.
Audio
On itch it was poor quality and quite noisy, but after loading the game "properly" it worked fine. Amazing soundtrack! I liked the sound effects for the jump, pretty simple yet they give a great feedback
Innovation
Well this one gets 5 stars. Congratulations on making a game that good from scratch for C64 (please tell me you ran it on an actual C64)!
Theme interpretation
Again, nothing too fancy on this side. I notice a number of frogs this year.
Thanks for the review!
I actually don’t own ANY Commodore hardware, so it was written and tested in VICE. The browser emulator is a big buggy, but I can’t do anything about that ;)
It has been played by others on actual hardware, though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdGToEAd-hM
As to the background limitation, it was a technical one. I could only decompress and double-buffer the top 13 rows (of 25) before I couldn’t keep up with the buffer copy. Also, I used all but ~4k of the C64 ram, excluding only the I/O space ($D000). Using that memory would require me to refactor the game to only page that ram out when accessing I/O registers and I ran out of time. :)
Really impressive entry. Coding game from scratch is ton more difficult :P
Gameplay:
It's fun and with time you can get used to the leap distance (I got 1283 score, dunno if it's good or not). Though it would be really nice if there was something like a line indicating power of the jump.
Graphics:
They are really nice and make you feel that vibe of old games. However the further I went the bigger problem with synchronisation there was. Like score and paddle were lagging.
Audio:
Nice and southing music with classy sounds.
Innovation:
It's not really innovative, but I like the concept of the game. Everything well fitted.
Theme:
Leaps are at it's best, but I'm not sure about bounds (maybe paddle collision?)
Anyway, really good game and congratulation on making it ;)
Tried to play it on the browser at first but for some reasons this seems to be one of those games where spacebar scrolls the page down... making the browser version completely unplayable.
So then I tried to download it aaaand I was met with a surprise that I needed to download an emulator.
I guess I am one of those people that is kind of bad with this kind of stuffs - I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to run the emulators... Made wrong downloads a few times along the way before it finally works - not a fun experience :(
Okay, now after venting I can finally review the game itself.
One thing that catches my attention is how you build this game from SCRATCH. Holy cow - I can't even imagine. I have a little background with programming but if I were told to make a game from scratch I would make a text adventure on command prompt at best.
Gameplay wise I think this is very standard - nothing too creative; but it's fine enough, especially for something built from scratch. It's kind of annoying though how I don't know how far the frog would jump just from the sound alone - but I guess I can just say that this is a game that needs practice.
Graphics wise... Damn. I use engines but I can't make graphics this good. You build this from scratch and the graphics is top notch. If I could give ten stars I would.
Audio wise it's nice that at least the power of the jump strength is telegraphed via audio - though it doesn't really tell how far the frog would actually jump from the audio alone. The music is also soothing - did you also compose it yourself? It's simple, but it does the job very well.
A job very well done. Hats off.
edit: I fixed the spacebar scrolling with a little javascript! :)
Thank for the thorough review and the accolades! If anyone else has the page scroll issue, there’s a version on its own page here: turtlepanda.games/playLilyLander
I’m glad you can see the work that went into this. It was quite a chore! Double-buffering, keyboard matrix scanning, speedcode, and hours of learning raster line timings :)
Not to mention using almost every last byte of the the C64 memory! The only trick I didn’t pull was storing data in the I/O shadow space ;)
And yes, the music was composed in-house!
And you did all that in just a month... absolute madman!
I do wish I also had composed a music for my own game too... after all I had spent $200 to buy an FL Studio...
To be fair there are two of us. I only had to write the assembly ;)
(Also, I played Human Resource Machine and TIS-100 before I actually had to write assembly (also I’ve been coding C since my teenage years))
Hey! I just wanted to say thank You for playing my game! I figured I'd stop by get to enjoy a classic commodore 64 retro game! I was surprised to find out that you even programmed it with a C64 emulator, which I think is pretty cool! Good luck with the rest of the voting period!
As a retro game enthusiast, high-five for doing a c64 game!!
I'm actually impressed, gave you a good rating.
I’ve included two links to preview builds that were shared on GitHub before submissions closed and was subsequently “cracked” by introscene community.
Given that players may have already evaluated other variants of this game, I will describe them here:
Preview 2 has a slower pace, as the screen will not scroll before the frog lands on the lilypad, and the animations move twice as far as the release version, i.e.: there is no parallax effect on the sprite. It’s missing a titlescreen bugfix and several other optimizations.
Preview 1 is roughly the same as 2, but without music.
Hi~ How to open your game? I downloaded a .D64 file.
You’ll need to download a Commodore C64 emulator like VICE.
With VICE, load up x64.exe, then drag and drop the .D64 file to the running VICE window.
Hey! I updated the game so you can play in the browser! Check it out again!
Cute graphics, though water could use more detail. I used Vice emulator and not sure if I used right speed settings, jump animation seemed to be way faster than it should.
I agree that the water detail is lacking. Getting detail into the game was a challenge; in the end, I had just over 4KB of RAM left, and accessing that 4k required me to refactor all the code to bank in the I/O registers before accessing them. By the time I realized it, it was too late :)
I’ll look at that jump animation with fresh eyes soon.
Thanks for playing!