| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Visuals | #76 | 3.961 | 3.961 |
| Gameplay | #109 | 3.412 | 3.412 |
| Overall | #140 | 3.529 | 3.529 |
| Audio | #167 | 2.980 | 2.980 |
| Authenticity (use of resolution restriction) | #212 | 3.765 | 3.765 |
Ranked from 51 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Did you work in a team?
We were 2 people:
- tducasse, code, music, sound effects
- mauricet, pixel art and animations
Was the resolution a challenge?
The amount of details that we can put in a 64x64px screen is very limited, so we had to adjust both the level design and the pixel art to make everything fit!
What did you learn?
I tried a framework I didn't know before, Love2d, and it was a lot of fun! The only bad point was the web export, since itch.io doesn't really support SharedArrayBuffers, I had to export using an older version, and it's not 100% bug-free...
Also, it was our first collaboration together, and I'm really happy with the result! I'll definitely try to do more collaborations in the future 😀
I took this as an opportunity to learn a new framework (love2d), build my own LDtk parsing library, and work outside the “main” path…. I was more interested in the technical learnings than the game design for this jam 🙂
Thanks for playing!
I don't see the canvas being 64 by 64. All the sprites are looking low rez but the game itself seems to be rendered in high rez, The canvas seems to be 640 by 640 when not in fullscreen
Here's a before and after of what it's looking like right now, and what it could look like if it was using a 64x64 resolution
mmm I’m sorry I don’t really get what you mean! maybe something is wrong with the way I do it?
Two things I do:
So effectively, I scale everthing up by 10.
The counterpart of this, and something I realised after the submission deadline, is that my camera is not aligned with the pixels, which means that while the size of the screen looks like 64x64, there are subpixels at the edges of the camera, like here:
Is that what you’re talking about?
Another issue is the fact that I’ve not aligned the movement to the grid either, effectively creating subpixels there as well, like here:
Sorry for over explaining, it’s my first time participating in the low rez jam, so I just want to make sure I understand for next time 🙂
Oh okay,
so basically, you are not rendering at 64 by 64 since if I scale it back down at a real 64x64 pixel resolution and scale it back up I get a different result. It's particularly obvious when looking at moving things, you can see that instead of being rendered on a 64x64 grid, things can actually use the full high rez of the screen.
I don't know what you mean by "my drawing canvas’ width and height are 64px" maybe they are only logical pixels and it's not actually rendered on a 64x64 canvas.
The best way to have a 64 by 64 game is to actually draw on an actual 64 by 64 texture/canvas/display and to upscale that with no special upscaling filter, I tried to do this on a recording it should look like that (without the compression artifacts from the video recording of course):
Another way is to actually make sure that all sprites are just the right size and at just the right position by rounding the positions before rendering for instance, this solution is pointlessly more CPU intensive and not recommended, but sometimes depending on the technology you use, you might not have the choice.
I saw you were using love2D, I'm sure someone already tackled this issue and made a starter kit for lowrezjam or something.
I'm not sure if it's working or not but I saw this one for instance: https://github.com/tcfunk/lowrezjam-starterkit-love2d and this video too
thanks a lot! I think I understand what my mistake was. On a high dpi screen, the library I use for resizing the screen was making pixels bleed for some reason, and I moved to not using their default canvas instead. Now looking at what they’ve done in this Love lowrez template, I get it now!
Thanks for taking the time!
I 100% agreed when I started play testing, which is why I put a grid tile under every skree, so that you can avoid them whenever you see one!
but yeah, I didn’t have enough time to make other people play it and watch where things were too hard/easy.
Such a strange experience.
A janky Metroid-clone with funny-ass elevator-music. I love it and hate it at the same time! (The song is still playing in my head)
A checkpoint or health-items would be nice. I never could get to the red room without losing almost all my health to the bats.
After multiple tries I managed to get the Morph ball but couldn’t get past the Metroid with only one health.
I don’t know if it’s because of my browser, but I could sometimes see the collision-box of the character, and the backgrounds were missing at some segments.
that’s definitely a bug, I didn’t fix it because I thought it added some difficulty, and my intention was to absolutely avoid them anyway. They fall if you are 10px close, so you can just slow down, or even just run, and turn back to avoid them!
Thanks for playing!
yeah I’m sorry about that! As mentioned in the description, the web export is very buggy, but the windows version works fine, you could try that if you feel like 😀
Thanks for playing!
The art is all by Mauricet, he did a very good job at fitting as much detail as possible on such a small screen!
I’m glad you liked the feel, that’s definitely what we were going for, totally inspired by the original NES version!
I didn’t have a lot of time to play test the whole thing, but yeah, the Skree falling without any kind of warning was definitely the first thing I noticed and “fixed” by adding the pattern. Glad you understood it!
As for the directional shooting… Mauricet actually originally made animations for it, but I prioritised other aspects of the game first, and I didn’t feel comfortable adding it and maybe breaking things in the process!
Thanks for playing!
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.