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Background

The Arcade Retro Clock started out as a project to help me learn python. I had a Unicorn HAT 8x8 led matrix and wanted to see if I could make it play a tiny version of pacman.

PacDot was a success. It was very entertaining to watch the yellow dot eating the white dots while trying to avoid the 3 "ghost" dots. 64 squares does not make for a very large playfield but I kept working at it, hoping to make it fun.

To make the game more interesting, I decided to show the time. I created a font (5x3) and displayed the time as HH:MM. Given the small screen, I was not able to fit the entire time on the screen, so I simply scrolled it.

I like the scrolling text so I filled out the rest of the alphabet and started showing things like the score, the levels played, the games, played, etc.

I kept adding to the game such crazy things as single color sprites, then multi color sprites, then animated multicolored sprites. I drew a pacman, ghosts, ghosts chasing pacman, pacman chasing blue ghosts, etc.

I branched out into other games including a worm game (with animated chicken chasing worm animation), Tron light cycle, Space Invaders, Rally Dot, DotZerk and a few others. 9 games in total. All on a screen with less pixels than most icons on a desktop.

I gave my little creations vision, radar, memory, etc. Everything they would need to combat each other in a virtual world. I had one map that was 64 screens in size. Multiple car characters would drive around the map looking for each other. The display was a window into the action and would scroll around the screen

This became a passion project to see how much complexity I could write into a video game, using my own code and my own ideas. Creating sprites, animations, fonts, timing modules etc. are all based on my own ideas. This project is about having fun and expanding on ideas, not about how to write perfect code.

Conversions to other displays

Pimoroni saw my work and sent me a 16x16 Unicorn and said "show us what you can do". I converted the games to run on the new display and greatly expanded the capabilities of two of the games. Dot Invaders could now shoot a proper sized armada (sometimes the armada is in the shape of the current time). Outbreak could also generate larger maps based on the current time. More area to work with meant more ideas to explore.