Plumber’s Smile is my C64 work in progress game that I started to create during Global Game Jam 2020 and now I’m developing further.
Just a month before the gamejam my girlfriend bought me TheC64 – Commodore 64 fantastic replica that revived my love for this old hardware. C64 was my very first computer on which I played games and also started my adventure with programming. I started to program in Basic and as I was quite a young lad and rather quickly I’ve upgraded to Amiga I didn’t get a chance to learn how to code seriously for old 8bit machine… but I continued to play with programming and I’m doing that to this day making games and apps.
So naturally, after checking all games built into TheC64 (plus some more I’ve put on my USB) I looked for some opportunities to write my games. This would also be a great time to do some break from managing my team that makes VR games and apps – doing something simpler and do some programming on my own.
One problem was I didn’t like the idea I should learn C64 assembler so I tried to look for some high-level programming solution and this is how I’ve found Turbo Rascal Syntax Error (yep, that’s not even the full name) – work in progress fully packed IDE to program in Turbo Pascal-like language for C64 (and more!) with out-of-the-box library to handle images, sprites, characters, and sound/music playback.
So, back to gamejam, it was a natural decision to code game for C64 as I already played a little with Turbo Rascal examples and tutorials. The theme of GGJ2020 was „Repair” and that’s when the idea of a game about plumber fixing paths made of pipes materialized.
I did all the graphics and coding, my friend helped me creating great theme music and short jingles for the win and failure scenarios. That’s how Plumber’s Smile first version was done – you can check it out on Global Game Jam entry page (the link’s at the top of this post). You will find there the C64 build+sources and also online emu+game pack (not recommended – use keypad to move and keypad’s dot for fire).
In the game, you move our Plumber around and use fire button+direction to kick pipes to rotate them. Your goal is to fix the pipe path in a limited time per level. In this version, there are only 5 levels (not very well designed) but a great proof of concept for me
The title screen is in polish as it’s my native language and it just translated to Plumber’s Smile as it’s the main characteristic of the game’s hero I wanted to highlight as you can see on the below bad sketch that I did during gamejam (more on sketches in a future post).
I liked this side project and the not-so-final result after ~48 hours of coding. This was also a great escape from my current projects and getting things done for C64 with all its limitations is very interesting stuff. I decided I will develop it further – making better graphics, more gameplay mechanics and publishing it afterward. On this devlog, I would like to write about all things done to this day and also about all future works. I would also like to make C64 retrogaming and Turbo Rascal IDE more popular. Hope you will have fun reading all of this, playing current and future version of the game. I would also really enjoy any feedback.
Cheers!