I’ve always wanted to write games, but none of the engines I found were quite what I was looking for – 2D, pixelly in era-appropriate ways, with robust support for all the content I wanted to put in one. So I’m writing my own, and I’m putting my own touch on it. And since I didn’t really want to write my own engine either, I’m writing my own platform.
The Fixl is a fantasy console along the lines of the Pico-8 or the TIC-80. However, instead of going for 8-bit minimalism, the Fixl aims to be able to simulate a roughly 16-bit-ish system as might have come from the early 90s. The intent is to have a platform that offers not just sharing games, but individual sprites, maps, sounds, music, and so on, all within the context of building bigger and better projects through collaboration.
Right now there’s nothing much there. I’m implementing the guts of the system – this image is of the RAM viewer which is the only thing it can do just yet. Making fonts for the higher-resolution text layer has been a fun way to get into this (I’ve been messing around with pixel fonts for years, but my interests have always been more ambitious). The emulated CPU (a Game Boy-esque Z80 variant but running much faster and with access to 16 MB of RAM) is still a work in progress, as is the memory map that ties the whole project together, but when those are done I can start coding up small demos and hopefully at least getting something someone can play on their own.
Then the real fun begins.