I Tried Making Games on a Calculator...

this is a graphing calculator and well it can calculate things and graph things but what you might not know is that you can actually just straight up write code on it so of course I'm going to try and use this to make one or maybe even a few games that run entirely on the calculator let's see how this turns out surprisingly there's already quite a big Community around making games on the TI 84 plus which is what I'm using and there's some pretty impressive Creations I don't think I'll be able to reach this level for my first project but it definitely gives a good idea of what is possible on what seems like such a simple device at first I had absolutely no idea how to program on this thing where is the program key that one so I looked up some guides for it and found this official one that is meant to kind of just help you learn with challenges and examples you can try using this and the ti basic language I wrote my first program which was literally just one line of code that prints this message that's crazy but it worked so I made some more code it's time for a program that takes your input and squares it yeah obviously again it was very simple but examples like these helped me to become familiar with how the programming language worked and somehow gave me a little bit of fun that you sometimes get from learning new things and seeing them work like encoding I continued trying out a bunch more functions from the language like if statements and even just formatting on the screen but while doing this I noticed that manually entering in all these lines and functions on the calculator was very tedious and very time consuming so I looked for a faster way luckily I stumbled across this program called Ti connect which allowed me to connect to my TI-84 plus to my computer and write code on the computer that I could then import straight to the calculator this made the process much faster and so at this point I decided to challenge myself by making an actual game albeit a very simple one a number guessing game for a number guessing game to work you of course need to generate a random number and tell the player if it is higher or lower than their guess it turns out that this wasn't too hard on the calculator I just use this Rand int function for the random number and then use prompt and some if statements to check if the guess was right or not eventually after playing around with the formatting and how everything gets displayed I had a working number guessing game and honestly this made me really happy and proud even for something so simple [Music] but now it was time to stop messing around this this isn't just a regular calculator it's a graphing calculator and that means that other than being able to show numbers and words it can graph or draw stuff onto the screen meaning that it's possible to create a much more engaging game with well Graphics so I decided that I was going to try and recreate Flappy Bird at least as best as I could I looked on the documentation and found out how to draw shapes like this circle or a line to the graph screen making sure to clear the screen and set the right dimensions beforehand I realized that to make a shape appear to move I could use a loop where each time it runs the screen would clear and then a shape would be drawn with a slightly shifted position which after a few attempts actually worked pretty well I also figured out that you could set custom backgrounds for the graph screen and after making a sky kind of one for fluffy bird spent me confident that I was going to be able to make a pretty decent game that was until I realized that yes it works great with an empty Square outline but when I actually fill that square in with colors it takes way too long to render each frame so it's pretty much not going to be playable like that unfortunately this meant that I was gonna have to keep the player as just an outline but I mean oh well I guess next it was time to make this very bird looking bird actually flap this was actually kind of difficult though because as you might know I'm used to making games in unity which has a built-in physics engine so I've never actually had to code physics myself before luckily though after some research I was able to find some formulas and strategies which helped me calculate the velocity and acceleration and stuff and then based on that I upgraded the position each frame and it worked with a full length faster and faster the longer it falls for I also made it so that when it detects that you press the up key on the calculator a positive velocity will be applied so that you go up for a bit and this made for an actually really natural and fun filling flying experience [Music] now for the obstacles the pipes using a similar random function to earlier I made the code choose a random height on the screen for a pipe to spawn and then draw some lines around the height to make the pipe to make a way to actually die to these I just made some simple if statements that check if the player's edges are inside the pipes of course there also needed to be a score so I used a function that draws text on the graph screen to display a number that increases every time you pass a pipe and it worked finally all line digital is a death screen so I made another image and made it so that it gets set as the background when the game ends and well this game was complete even if it does look a little scarf compared to the actual Flappy Bird but I didn't stop here I wanted one last challenge to see if I really knew my way around the calculator so I decided to try and make some kind of version of Kong you know that arcade game where you hit the ball yeah it turned out and making this was actually not too hard learning all of the skills that I'd learned in the Flappy Bird remake allowed me to make some parts of the game way easier all I really had to do was make the ball move with physics in two Dimensions instead of one luck in blackened bird and make it Bounce by flipping the velocity on one axis after hitting the walls and of course add the paddle that can move up or down if the arrow keys are pressed with all of this added it was simply a matter of adding a few more polishing touches and I had a working game in just a few hours way quicker than I spent on Flappy Bird overall even though they are a bit Bare Bones I had so much fun making these games and trying and learning something new and it definitely made me appreciate this calculator and the community behind calculator games so much more [Music]

Channel: DevBanana

Views: 133,024

Keywords: game devlog, game dev, game jam devlog, i made a game in 24 hours, devlog, devbanana, game development, making a game, unity game engine, unity, unity game development, unity devlog, making a game in unity, dev banana, graphing calculators, graphing calculator games, i made a game on a calculator, ti84, ti-84 plus ce games, ti-84 plus ce, ti-84 plus, texas instruments, graphing calculator, calculator

Id: wTUlVpIA4LA

Length: 6min 17sec (377 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 12 2023