I wish i could play it, but I couldn't run in an emulator :( it doesn't render the graphics, no matter the emulator/bios

@satless Interesting. Thanks for trying. The game was tested on PCSX-Redux, that should work for sure. I'll see if I can make others work too.

EDIT: Game works now on all PS1 emulators. I uploaded a hotfix to Itch.

There’s even a PS1 game; you are definitely a big shot.

Very interesting to have done it in PS1 style!!

@samuli was now able to play it on PCSX-Redux. Rly experimental and the songs are a banger. There were some issues with depth perception and collisions, but the game is rly charming and i'm glad i could play it.

(Tried to use Duckstation for this, but only PCSX-Redux worked)

That's my favourite entry so far in this jam. Jump windows are a bit tight and sometimes finger presses X in hope of double jump. But nevertheless, damn, I didn't expect to see PS1 game. Not PS1-style game made on Unity and barely fitting on double-layered Blu-Ray disc, but actual PS1 game made for PS1 hardware.

Also soundtrack is banging and the whole liminal crispy vibe of the early 3D games is just chef's kisses. Bravo!

@satless @0x0961h Thanks for playing and kind words!

I fixed the game to work on Duckstation and other more traditional PS1 emulators. I am actually surprised that the PCSX-Redux was running the game at all as I was initializing my polygon rendering buffer incorrectly! Once I found the issue it was just two lines of code that my sleep deprived jammerself had typoed.

@samuli Can confirm, it works on Duckstation now, both PAL and US-NTSC bioses!

This is absolutely amazing! I really enjoyed this one, the gameplay is simple but in a good way, it was just a fun and pleasant experience. Mine worked fine on ePSXe. Definitely an interesting and innovative project for the jam. Hopefully this project gets a lot of attention because it was both very fascinating and very fun!

Amazing little game, altho unforgiving and I found myself hyper-retrying a lot. Enjoyed it very very much. Good job !

Awesome job on a PS1 game. It only worked for me under the US bios (once I figured out how to change that in mednafen)
Great music, and I like how all your collected friends follow you in a line.
The relative platform heights were sometimes tricky to discern, but I managed to collect everyone.

@someone Thanks!
The game is made for NTSC (US or JP doesn't matter). I quickly tried the game with some PAL region settings as well and even when you get it running, the game runs slower as it is not PAL optimized for speed. PAL games also run with a different vertical resolution on PS1. Some emulators may not accept the NTSC signal when PAL region is selected.

Ironically I live in the PAL land myself. NTSC/PAL differences are one of the more annoying part of retro game development. :P

It's actually very impressive that you decided to go for a PS1 emulator game. A game jam is supposed to be a mini-challenge as is, but working with emulators is an additional difficulty. I liked the general vibes I got here, although I wish the music was a bit calmer as there's not THAT much of action going on :D nevertheless it's a very cool entry, well done!

p.s. am I stupid here?? I pressed both 0 and O and o nothing works - it just doesn't react to anything

@momotiktik Thanks for playing!

The O, refers to the PlayStation controller circle button. Check your emulator controls where it is assigned to.

Respect for programming a game for PS1! I like how little friends were following the character. I enjoyed playing it! Last got a bit frustrating because collision felt too unforgiving. Neverthenless, great job!

As someone who made a Game Boy Advance game for the last LD, I'm always glad to see homebrew console games in the jam! And making it 3D is an additional challenge that I wouldn't dream of putting myself through. You went for a uniquely PS1 visual design, with pixel art sprites in 3D space, and it's particularly effective - especially with the warping on the edges of the camera.

Of course the perspective makes it a little harder to time your jumps right, and I couldn't tell if the jump was longer if I pressed X for longer. There didn't seem to be much of a difference and this could be a nice improvement to avoid landing on the end of the platforms.

A few things worth noting:
- There's a steep difficulty gap between stages 1 and 2 but the latter is still doable (harder if you want to collect all friends), whereas I found stage 3 to be almost infeasible even when ignoring most friends.
- As there is no middle ground between "stage completed" and "stage completed with all friends rescued", there isn't an incentive to collect as many friends as you can if it's too hard to collect them all. Maybe showing the number of friends at the end would help, or perhaps you could unlock the next levels by reaching a certain score.
- Sometimes the music would stop looping and start again a minute later.
- It's not always obvious if a gap between platforms needs a jump or if you can just walk over it.
- I think there is some kind of coyote time where you can still jump for a few frames after leaving a platform, which is good, but it probably should be more forgiving given the camera orientation. I often died without seeing how, as sometimes you can see your character fall for a bit before dying, and sometimes you die immediately as you hit a ledge (maybe it's when you get sandwiched between two platforms).

The game has a lot of things going on with the scrolling level, camera, physics and the nice bonus of having your friends follow you. It's impressive you managed to do all this during the jam. The music is very catchy as well, congrats if you made it for the jam too!

I don't have PS1, so I rated from video. Looks like a nice little game. The only strange thing I noticed was the texture of "cloud" tile, it is sometimes indistinguishable from background color, so I first I thought it was a bug when the character run on "empty" space.

@kyrio Thanks for detailed feedback! I agree with pretty much all of it. :)

The game indeed has both coyote time, but also variable jump height based on how long you press the jump button. Latter is mostly useful for short hops, usually you end up with max jump.

Music was done by a friend of mine, I concentrated on programming. When you hear a little gap, it means that the track ended and the CD-drive has to find the beginning of the track again. I edited the 20s loops to be around 3min CD tracks because of that reason.

Really cool! It's quite hard (but maybe it's because I'm playing it in an emulator with my keyboard. Well done! It's really amazing to see new games made in such a short period of time on such old consoles.

I've been trying to tweak my emulator's settings but can't seem to counter this problem. I'm using Mednaffe 0.8.8


I can hear the audio but video doesn't obviously show.

Other ROMs work fine tho. Guess I need to try again later.

AAAAAAAAAAA, I DID IT! STAGE THREE WITH ALL FRIENDS RESCUED!

What a tense level, I was hyperfocused all the way through. You've done some great level design in all levels, but level 3 easily takes the cake, just an array of amazing ideas in there. Music is a banger and the stage has that cool cyber look with the playstation, circuit board inspired design. The 2.5D style looks brilliant here as well. The sprites are cute and lively and contrast well with the 3D environments. You've nailed the Playstation aesthetic, looks amazing. Everything is awesome in this, you really did an amazing job on this game!

This is so cool! I used the pcx-redux emulator. Total PS1 vibes! It was really fun and fast-paced! I like the music, too! Awesome job!

Very technically impressive, but man it is brutal! My full playthrough is linked below, no judgement if you don't want to sit through the literally 42 minutes of Stage 3 attempts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXsRmyUMCMs

I'll need to stop playing for now because I keep failing the 3rd stage 😅 Worked great on PCSX-Redux, which I just downloadeed.

Sadly it didn't play any sound on the JavaScript emulators I tried before it - otherwise I would be tempted to jump on the PSX bandwagon next LD (I'd like people to be able to play and rate without needing to download an emulator)

I think any criticism that I could bring was already mentioned before: I wish there weren't gaps between tiles that don't require jumping, but other than that the platform gameplay was great.

@mathstr0fficial That is true dedication! Though, looks like you had it extra hard. The game seems to run faster on your emulator than intended. Congrats for completing it with extra speed!

@captaindreamcast Thanks for the praise! The 3rd level is not actually just inspired by the PS1 motherboard, it IS the PS1 motherboard. I edited photos of real mobo for the level. Additionally, one of the tiles is a PS1 modchip as an easter egg - a nod to a modchip is required to play this game on the real hardware.

@wendel-scardua It would be great to have a browser emulator. I really appreciate everyone who has set up and run this game on their emulators!

Amazing little game, altho unforgiving and I found myself hyper-retrying a lot

Definitely wasn't expecting to see a PS1 game in Ludum Dare. Reminds me a bit of my own game "Rush Deliverance" back in LD53.

I agree with others that a big problem is that it's hard to tell when gaps between tiles are stairs you can just walk up and when they're actual holes you need to jump over. Collision also feels really unforgiving at times - there's more margin for error than it looks like when picking up friends, but less margin for falling off platforms!

I couldn´t get it running but I did watch the gameplay. Very cute creature design and interesting music choice, though I´m not a huge fan of the whole aesthetic. However, it seems like a fun game to play! :)

Neat to see a PS1 game! Didn't manage to beat stage 3, but got near the end.

respect

I always love to see homebrew entries for LD! Unfortunately I don't have a hacked PS1, but I do have hacked a PSP and Vita, so I spent some time trying to convert the ISO into EBOOT to play this on one of them, but it didn't work out. Apparently converting psx homebrew isn't as easy as converting backups of official disks. In the end I had to play it on an emulator :(

As for the game itself, it was a lot of fun! The concept is simple, but the platforming is precise and challenging. I managed to beat the game, but could only 100% the first stage (I only missed 1 animal in stage 3 though >:[ )

The graphics were cute and the audio effective.

Nice entry!

Thats such a sepcial entry and I love it :D The only baby critic point i have is - for me the music from the get go was so loud my ears nearly exploded haha - but other than that a super cute nostalgic ps1 game :DDDD

I didn't expect to be playing a **new** PS1 game, let alone one made in 2024, let alone one made in a weekend! The moment you announced this, I was pumped!

It's definitely reminiscent of Crash Bandicoot, but an auto runner. Raccoon friend adventures around to collect cute little pals across a long flowerbed, a sort of temple level and inside of the PlayStation. Despite being sustained in these voids, I like that there's different environments with different sort of personalities. Flower zone being a little more lenient in the beginning so you can get a hold of the character's speed, while getting small tastes of what's to come (elevation and little bridges). Stage 2 is a bit faster and demanding, it's got bigger platforms as brief breaks from the tighter more precise platforming. Stage 3 is Friends Adrift's Slippery Climb: Very hard, very precise. I feel you kick off just a little too fast and there were a couple of jumps I completely misjudged. It's super cool how this level is constructed from photos of real hardware!

I love the aesthetic you went with, it made me think of Grandia and Parappa the Rapper with the flat 2D sprites in a 3D world. I love when games do this and this is no exception. Vitally, you kept the frame rate as consistent as possible, I didn't get any stutters or fluctuations.

Sounds are present and provide adequate feedback, wish there was music, but hey you got the most important bits down.

Anyway, huge kudos for making a game for the PlayStation in 72 hours for LudumDare, you absolute madlads!

I don't have a Playstation, but I still wanted to play on a Sony device.

That's awesome to see a playsation game in Ludum, lose screen is rough but the game is very fun, it remains me Super Hexagon, a catchy music, you need good reflexes and you lose / retry all the time. The game is well design so we want to retry in loop.

Congratulations for your entry !

@ale I had the same issue, I spend a lot of time installing RetroArch on my Vita, and it worked well (except some strange noise instead of the nice music at the begining of the stages).