Making games with Meggy Jr.

I recently assembled a MeggyJr. RGB kit and was pleasantly surprised at what a solid handheld gaming system it really is. Inspired by Meggy’s bright and blinky LED matrix screen, I decided to try my hand at some basic game development. Because I’d never written a game before (though played more than my fair share), I expected the process to be a bit tough – thankfully I was mistaken. Armed with the excellent programming guide from EMSL and previous experience with Arduino coding, coding up my game was a snap.

I started off by opening up the most basic example sketch provided with the MeggyJrLibrary – MeggyJr_Blink. Then I added a few lines altering the position of the blinking dot with every button pressed. A few minutes of improvised coding and uploading later, I was thoroughly entertaining myself with a screen full of flashing colors. After some refinements, improvised animations & sound, came the result of all my pixel-pushing – “Dot”, a simple and colorful action game. You can download the source code for Dot and give it a go on your own Meggy. Please hack/mod the game to your heart’s content. I commented its inner-workings as much as possible in hopes that future authors might find it useful.

Of course Dot isn’t the only title available for Meggy, there’s a bunch of good games you can download for the kit over at Google Code. (Gemkeeper’s my current fave) Have fun!