I Made a Game That Lets You Share Levels Using Morse Code | Devlog 0 

Check out my new book here if you're interested in learning programming! squidgod.itch.io/lua-for-game-development Also my Patreon if you want to check out the source codes for all my games! www.patreon.com/squidgoddev

No way, a squid, a god and a dev at the same time???!!!11

You’re a digital mad scientist 👨‍🔬

i love seeing all the creative thinking going into the play date community. it's really impressive seeing what you guys are making on such a humble little device!

You deserve an award for writing a book

wow that's cool! also, i'm surprised to hear there's not any networking between playdates. I remember seeing that it has bluetooth in it to be integrated later or something, i assumed that would be available to devs for networking like that. but I guess we'll see. but if that doesn't pan out, it's very cool to see something like this to have some sort of way playdates can communicate with each other

I mean, you more or less just gave the PlayDate an actual modem :D That's pretty epic!

Clever! Love it! You can always expand on this further, by adding kansas city standard-like encoding, hamming code, checksums to make sure it all worked properly, or like encode binary data in RS232 like signalling... etc... :D

Awesome way to download levels!

I can't stop laughing at how cool this is and how well it works. I didn't even know this thing had a microphone!! At first, I assumed you were using the included speaker.

whoa! this is a really cool!!! you weren't kidding about having a good idea for level sharing!

i love how analog this type of data transmission is, and its exactly what i would expect from playdate devs

you make amazing videos, keep doing what you enjoy

Pretty cool, really changed the way i look at the playdate

wow amazing video!!! very impressive, and such a cool idea

Thanks for the link to that book!!

You really need to look into the various data encoding & transmiting formats that ham radio has come up with. There's some really impressive stuff they've come up with, with far greater information density than morse code, and is specifically designed to work with "noisy" (radio sense) environments.

this is really impressive

This is so amazing - I really hope that we continue to see more people developing unique experiences for the playdate. Mine unfortunately is in group 5 and it looks like it's going to be a LOOOOONG time until I receive it, but I'm happy to see there will be more and more games to choose from once I jump in!

This is REALLY fuckin cool! Since you're already listening for "volume" thresholds, I wonder if you can't transmit data as a modulation of volume, rather than time...? Something like, 3 different volume levels (or even 3 different notes, if that's way more distinguishable? I have no idea how robust the mic api is! haha) and just transmit at a constant 50ms, or whatever is most reliable? I know there will obviously be some volume variance depending on how the person is holding their device up to the speaker, so maybe you could do it based on relative volume, rather than a hard threshold? Like, maybe you could start each transmission with a series of "calibrating" pulses (to determine the base relative volume level and also establish timing). And who knows, if the timing is consistent, maybe this could even help you parse data from a noisy environment? Anyway, just a rambling thought! Keep up the great work Edit: Oh also, if you were to listen to relative volume for data rather than timing, maybe the little levels of accuracy (like, with timing you currently said it's around 50ms) is even better? Who knows, maybe you could even do base 4, if it's very reliable at parsing 4 different relative volume levels! And you might not have to deal with the framerate problem as much, since it's less important if you drop a frame when listening to volume rather than timing.

Awesome video! Really like the creative way you solved this issue. Using sound to create level now that is unique and awesome. I will definitely give playdate a chance after my current project. Something about the display just brings back good old memories especially Tetris. Keep it up! :)

could totally use this to transfer a save file from one device to another. “bro u gotta play my character” or whatever. especially on games that are not linear or are procedurally generated. very cool.

So cool!!! What an amazing concept. I wonder if the play date can detect different notes as well, if more complexity were needed for where the tiles were placed. This is a pie-in-the-sky idea, and probably way too hard to implement, but it’d be AMAZING if you saw the level start building itself and rendering AS the tone plays. It’d be like watching the world slowly coming to life!

This is impressive. Way to push the limits of the software.

Wow, very impressive

Morse code is a crazy cool idea, it’s not used much anymore, so using it this way is a fun idea!

Creative and good solution 👍

oh sweet ! it reminds me of how pocket operator data is transferred

Too impressive!

this is kind of like dial up. this is so cool

The playdate should have a Bluetooth or WiFi connection, but unfortunately it doesn't. But your morse code technic is a really good idea. I heard that some radio stations would do something similar to transfer games and other cool programs

Thats wild

Amazing and inspiring

Crazy! 😄

I know I'm a bit late, but regardless. I think to ensure that the Playdate doesn't translate random sounds from the environment into letters, there should be some sort of characteristic sound for the start of the transmission level and one for the end of the transmission

Thats really cool! perhaps the app on your phone can have a level editor as well! or maybe at the beginning you can define a level width and any letter bigger then that will move down to the next column! even if you dont add those i think this will be a really cool game and i cannot wait to try it out.

If you ever need any music for the game, I’d be happy to make some.

Оце ти заморочився) Чудово👌

Genius

niceeee

This is very wow EMCG

In The setup yup that was my problem thanks a lot

You should also try using pitch. It will help to transfer data more efficiently but I'm not sure how hard it is to implement on a limited hardware such as Playdate

This is so cool! You could also do this to make multiplayer games

you're a fucking genius

You could totally make it from play date to playdate. It has a built in speaker does it not? A playdate Playdate!

Why not use binary data for levels? Lua strings are pure 8-bit and binary-safe (you can use all values from 0 to 0xff/255) And also I think compression should greatly reduce level size, even something simple like RLE or huffman codes. (or both?)

this guy is too intelligent.

I wonder how much faster the data transfer could be if you used a frequecy shift type signal. Each character could be at the shortest practical signal duration but at a different pitch.

How fast can you transfer data using sound? Can you transfer a level with hundreds or thousands of blocks in a few seconds without errors by encoding each block as a frequency, using start and end signals, redundancy and error correction?

Why not cut out the middle man and just beep out the code from playdate itself. The thing has sound, no? Also, if you go that route, wouldn't be the modem sounds a more efficient coding for the level data?

Bruh so cool also 100th comment

Це як geometry dash?)

Ok

Epic.