Metaworm

i'll see what i can do :).  do we have a zoom function for pixel art in the gamebuino library?  (i could probably do some simple stuff,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel-art_scaling_algorithms

but these are just at integer zooms, i.e. 2x, 3x.)  i suppose it'd be easier to have a few frames for each given fruit.  

you could potentially make it two player by having the A/B side of the screen control the player to rotate Left/Right.

is this the right resolution and number of tiles per screen?

Yep, that is the right resolution (80X64) but I scaled them 3x to make it watch friendly.
The number of tiles are correct too, I will upload tomorrow a better "real screen" setup+descriptions.

The two player solution is quite nice, we could work that way!

If we add enemies above and under water and if the worms can move underwater slowly like you proposed, then I guess we have a path.
The game could still be played single player, and the two player stuff could be either coop or vs.

edit: About the zooming fruits, I sure can do an animation for them to appear within the same size sprite.

it would make the sprites simpler if they stayed within one tile, but we could try for the real "pop".  but let's go for easy first :).

your screen looks like 14x11 tiles, but i'm getting either that we have 10x8 tiles at 8x8 pixel resolution, or 20x16 tiles with 4x4 pixels.  (assuming 80x64 16bit pixels.)  were you using 6x6 pixel sprites with 13x10 playable tiles, with some extra tiles partially off screen?

i'll start sketching out some ideas.  it won't be a direct translation of my old snake code (https://github.com/lowagner/bitbox-boredgames) since you have the snake make smooth transitions between tiles, which look very nice, but complicate things :).

maybe we can have a cool death animation:  like segments turning gray and shrinking to zero.

Here the screen display centered, your are right, I have some corner tiles off screen on the mock.
The darker parts are the cropped tiles according to the resolution, I pushed everything 1 pixel up on the mock so to get an extra playable tile row on the bottom and maybe display something game related (life/score/whatnot) above the top unplayable cropped row, but I´m not sure this game needs it. Yep, a death anim to the body parts will be cool, I will start thinking about it. :) About the smooth transitions, I could make smaller tiles so to make it easier on that front, but we loose object art quality. Whatever is best for you. ;)

I also thought about two things:

+ if worms reduce speed when getting on water, won´t that make it hard on coding the bodies following/collisions?
+ A worm could auto jump between above water tiles when 1 tile is between, like we talked before, but I also thought a worm would not be able to rise on a bridge tile, instead it could travel under.
+ how should we handle a worm reaching the non playable borders?

I still have a few more doubts about worm vs environment.

edit: you can see the bridges, when horizontal, advance into the lower tile, I can keep it one tile only for the sake of rendering objects above in case the idea of a worm going through under the bridge is fine. ;)
Oh, I miss understood what you meant by "pop", yep, lets keep it all within the 6x6 tile. I thought "somehow" you meant to have smaller tile+sprites, like 4x4. :D

Integer scaling is available in the library, howeber i think that that pop animation is more easily realized with just using an animation and storing the stuff frame-by-frame.

More than integer scaling, any scaling, with different scaling on X and Y axis! This is a very early demo I made:

So there is already a gamebuino meta emulator?

Not yet!

https://gamebuino.com/community/topic/meta-api-release-when

reducing speed in water would make things more complicated, but not too much more.  i think it entails keeping track of two movement counters rather than just one.  (of course, it's always easier until you try to code it ;).)  you can kill a worm that hits the border, or you could teleport them to the other side of the screen.

i'll probably keep most of the same ideas from my old snake game, but i think we'll be able to have a few different tiles (including tiles which are essentially tied to the tile right above them, like in the horizontal bridge or the grass tiles which bleed down into the water).  we can probably rely on map makers to keep those in there.

A teleporting worm when corner is reached sounds like a good idea.
Yep, the bleeding tiles is fine. I was thinking about the sprites when in-water and came up with some ideas too, I have to upload it with all the other gfx already done into it. Will look to do so this week.

If you are up to code this game, it might be a bit hard to do so without the lib and a meta, but then we can all help on that front.

We have a discord channel now where we can open a thread to eventually chat about the on-goings. That way more people can help with code hints if it may need. Come over there and we will set it up.

sorry for being pokey; currently i can get time to code side projects on holidays it seems.  a big stopper for me now is not having the lib to code the game for/within.  as a wishlist, of course, it would be nice if the lib also had an SDL target to ease development.  does the lib exist "in the wild" yet?

also, @erico, is there a decent looking two-frame animation for the water?  (can the waves wiggle back and forth gently, for example?)