Stay on Bucky the Bull as long as you can. A button pops up next to the bull: press it fast and he bucks the way you pushed. Too slow, or the wrong button, and you slip. Three slips and you're bucked off.
By jaychugstein · MIT License · Arduboy FX / FX-C (uses the FX flash chip).
Play it in your browser: https://jaychugstein.github.io/Buck-Off/ (works on phones too)
| Button | What it does |
|---|---|
| Up / Down / Left / Right, A, B | Press the one shown on screen, fast |
| Up / Down | Sound on or off (sound screen) |
| A or B | Next screen · finish or turn the cowboy's speech bubble |
| Right | Ride again (score screen) |
| Left | Back to the title (score screen) |
Buttons follow the Arduboy layout: A is the inner (lower left) button and B is the outer (upper right) one, and the controls screen shows them that way.
- A prompt pops up in the open space around the bull: an arrow, or a round A or B.
- Press it before it runs out and the bull bucks. Each button has its own move: rear up, kick, lunge, drop, leap and spin (on the spin, the cowboy waves his hat).
- Too slow or the wrong button is a strike (top left). Three strikes and you're thrown up in the air and kicked clean off the screen.
- Eight hits in a row wipes a strike.
- It gets faster the longer you ride: 1.3 seconds to react at the start, about 0.75 s at 20 seconds, 0.45 s at 40 seconds, never less than 0.3 s. Most rides last 25 to 40 seconds.
- Every hit: 10 points, plus up to 90 more for how much of the time you had left.
- Every 7 seconds without a strike: +250.
- Reaction times are measured to the millisecond, from the moment the prompt reaches the screen to the moment you press, not frame by frame.
- The score screen shows your time bucking, your average reaction time and your high score (saved).
| Rank | Score |
|---|---|
| Ground Beef | 0 |
| Hay Bale | 100 |
| Dust Eater | 250 |
| Buck Boy | 450 |
| Rodeo Clown | 700 |
| Saddle Sore | 1,000 |
| Buckaroo | 1,350 |
| Buckshot | 1,750 |
| Buck Wild | 2,200 |
| Ball Buster | 2,700 |
| Big Bucks | 3,300 |
| Bull Whisperer | 4,000 |
| Rodeo Legend | 4,800 |
| Buck Almighty | 6,000 |
Load release/BuckOff.arduboy with any FX-aware uploader (for example the
Arduboy Web Flasher or the Arduboy-Python-Utilities), or the .hex together
with release/BuckOff-fxdata.bin.
The game is built with ARDUBOY_NO_USB to save space, like most cart games:
to upload something else afterwards, press reset when the uploader asks.
The sketch is in BuckOff/ and needs the Arduboy2, ArduboyFX and
ArduboyTones libraries. The source sets a few size-saving compiler options
itself (top of BuckOff.ino).
- Arduino IDE: open
BuckOff/BuckOff.ino, pick an Arduboy board, compile, then uploadBuckOff/fxdata/fxdata.binas the FX data. - Command line:
./build.sh(edit the paths at the top) →build/BuckOff.hex.
All the art is drawn by Python scripts in art/ (needs numpy, scipy and Pillow)
and packed into the FX data:
cd art
python3 head.py && python3 title.py && python3 frames.py
python3 controls.py && python3 bucko.py
python3 fxpack.py # writes BuckOff/fxdata/fxdata.bin, BuckOff/fxdata.h and BuckOff/tables.h
The lettering uses the DejaVu fonts (DejaVu Serif Condensed Bold and DejaVu Sans Condensed Bold, free license). The music is Oh! Susanna by Stephen Foster (1848, public domain).
docs/ is a small web page that runs the real game file in the
Ardens emulator (MIT, by Peter Brown).
It's served by GitHub Pages from the docs folder.
MIT — see LICENSE. Uses the Arduboy2 (BSD 3-Clause), ArduboyFX (CC0) and
ArduboyTones (BSD 3-Clause) libraries; BuckOff/font.h is the Arduboy2 font.