Pocket Rocket

A 1-bit rocket lander for the Poom, Arduboy FX (and FX-C). Fly a tiny rocket across 100 levels in 10 cities and places — Seoul, Venezia, Giza, Paris, Lisboa, Sydney, Star Base, Siberia, Mariana and Rio — and set it down slow and straight on the pad.

By jaychugstein · MIT License · Requires the FX flash chip (Arduboy FX / FX-C / 8BitCade XL).

Included on the Arduboy FX cart (BigFX list, Skill category).

▶ Play it in your browser (works on phones too)

Controls

The buttons are named as on the Arduboy: B is the outer (right) button, A the inner (left) one.

Button	Action
B (hold)	Thrust
Left / Right	Tilt
A	Parachute — only with an empty tank and above 100 m
B / A	After landing: next level / how the landing was scored

Hold B on the title screen to launch. Land slow and straight on the pad.

Bonuses

Extra points for 360 / 1080 flips, a perfect landing, finishing with 69% fuel, LIGHT SPEED dives, a parachute landing and one very particular statue arm in Rio.

Install

Arduboy FX / FX-C: load release/PocketRocket.hex together with release/PocketRocket-fxdata.bin, or the packaged PocketRocket.arduboy, with any FX-aware uploader (for example the Arduboy Cart Builder or the Arduboy-Python-Utilities uploader.py + fxdata-upload.py).

The game is built with ARDUBOY_NO_USB to save space. To upload a different sketch afterwards, press the reset button when the uploader asks.

Building from source

The sketch is in PocketRocket/ and needs the Arduboy2 and ArduboyFX libraries.

• Arduino IDE / arduino-cli: open PocketRocket/PocketRocket.ino, select an Arduboy board (or Arduino Leonardo), compile, then upload PocketRocket/fxdata/fxdata.bin as the FX development data.
• Command line: ./build.sh (edit the paths at the top). Builds build/PocketRocket.hex.

The program uses about 27 KB of the 28 KB available, so it is close to the limit. The release hex was built with avr-gcc 14.1. Other compiler versions may produce a slightly larger file.

Where the data comes from

The game was designed as a browser version first (browser/lander.html, playable in any browser). All level art, collision masks, animations and screens on the Arduboy are exported from that browser source so both versions match:

cd export && ./build_data.sh      # needs node and python3

This regenerates everything in PocketRocket/fxdata/ plus fxdata.h and screens.h.

Porting (POOM and other Arduboy-compatible devices)

• All game logic is in PocketRocket/game.cpp and only uses Arduboy2Base (buttons, frame timing, sBuffer), ArduboyFX (FX::begin, FX::readDataBytes, FX::seekData, FX::readPendingUInt8, FX::readEnd, FX::display) and EEPROM.
• tools/hosttest.cpp builds the unchanged game on a PC with small stand-ins in tools/shim/ (FX reads come straight from fxdata.bin in memory). It runs an autopilot across all 100 levels:

  cd tools && g++ -O2 -std=c++17 -w -Ishim -o hosttest hosttest.cpp && ./hosttest
  

  It's a handy reference for porting to non-AVR hardware.
• FX data is about 1.5 MB.
• The high score is saved at EEPROM address 32 (4 bytes).

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Uses the Arduboy2 (BSD 3-Clause) and ArduboyFX (CC0) libraries.