Tex Adventures

Inspiration

Although we have worked a lot in websites and high-level code before, we decided any of the ordinary challenges - making a website or generating content from a generative AI model - would be too straightforward for us and would hold our hands throughout the process.

Thus, we decided on something completely out of the ordinary, with an incredibly niche and small community that dedicated their work to it, with a process that would actively try to work against us - making an add-in for the CASIO fx-CG50, in the form of a simple platform game.

What it does

As of currently, it only generates a level and a main character, which the player can control using the navigation keypad. When the player moves across the screen, the level will scroll with the player. If the player hits an enemy or falls off the screen, the game ends.

How we built it

We built the program using the Prizm SDK, of which is the library that directly interacts with the calculator. From there, we set up two backends - one for the calculator, and one for the PC to debug issues on there since we could not debug problems on the calculator. Once we confirmed things worked on the PC backend, we moved the code to the calculator backend.

Challenges we ran into

The Prizm SDK took a considerable amount of time to set up, since it required making a custom toolchain in Linux.
We used C, which is a lot more prone to human error, especially since we were not initially familiar with the language.
One of us bricked our laptop working on this project and we already lost a teammate, so we had one laptop and one smartphone to program on.
We ran out of memory.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite being new to the library, we were easily able to learn it and understand how to draw sprites.
We were able to compile a program that ran on a calculator.

What we learned

Don’t get too excited with the Developer Mode in ChromeOS.
We learned how to compile and run an add-in for the CG50.
We were able to create a game essentially from scratch with a scrolling background.