CodeWalrus

Hello everyone!

A bit more than a year ago, I started working on a new game remake, and decided not to share anything until it would be finished. Well, it's finished now :)

I'm happy to introduce you RGB Express for TI CE calculators!


You can see in the screenshot above the title screen and the level selection menu - there are 400 levels in total (all the original game's levels).

RGB Express is a puzzle game, where in each level, your goal is to draw paths for trucks to deliver cargos to houses of the same color. The two screenshots below show level 1 and level 20: level 1 is straightforward, but level 20 is more tricky, because although paths are allowed to cross or meet at intersections, every part of the road can only be used once in each direction (up, left, right, down).


Each time you complete a level, the next one will be unlocked. If you don't complete a level, but have less than three uncompleted levels so far, the next level will also be unlocked. This way, you can be stuck on a level and keep advancing, stuck on a second level and keep advancing, but as soon as you're stuck on a third level, you'll have to finish one of those three levels to keep advancing.


The difficulty increases progressively. Some levels require more thinking or more trial-and-error because they simply contain more cargos to deliver, or there is more contention on the roads. Other levels introduce new mechanics, that are sometimes used to increase the complexity of planning routes.

On the left, level 36 featuring the white truck, which has the ability to deliver cargos to houses of any color. As trucks deliver their cargos in the reverse order they collected them, you'll need to be careful about the ordering of the different deliveries' steps. On the right, level 72 and its bridges: pressing a button by driving over it will toggle the state of all bridges and buttons of the same color.


There are other mechanics that greatly increase the combinatorial aspect of routes planning, but I'm not showing them here to not reveal all the surprises the game has to offer!

I discovered RGB Express (the original game, for mobiles) in december 2017, and I immediately liked it. As much as completing this game was both enjoyable and a real challenge (it took me 2.5 years of weekly/monthly playing), because of some difficult levels, recreating it for the TI CE had its own fun and challenging steps (designing the sprites and the palette, coming up with memory-efficient and fixed-length encodings to store the levels and the paths, programming the game engine with as few state variables as possible, programming the menu, and finding spare time for all of that!).

In case some of you wonder if I've made any progress since last year on my other game remake BOOM (https://codewalr.us/index.php?topic=2615.0), I haven't, and now you know why!

RGB Express CE, its source code (written in C) and the 400 levels are available for download here: https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/476/47662.html (https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/476/47662.html)
To run this game, you'll need the CE C libraries (version 8 at least), their latest version can be found there: https://github.com/CE-Programming/libraries/releases/latest (https://github.com/CE-Programming/libraries/releases/latest)

Have fun!

Yes, a new game from you! :) They're always very good and quite elaborate for calculators, so this will go on my CE soon. :3=

Thank you very much DJ Omnimaga :)

I'd like to add something about the difficulty of the game: some levels are extremely difficult, and some can even seem impossible. If you're completely stuck on a level, sometimes the best thing to do is stop playing it for a while and only retry it after a few weeks, or even a few months. If you still can't manage to beat a level after that, you may want to wait again, until the 1st of April this time, and retry the level then (in that case, make sure your calculator's date is correctly set - you can see it and set it in the [mode] menu). All the levels are easier on that day.

As long as level 1 is not next to impossible to solve. :P (Donut Quest 2, I'm looking at you)