Basic Platformer

About the game

Basic Platformer is the kind of platform game you can learn in a minute: your little yellow character runs to the right, jumps over crates and gaps, collects three coins in every stage and touches the goal flag. Spiky balls patrol the ground, and a hit costs one of your lives, shown in the corner next to a stage timer.

The game has three worlds, each with its own colours and its own song, and the controls are as forgiving as the genre allows: the longer you hold the jump key, the higher you go, and you can steer in the air. It was written as a teaching example for the console, so it also shows how a complete small game fits together.

Playing it here

Vircon32 is a 32-bit virtual game console designed by Carra: a fantasy machine that never existed as hardware, with a 640x360 screen, 16 sound channels and a simple gamepad, built to be easy to program and to emulate. This game is a native Vircon32 cartridge, so it runs here in the console's official emulator, compiled for the browser; no BIOS or firmware from any company is needed, because the standard open source BIOS of the project is built in.

Click Play, press Enter at the title screen and again to start the first world. Press Enter during the game to pause.

Controls

On a phone or tablet the console's buttons appear on screen, under the picture (or on the sides, with the device lying down). A game controller connected to the browser also works. F2 saves the emulator state and F4 loads it. The game's own saves are kept in your browser.

Tips

Collect the coins on the way, not before. The coins sit on blocks and on the ground; take the ones near the path first and come back for the high ones.

Jump early over the spikes. The jump arc is long, so you can start it well before the obstacle and still land past it.

Use the air. You can change direction while jumping, which makes tight landings on the small blocks much easier.

Credits and licence

Basic Platformer was made by Carra (Copyright 2021) and is free and open source under the 3-Clause BSD licence; by the repository's default the assets are under CC BY 4.0. The music was composed by Sebastian F. (FraynVGM) for the author and is published under CC BY 4.0 as "Basic Platformer music", by Vircon32 (Carra). We built the cartridge ourselves from the author's source with the official Vircon32 tools; the licence text and the exact source are linked from this page.