Hello!
I am a new/novice baremetal Sega Saturn game developer and I have a submission for the "Original Games" category, "Saturn Wordle":
I am a Sega Saturn hardware enthusiast. I wrote this game from scratch using my own toolchain, build system, register definitions, and study of the official Sega Saturn hardware manuals.
All code was authored by myself. No part of this project is derived from an AI-generated output.
Two assets are included that I did not author:
- the included list of accepted words is a derivative work of the New York Times list
- the included font is DejaVuSans Mono, as rendered (at compile-time) by freetype2.
This game exclusively uses the Saturn Keyboard. All other types of controllers are unsupported and ignored.
The exhaustive list of supported controllers is:
For mednaffe users, I prepared this silent video tutorial of how to configure the Sega Saturn Keyboard, (if you prefer to read rather than watch a video, read on...):
The keyboard must be directly connected to any of the Saturn's built-in controller ports. Multi-taps are not supported. If playing the game on real hardware with a genuine Sega keyboard, no additional configuration is necessary.
To enable keyboard input in mednafen, launch mednafen with these options:
Code:
-ss.input.port2 keyboard -command.toggle_grab keyboard 0x0 43+ctrl+shift
For example, a complete mednafen command line might be, inside same working directory that wordle.cue and wordle.iso have been copied to:
Code:
mednafen -ss.input.port2 keyboard -command.toggle_grab keyboard 0x0 43+ctrl+shift wordle.cue
If you have a physical "Context Menu" key on your full-sized keyboard, you may omit the `-command.toggle_grab` option if desired, as you would be able to use the default keybinding ("Ctrl-Shift-Menu"). As written, these options will connect an emulated Saturn keyboard to controller port 1, and "Ctrl-Shift-Tab" will be assigned to the "Input grab toggle" command.
When the game is launched, press "Ctrl-Shift-Tab" to "grab" keyboard and mouse input. When finished with the game, press "Ctrl-Shift-Tab" again to release keyboard and mouse input.
If you prefer to use mednaffe to launch mednafen, the "Toggle input grabbing (for emulated mice and keyboards)" option is in Global Settings -> Key Assignments -> Basic -> (bottom of the list).
Wordle, from Wikipedia:
Players have six attempts to guess a five-letter word, with feedback given for each guess in the form of colored tiles indicating when letters match or occupy the correct position.
To guess a word, type the word using the letter keys of the (emulated) keyboard. To submit a word, press the "Enter" key. A submission will only be accepted if that word exactly matches a word in the game's word list (the word list is a subset of all of the 5-letter words that exist in English).
Rejected submissions will not count against your six tries--in this case, simply nothing will happen when you press Enter. The intent of this mechanic is to simultaneously: slightly reduce the difficulty of the game, protect against premature presses of the "Enter" key, and to prohibit certain types of systematic guessing (e.g: attempt all vowels in a single guess).
When a word is guessed, each letter is assigned a color-coded hint highlight:
- LIME-GREEN: the letter is both present in the word, and in the correct position within the word (there may or may not be more than one of this letter in the word)
- YELLOW-BROWN: the letter is present in the word, but the guessed position does not match the position of the letter in the word.
- GREYISH-BLACK: the letter is not present in the word
- LIGHT-GREY: the letter has not yet been submitted / evaluated
How to win:
The game ends either when you make 6 guesses, or guess correctly, whichever comes first. A correct guess is indicated by 6 letters with a green highlight.
You may (re)start a new game (with a new psuedo-randomly-selected word that varies each time you restart the game) by pressing the Escape key.
After your first playthrough,
it is recommended that you press the Escape key at least once before you begin playing, as this action will seed the random number generator (hopefully giving you a word you have not seen before).
