Myself & Oliver Pope made a tiny thermal printer dungeon crawler game where you play mostly blind, i.e. where you make 3 inputs +1 level beaten and then once N inputs have been made we print the game state.

The idea is you would only get a single run and you would get to keep the receipt paper of your run as a “prize” to take home.

Our game was accepted into bonus stage Live London, but then COVID-19 happened and as a result it was never played by the public.



Edit: The original tutorial was never upgraded between blog websites (before this hugo blog & before the old HTML5 template website too), & it seems that the wayback machine doesn’t have it either which is a shame.

I’ve ripped the gameplay video from Twitter (so you don’t have to go there)


From what I remember on this project I spent a decent amount of time attempting to reverse engineer the serial/USB commands to move the write head/motor I eventually managed to store some data in the ROM on the receipt printer but it only had a few hundred bytes enough for a small logo.

Later we found out that instead of doing that you could just treat it as a regular printer & grab the pixel from the game write them as a .png & then send them to the receipt printer as a display.

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private void OnPostRender()
    {
        if (takeScreenShotOnNextFrame)
        {
            takeScreenShotOnNextFrame = false;
            Texture2D CamRender = new Texture2D(width, height, TextureFormat.RGBA4444, false);
            Rect rect = new Rect(0, 0, width, height);
            CamRender.ReadPixels(rect, 0, 0);

            byte[] byteArray = CamRender.EncodeToPNG();
            System.IO.File.WriteAllBytes("Assets/resources" + "/image.png", byteArray);

            if(_save)
            {
                System.IO.File.WriteAllBytes("Assets/resources/SavedImages/" + getPrintName(), byteArray);
            }
           
            printNumber++;
        }
    }