README

tangentscraps/cardinalrule

"A little game about a bird" — a Ludum Dare-era NES-style game written in Flash Pascal (Pascal that compiles to Flash SWF): a Joust × Defender hybrid where you're a cardinal fending off vampire bats. The Flixel side is a stub; the playable sprite test survives. Repo: https://github.com/tangentscraps/cardinalrule — commits Nov 2012, by Michal Wallace. Play the Godot port: https://tangentstorm.github.io/arcade/cardinalrule/#play/cardinalrule/direct Keep, document.

What it is

The README describes the design clearly: an NES-style game combining two Williams Electronics classics — Joust and Defender. The environment and objective follow Defender (a wide, wrap-around scrolling landscape; protect things on the ground from enemies trying to snatch them), while combat follows Joust (press to flap; when you collide with a bat, whoever is higher wins). The twist: instead of a spaceship, you're a cardinal, and instead of aliens, vampire bats.

The distinctive technical choice is the language: Flash Pascal (flashpascal.sourceforge.net), a Pascal compiler targeting the Flash VM — hence the unusual mix of .pas and .as files. src/Flx.pas and src/crule.pas wrap Flixel (the AS3 game framework, included as a submodule) in Pascal external class declarations; spritetest.pas is a working sprite demo. The pure-AS3 side never got past scaffolding — src/PlayState.as literally adds the text "INSERT GAME HERE".

The playable artifact is spritetest.pas: it loads img/cardinal-r.png (the cardinal sprite) through a MovieClipLoader, scales it 2×, and gives it velocity + gravity (0.2/frame) controlled by the arrow keys, at 512×448 and 32 fps. game.html embeds the resulting spritetest.swf. So the repo contains the bird, the physics feel, and the design doc — but not the bats, the scrolling landscape, or the Joust-style collision.

The commits run Nov 24–25, 2012 ("resized swf to NES size per the ludum dare rules" — the 256×224 internal resolution, doubled to 512×448). The game has since been ported to Godot and is playable in the browser: https://tangentstorm.github.io/arcade/cardinalrule/#play/cardinalrule/direct

(Flagged as unverified: the commit message says "per the ludum dare rules" but no Ludum Dare event number is recorded in the repo; the late-November 2012 dates fall just before that December's event, but which event (if any) this was entered in is not documented.)

Tech stack

Flash Pascal → SWF; Flixel (AS3, git submodule); FlashDevelop project (Cardinalrule.as3proj); MIT/x11 license per the README. The Godot port lives separately under the arcade site.

Inventory

Path	Contents
README.md	Game design: Joust × Defender, cardinal vs vampire bats, Flash Pascal credit
src/spritetest.pas	Working sprite test: loads cardinal PNG, arrow-key velocity, gravity
src/crule.pas, src/Flx.pas	Pascal wrappers around Flixel classes (external class)
src/CardinalRule.as, src/PlayState.as, src/MenuState.as, src/Preloader.as	AS3/Flixel side — PlayState is an "INSERT GAME HERE" stub
img/cardinal-r.png	The cardinal sprite
game.html	Embeds spritetest.swf at 512×448
Cardinalrule.as3proj	FlashDevelop project (SWF 512×448)
.gitmodules	Flixel submodule

Surprising / notable

• Flash Pascal is the real story. Writing a Ludum Dare game in Pascal- to-Flash in 2012 — while everyone else used raw AS3 — is exactly his kind of contrarian tooling choice, and the external class wrappers are a neat FFI pattern.
• Design doc survived, game didn't: the README's Joust-meets-Defender pitch is vivid and complete; the code has the bird but no bats. The Godot port is where the design finally became playable.
• The sprite test is the game feel prototype: gravity, velocity, arrow-key flight — the Joust half of the design was being prototyped before the Defender half existed.
• No linked streams or videos found in the repo. Verdict at triage: keep + document (done — this file).

Verdict

Keep, document. The repo is a design document plus a tech demo for an unusual toolchain; the playable realization is the Godot port linked above. If the Flash Pascal angle ever becomes a story (a "weird tools I have shipped games in" post), this is exhibit A.