Thanks for making these Pulp tutorials. I've been shifting over to learn Pulp and these videos have been a great intro and stirring up ideas for a future game.
With the red and black color scheme in the trailer, I expect we'll see this game get ported to the VirtualBoy as well....right? ;) From what I can see of these screenshots, they look top notch for a Pulp game.
I just came across Void Stranger today, and a Playdate version came to mind immediately! I'm just going off the video I saw, but the graphical style definitely looks like it could work very well with the Playdate.
Congratulations on the release of your first game! I love how small Pulp games are.
After I'm done with my current project (developed with Lua), I'm going to take a look at Pulp for another project I have in mind. How easy or difficult did you find it was to learn to use Pulp?
I tried out your demo for a few minutes. Managed to crash the Playdate when I encountered the two bats I was trying to fight. Looks like the character and a bat were overlapping the same tile at times.
At least by the looks of the screenshots and initial game play, your game does not look like a trivial project, so it is understandable if it is taking longer than you might have hoped. Even from my own small Playdate project I'm working on, I've found a lot of things need to be created, put together, and polished. Due to the PD being a relatively new platform, the SDK is lacking the tools, libraries, plug-ins, and general experienced developer base that one can find with other platforms, so we are all learning as we go along.
I encourage you to keep plugging away, have fun, and hopefully the end product will be here soon.
The thing which caught my eye with this game was the very distinctive game title font. I'm guessing inspiration from either the Scorpions logo or the 1975 movie Rollerball.
I tested through the demo, here's my initial feedback:
Movement of the ship is very smooth, hit box is definitely fair. This game reminds me of a mix of various 80s games like Silpheed, Bosconian, Xevious, etc. Great art, it drew me in from the initial screenshot. Love the little dialogs between chapters. Will this waffle maker get a spin off game?
I'm assuming that since this is a demo it doesn't have all of the features fully flushed out, since I didn't see anything that would be typical for this type of game like score, power-ups, lives, etc.
The only "issue" I think I found was in one of the early dialogs, there is the phrase "can not" which probably should be "cannot".
This is a great start and love seeing the types of games being made for the Playdate.
The Keeper reminds me of old adventures like Colossal Cave or Mystery House by exploring, getting lost, and slowly finding new things to progress through the game. Loved it! I also appreciate that even when I got to "the end", I was still allowed to go back and keep exploring, since I still hadn't found all of the keys and unlocked all of the secrets.
Side issues:
When I tried to buy this game through Catalog, my bank kept declining the purchase (perhaps because I had just purchased several other Playdate games, so maybe something was flagged as suspicious). Fortunately, I was able to purchase the game through itch.io with no issues.
I encountered several bugs in the games, such as keys appearing again in rooms even after I had obtained them. After going back at "the end", the elevator wasn't accessible. Also if the service elevator had been moved to another floor, you enter it and exit it, you end going out the previous location.
Thank you for making this game! I love the creativity and weirdness we see with Playdate games which might not be feasible on the bigger platforms.
I especially liked the use of dithering and the graphics for this. I love the Playdate for all of the great and different products people are making for it. This game is definitely one of those things which would never be on the Gameboy, but fits in well with the quirkiness of the Playdate. Thank you for making this dark visual novel!
Thanks, that did the trick! I noticed the _CodeSignature folder within the app bundle, so on initial glance it looked like the app was code signed. I then did another test via the command line and did verify that it was not code signed properly.
Hello. I downloaded the Mac version 1.0 of The Aching from the itch.io page, but when I launch the game, it gives an error which says
“The Aching.app” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Trash.
Is the app not constructed properly, possibly? I noticed that the UNIX executable was in the app bundle's Resource folder, instead of the standard MacOS folder.
In the meantime, I found it is possible to copy the contents of the floppy directory and then launch the game via DOSBox.
Thanks for this fix. When I first found the Ironmail, I tried to use it and it caused the Playdate to crash. I was initially worried that I lost my progress and would have to start over, but was very glad to see the game auto-saved.
I also noticed that in addition to the high score issue, when I'm playing the game it looks like the score isn't updating, but when I finish the game, it will try and save the score to the high score list.
Other than the score issues, this game has been a lot of fun. Love the graphics, the music is jaunty, and it has a good level of progressive difficulty.
Fun collection of brain teasers. A few were quite vague in how to approach them. A few I had to step away, but upon returning I would figure out the hints. Rating: 4 / 5
I'm glad there is a demo available to get a little sample of this enjoyable puzzle game, but why does the demo come in at 23MB? Most of the third party Playdate games I've purchased have been under 1MB in size.
I've had the Playdate for only a couple of weeks, so I've been searching for new games. Castle Helios has been my favorite game so far. It reminds me of a mash up between Metroid and Zelda II (but far funner and not as frustrating as those games). Definitely had a good balance of finding new abilities and using them to solve the puzzles. I'm being cautious about what I pay for new and untested Playdate games, but this game was well worth the $7.
I've learned about a way that uses a small shell Mac app and the resources of an AGS game can be put into the app. This greatly reduces the size of the app so all of the Wine-related files are not necessary. I've already helped port a couple of apps to the Mac. I have an extensive blog post that I'm writing which will detail more of this process which I'll release some day.
Awesome, hint! The Windows version comes with a winsetup.exe program. Does anyone know if there is a similar Mac app? If not, I'd consider writing a little app which can be used to help configure the settings for Mac versions of games created with the Adventure Game Studio.
I see that this game was created using the Adventure Game Studio, so there is an easier (and MUCH smaller) way to port the game over to the Mac that will run on macOS Mojave and Catalina. I'm testing out a port of the game. I'm not using Wine, so the app has been reduced from a hefty 590 MB to a svelte 57MB.
Since this game was designed using AGS, making a Mac port is relatively simple. I already got a quick proof of concept running and would be glad to help out with an official Mac version of this game.
If you hold the mouse cursor near the top of the screen for a few seconds, you will see the window bar appear, then tap on the green button, which will put the game into windowed mode.
