A friend and I are making a version for Playdate handheld (from scratch, based on the information in The Book of Kye) and we have added rewind function (using the Playdate’s Crank, naturally). It’s a game changer! :)

I’ve been playing this and it’s great. Though I’d love limited undo moves!

It also blows my mind that the original was made by a guy from Towednack who I used to see around when I lived in St Ives ~2010.

Website is down, so here’s an archive version https://web.archive.org/web/20230129114435/https://c64games.net/2022/12/07/kye-2022-patai-gergely/

This is the only issue that I couldn’t get to for 1.2, will look at it ASAP in future.

A worthwhile read, as always.

The game itself won’t be explicit about every mechanic. Dedicated players should be rewarded with the joy of discovering the hidden tricks, their own observations giving them a gameplay advantage.

This is exactly the type of game I strive to create. Bravo.

Currently it’s a bit of a hack that I can’t believe is still in there and still unmentioned. Left alignment is triggered by the text bullet “- “ sequence of characters, so it’s per card mostly added for items with lists so they all align.

How would you like it to work? I’ll improve this for 1.2.

Great! Keen to hear about the types of decks you’re using so I can make sure you have everything you need for a good experience.

I’ve addressed this in version 1.1, there were a few changes required but it feels/looks much better and more obvious. Most immediately you’ll notice that left/right have been swapped, and new cards come in and go on top.

This is now fixed in version 1.1, by disabling the crank in game mode. Thanks again for reporting it!

Yes, I see what you mean regarding the next/prev card. I’ll take another look and fix this! Thanks.

I’ll look into a long list of the decks, too. But no promises for that one.

Good question! It’s can be tricky the first time.

1. If you mount the Playdate as data disk, over USB, it will show up as a drive on your computer.
2. Open that drive, then drill into DATA folder.
3. Then you’re looking for a folder that ends with com.gingerbeardman.strategies.
4. Inside here, we need a finder called decks.
5. This is where your .txt files go.

Sideloaded manually: /PLAYDATE/Data/com.gingerbeardman.strategies/decks

Sideloaded via Playdate website: /PLAYDATE/Data/user.XXXX.com.gingerbeardman.strategies/decks

my best so far

Loved this early pico8 game and this is a great conversion.

I’d love to be able to use any D-pad direction or button to fire the ball as the A button is the trickiest to use with the crank.

My main critique is that the ball patterns are (for me) a little difficult to tell apart, but I know first-hand that is a challenge.

Thanks for this great bug report! I need to disable and ignore the crank in game mode. If the crank is out, game mode will currently not work correctly. Once you dock the crank, it will work. On the welcome slide, you can press any button to proceed.

I read your blog post about publishing this on iOS. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/disciplines/publish-a-game-on-ios-android-and-html5

What do you use to package it up? Thanks

I just found your book when looking into implementing some standard computer science things like queues in Lua. It’s an amazing piece of work you’ve created here.

Also, I have promoted it on my Twitter and also within my game dev circle (Playdate, using Lua).

Best of luck with your future endeavours!

No, for that you need to use “pdc” that comes with the Playdate SDK.

https://sdk.play.date/inside-playdate/#_compiling_a_project

Me, too! For me it’s still the greatest.

Beautiful work all round.

The font has some similarities with Chicago from the classic Macintosh days.

if you’re looking for another platform to port Polarium to, I think Playdate would be a good fit. Probably a lot of Lua from Pico-8 version could be reused.

Wow, how good do these look!? Amazing work.

Also having an issue with the Apple ARM64 build: https://gist.github.com/gingerbeardman/0afcd9c849b41048d3e58e0ce659823c

The Apple x64 opens just fine though.

Thanks so much for the kind words! That’s a really good observation and suggestion. We will put it on the list of changes for a future revision. We did put in place a way to avoid triggering zoom as you docked the crank, so any zoom triggering adjustment would have to work alongside that.

Thanks so much for the kinds words. A port is on our mind… but maybe after a break!?!

It makes me very happy that you found it! nasa pona!

Great progress as always!

Full version is OUT NOW! Have fun with it.

Thanks, and for all your suggestions! It really is something, we are super proud of it. Hoping you have much fun with the game, maybe we will see you in the high scores? :)

You can count the dots in the bottom right of a stack of tiles, I designed this feature into the rules.

Of course this can’t be done everywhere, but it may help.

Thank you very much. Comments like this make it all worthwhile!

Not long, it’s almost there :)

As somebody who still loves to use System 7 (on a Macintosh Classic and also on an iPad Pro) this comment has made my day. Exactly the vibe I was going for visually.

Sadly not. But surely 2023 has to be the year, right? I’ll work my hardest to get it out.

Any thoughts on making it run in portrait mode?

I look forward to it!

A great read! They say you have to there to come back. Nothing is wasted on a journey like this. I see many parallels with my explorations and finding an art direction in Daily Driver. You did it!

I’m really looking forward to this game. I’m a pacifist and don’t play games that involve shooting in but hopefully I’ll find enough to do in this!

My worry is the music will get repetitive. I’ll consider it! Thanks for playing and for commenting.