Out of all the games in this jam, I think this one has the greatest opportunities for expansion (and based on the name I think you see that too!) The art style is very charming and there's already a lot of threads built into the game that can be pulled on to expand it. The main thing I feel needs expansion, however, is the battles. The flavor text helps, but having these battles boil down into stat checks feels a little lame. Speaking of those stats, they don't feel that different from each other besides being the conduit to getting different evolutions. There's no reason to target any one stat over another besides it being lower, since having a single low stat risks running into a fight you can't beat. Some kind of system that allows you to modify your creature beyond just stats would go a long way to improving the replayability of the game, but anything like that would probably be reliant on a re-work of the battle system. That being said, I did complete a run and had a decent amount of fun doing so. so I think this game is on the right track!
Powerdive Games
Creator of
Recent community posts
A very cool idea for a super mario bros-esque arcade game! I liked the risk/reward aspect of needing to pop the webs after you shoot the enemies, and I think the fact that the webs go down to the lower platform is clever game design to force the player to move around the map more than they otherwise would. I did find it a bit annoying that webs could spawn in unreachable places, but that might be better for the game as a whole to make where you kill enemies matter more. I'm not sure. My only complaint is that things were a little hard to see on the playdate's screen. Once the screen fills up with a lot of enemies it can be difficult to keep track of everything that's happening with all the small sprites. I did thoroughly enjoy my time with this one though, despite not being a fan of the genre. Good job!
This was a pretty emotional game, especially because it was written based on (correct me if I'm wrong) your own experiences of grief. The story was definitely the highlight here- I'll be honest, I don't really understand what I was even doing with the gameplay besides cranking like a madman and tapping the d-pad when that didn't do anything. Also, I hate to say it for a game that's trying to tackle a serious subject, but the ghost sound effect was really goofy. It undercut the tension a bit, especially when I somehow glitched it into playing on a loop while attempting to have a heartfelt conversation with the dad, which made that scene unintentionally funny. Besides that though, the writing really resonated with me. A solid entry!
An interesting collection of minigames! I liked the theme that tied everything together. The rotoscoped art and animations also gave the game a good amount of charm. I'm only sad that I didn't get to see the whole thing through- I was playing on device and was unable to move during the truck minigame on level 1. Besides that glitch, my only main criticism was that the game boots you all the way back to the intro when you fail. Don't get me wrong, you all deserve credit for the game, but it made it take a long time to get back into the action. Still, I think this is a fun entry. I find it funny we took the theme in the same direction!
A pretty interesting idea for a board game! I felt like there wasn't a ton of agency as the player, but there was enough to keep me engaged. That might be a personal preference thing as well- plenty of people would probably be fine with the amount of agency they have in this game. I thought there would potentially be more depth with the reroll tokens, but since they only worked on normal squares I wasn't sure how I was supposed to be using them. Might have been a skill issue. Still, despite all the luck required to succeed it was at least engaging to be punished by repeatedly choosing "risk". The art style is simple but charming, and I like the idea of multiple characters with different abilities. I hope you expand this game further in the future! More squares, more characters, and more choice would make this an addictive little risk-taking game.
I think this is an interesting take on a strategy game. I like the ability to use gravity to your advantage in creating the lanes. I feel like it's a little hard to see what's going on on the playdate's screen- the font is very small and the icons are even smaller. That's definitely something that happens when you push the bounds of the system with such a big genre but it still made the game a bit uncomfortable to play. Also, despite the tutorial I still felt a bit lost my first game. Part of that, I think, was that the UX was a bit confusing- the up/down menu was something I was able to get used to, but having no indication that I'm in the process of connecting a transport from one point of interest to another left me really confused on what I was doing. I will also fully admit that real time strategy is not exactly my forte, which probably didn't help. Still, I can see that this has the right starting structure to be a fun game for people who are more fans of the genre than I am, and with some polish I could see it expanded into something fantastic!
Yes! Inside the shattered wilds save folder there's a worlds folder where you can either copy your world to share with others or place a world someone's given you. I know one of the people who helped with art on the game shared her world in the playdate squad discord server.
In terms of challenge maps, you could even conceivably create a world in creative mode and then change the world type in the save data before sharing it to make an adventure map, for example.
Glad to hear you're enjoying the game! Sorry I made some of those achievements quite brutal.
1.) Mage Hand lets you interact with blocks at a distance, and you set it up with runes to target a block the same way you would set up a teleporter. You can use it to interact with a chest at a distance, for example. I'm not sure it's that useful but I figured it might be used if someone got around to making a custom map, since it would let you hide exactly what the player is interacting with.
2.) Anything that drops a painting can drop any painting, they're not set to any specific map or boss. If you're going the fishing method I recommend getting an eyepatch from lava fishing first, otherwise just farm the boss that takes you the least amount of time to kill.
3.) Nope, just aesthetics! Tabi redid my art for bricks/obsidian bricks and while I liked it it felt more metallic than stone, so I added them as iron/dusk brick variants for decoration.
If the item you're talking about is the one I'm thinking of, it should be craftable. Technically though, every item in the game is renewable in some way (at the very least with the use of an item you unlock in the final workbench, but usually there's another way as well). Even that other item you're thinking of re-spawns, although it takes a very long time to do so.
Also, even if you lose an item due to a full inventory it should count in the logbook.
Thanks for purchasing the game! A rebalance is definitely in the cards (no pun intended) in the future, but I don't have any definitive plans at the moment. Honestly, Lux is a hard game to balance, because "hard"can very quickly morph into "frustrating". I ended up making the game much easier than the jam version to at least keep the experience on the "fun" end of the spectrum, but I might have gone too far. Still, I hope you enjoyed the experience, and I'll definitely look into a possible rebalance sometime in the future.
It's always impressive seeing something 3D made in a short time for the playdate. The way this game renders graphics is pretty smart, and the minimalist vector look works... most of the time. I had a really hard time on track 5, because after the ramp you can't see where you are at all while you wait to fall back to the track on the floor. With a completely black background in front of me, there's no way to tell if I'm even facing the right direction coming out of that ramp and turn. The powerup system is interesting, but it feels like RNG definitely impacts how easy or hard a race ends up being. Still, I love the look of the game and had fun racing the first 4 tracks!
I felt a little lost with this one. I got the broken part unscrewed and brought the new part over, but I wasn't sure what to do from that point. I tried putting the screws back but couldn't get them in the right spot and grabbing them was really hard with such a small hitbox. The game has a lot of different controls, and honestly it's a bit unintuitive to use. I did actually like the accelerometer, which isn't something I often like in a playdate game due to how the screen works, it felt very fluid. It was mainly the d-pad and button combinations that threw me for a loop. That being said, there was something compelling about the process of fixing the... computer? Not sure what it was. Either way, despite the controls I love the concept of this game and wish I had the patience to figure out what to do next.
Love the 3d look, and a good use of the crank! I did find it a bit disorienting having the camera spin around when doing tricks, but cranking as fast as I could after hitting a meteor was very fun and satisfying. I want more tricks though! Maybe bound to the d-pad? Either way, for 72 hours this is an impressive result.
A pretty fun platformer. I'm not a huge fan of having zero air control, but I realize that's a personal preference. It did make the game feel pretty rigid though, and climbing up one-block cliffs was a bit annoying since you stop if you so much as brush your toe against the side of the block. I did encounter a few weird things with movement- most noticeably that hitting your head cancelled all your horizontal momentum, but the game controlled well enough that these are more just minor gripes with the physics.
My only other gripe was with the post level menu, and I think I said the same thing about it in Negative Reinforcement- It's a bit unintuitive, and I often found myself restarting a difficult level by mistake instead of moving on, since I had been conditioned to press up when seeing that menu. To be honest, in both games, I have never wanted to restart and play the level again, especially as there's no flag to let me move on without beating the level again.
Despite it all, I still enjoyed my time with this game- the art is fantastic as always, the music is good, and the premise is fun. A well rounded jam entry for sure!
Felt a bit like wario ware! Very fun, and I enjoyed the variety of minigames. I didn't really understand what to do in the "collect 10 spaceships" minigame, mainly because I couldn't tell what was causing space ships to appear.
Using tiles like pixels definitely gives the game a distinctive look, although the super-large characters do make it a bit hard to tell what's going on sometimes. Still, maybe that adds to the "head in the clouds" feeling you were going for.
A very peaceful and compelling entry! Designing a little garden was fun and relaxing. If this game saved when closed and had offline progress, I could see myself coming back to it daily to check up on my plants. I'd love a post jam version with more stuff to play with (not that the available content isn't a ton already!)
I was a bit confused what the goal was while playing this. Obviously I can tell you lose at some point (so I guess "don't lose" is the goal?) but it didn't really feel difficult to keep placing buildings and shooting monsters, so I basically only lost because I got bored of playing.
Maybe I wasn't understanding something though! That could definitely be the case- my first run I missed the fact that you could move the cursor with the d-pad (all the other controls were listed at the start of the game, so I assumed that was all I could do!)
Still, cranking around to spin the moon was viscerally satisfying, and because the bullets travel in screen space rather than around the moon it was fun to spin a wall of bullet death around the moon repeatedly and rack up kills.
I appreciate the feedback! The bar was meant to represent the number of cards left in the deck, and I was split 50-50 on whether I should end the floor when you get all the cards out of your deck or when you play the last card. I ended up going with playing all cards and adding the "storing" system as a compromise. I'm working on a post-jam version, and I'll definitely try ending the floor after all cards are removed from the deck. I do think that could solve some of the issues of being stuck with all "take damage" cards when at low health.
Lower levels do actually have unique misfortune cards, but they still have a chance of being rerolled as misfortunes from lower floors. Plus, you keep those lower floor misfortunes in your deck, which dilutes it more. I'll definitely look into making each level feel more unique! Your suggestion about different sounds for each level is a good one, and something I definitely would have done if this wasn't a jam game. The post jam version will definitely do this.

































