itch.io

The cart is legit y’all. It even has a rad soundtrack! Load it up in an emu, or dump it to device if you have one. You can practically smell the real game wafting off of this thing.

Link added! Sweet collab :)

Oh, and no, I wasn’t thinking he was holding anything. I wanted rubber band Fleischer animation arms so he could be a punchy guy with big fists. Felt like it would be a nice game play thing? Sort of Rygar meets Luffy.

Dude, that slaps so HAAAAAAAAAAAAARD!

The right hand chain is OK. I intentionally went the other way and just let the background cut out behind the moving chain parts, but I’m fine with it being black instead. I mean, it reads right. The x-flip on the character is money, combined with the music it makes him look really anxious about his choices.

Super cool. Ship it. Once you publish, I’ll link to it here too.

Nice! Lovely use of pattern, and the whole thing reads very clearly as a tarot card. I like the little 8x8 suit symbols in the corner :)

If I were looking for constructive criticism, I’d say you could try iterate on the fluid moving between the cups. The arc is a little awkward, and the solid black lines throw off the translucency of the material. Perhaps try going with just the dither, and taper it off at the extents to get that fresnel feeling?

Eh, whatevs. We’re just jamming, right? It’s the making that counts. We made stuff!

That is super cool! I’m fine with the changes, and you can CC license the art as far as I’m concerned.

I tried opening the cart in OpenEMU, and I did see the background and everything animating, but I didn’t see the scales. Looks like maybe all sprites are missing?

Thanks for leaving a comment, much appreciated. It’s the Game Boy after all, at least I can’t help but think of games!

Thanks, much appreciate you taking the time to leave a comment!

Oddly enough, the Game Boy frame was surprisingly difficult to do, itch filters the CSS you can use in their page system, so a bunch of stuff I tried didn’t quite work to place the animated gif over the static frame, and I didn’t want to make a gif that repeated the whole frame because the file size would be rudely huge. Glad it amused someone :) Feel free to copy paste if you want to use it on your own page!

I don’t see anything in e-mail or on the dashboard here, where should I look?

Yah, that’s just me getting lazy by that point and animating the eye blink across 3 bg characters. If I shifted the whole boss right by a pixel I think I could probably cut that down to 2 individual characters and it would be just about the same.

Man, this convo is nostalgic. My very first job aeons ago was as a GBA artist/engineer. I only did a few quick things before we moved to 3DS games, but now I get to look back on that with more than a bit of nostalgia. Thanks :)

Lol yeah, the thought occurred to me that the cat was one tile too far. On the other hand, if he never moves out of his 8x8, he can just be a bg tile swap, right? He’s intentionally standing against a blank background too :)

Oh I’m certainly it’s technically feasible, including the animation. I did it to spec, and I’m certain the number of moving sprites and changing characters is actually well within the CPU’s capability. What I meant was whether as a game it would be readable on a DMG. I saw one again for the first time in a long while a few years ago and was shocked at how low contrast the screen really was! And the ghosting! I could have sworn I remember is being more eligible, but eh, rose tinted glasses right? With contrast that low, it feels like big blocky shapes are essential for readability, little 8x8 characters moving too quickly would just be an invisible blur.

Just submitted, dying to see what everyone else is doing, looking forward to seeing tomorrow! I don’t want to post my image here yet, to keep the spirit of the jam, but I do wanted to chat about process.

I know the field was open to any art format, but I ended up wanting to do an in-game screen. I grew up with Game Boy games, so stepping into the occasional bit of GB art is sort of like cosplaying the devs of my era. I can kinda imagine some smoke filled dungeon, Nirvana blasting, CRT glow, and slaving over DPaint all day. Probably hell, but sorta romantic.

I know I wanted a boss encounter style screen, and I wanted a mix of a big boss element, and structural level elements. I thought I wanted a large main character too, but it turned out feeling really nice to have a tiny little guy. Luckily the balance theme clicked into place with the initial concept, so I could sort of ignore it while I was working. Or not focus on it, I guess. Probably a little obvious, but it’s visually pleasing, plus is feels like an intuitive game mechanic? Really curious if this style would work on a real DMG at all. Feels like it would be too busy? Makes for a fun image though :)

One odd thing: when you’re building for a game, setting up tiles, especially in 1-bit where it feels like you need lots of blank space for legibility, you end up recycling so many tiles be default that when I went to check, I was way under the count. I went back and beefed up the tile count, but I hit the finish line before I could use them all. Kinda wasted some there 😅

How did you come up with your art?

I hear ya! I have trouble with small things on the Playdate too! I’m afraid the font is as large as I can make it without redrawing a new font, and I won’t have the time to do so any time soon. I tried to find a compromise between having enough text on screen to see context clues and a large enough font to be comfortable, but I understand it can be tricky.

As a workaround for now, could you perhaps play it on Mirror?

Found a lead: games built with newer OS versions may just not appear at all on devices still running older versions of the OS. You can check to see if this is the case by going to your Settings on the Playdate, then System -> System Update. If your device is behind, that should start the update!

Also note: some of the updates are applied in sequence, i.e. it needs to download and apply them one by one. Even if you do get an update, once it restarts go and check again, it might need another turn!

I hope so! I’ve never done it before, and it also doesn’t seem like I have any control over the process, but it does seem like you can get a refund if you contact Itch support via https://itch.io/support

Apologies for the difficulties, I hope you can get it worked out!

Hi! Did you manage to get it working? Are you using the side loading method where you upload it to the Panic website?

Ah, I apologize, but I can’t maintain all the required binaries to make the game compatible with every platform the simulator runs on.

I hope you do get, and greatly enjoy, a Playdate eventually!

Would it happen to be a particularly testy file? If so, no actually! Unfortunately there is a bug right at the end of the game that I’m patching as we speak, hope to get it out ASAP.

I will say though, that if that’s the one you’re talking about, then you’ve already discovered all the pieces of the story. All that’s left to do is forget about it.

Hit a tiny snag and unfortunately had to pull it. Working on a fix, should be up ASAP!

Thanks!

No other changes as yet. I did experiment a bit with alternative cranking speeds/responses after your last comment, but I’m afraid I couldn’t find any other version I liked better, apologies.

Thank you :)

Oh no! That sad face makes me sad too :(

Have you taken a peek at the tips in this post? They might help you get over the hump. Once you get past the middle point of a document, I find everything sorta slides into place!

Oooh, thank you! Very kind of you to say, super glad you’re enjoying it.

No plans for an expansion yet, but bring-your-own-content? Well, let me think about that.

There is not, unfortunately. Would you like one? I’m afraid half the fun is in verbalizing the feature you’d like to guess about, I don’t think the Playdate has enough processing power to analyze speech :)

I can sort of imagine a spy guessing game that was one player, but it would have to be substantially different. Maybe that’s inspiration for another game!

Many thanks for the comment, Logan! Delighted that you’re having a good time.

Yeah, D38813 may be a little harsh messing with you when you reload. I’ll have a think about that. It’s worth noting that it won’t do that if you just sleep the device. Also, the game doesn’t save unless you change something, so there’s a soft limit to its malfeasance.

You know, I’ve noticed the dead zone thing too. Not super certain what that’s about. I tried to counteract that a bit by adding a little curve to the crank so that smaller cranks scroll less, letting you crank farther to get more precision, before ramping up to much faster when you, err, crank it. Going to have to experiment over time to find the best feeling response. Thanks for the input! Always great to have more insight.

Aww thanks, Tonus_ very kind of you to come here and leave a review. Much appreciated! Glad you’re having a good time with your Playdate 💛

Hey friend, thanks for playing!

I’ve collected a few FAQs and tips for making it through SCP-D38813’s defenses in a new blog post. I hope they help!

It’s a relatively simple concept: the articles are ciphered and you have to rotate the letters to decode them. It takes a little lateral reasoning to figure out, but if you like word games, I hope you’ll enjoy the process!

No, it’ll still be a while I’m afraid. Please look forward to another short game to pop out before that one!

Lol, it is! Well spotted :)

Hilarious! Love the humor.

The interface, samples, and crank I think already give you the quaint vibe. You could have infinitely long pieces of music and it'd still feel just as nice. Heck, I'd even like to explore something generative like a couple of randomized arps that just made endless tinkling runs.

We'll certainly need more capacity if we're going to transcribe a few Wintergatan songs in here!

It's good to see this story told in this format. It's also very brave to share this part of you, well done.

Aww, this was a fun throwback! You were only missing one convention from the old days: just entering look or examine by themselves should give you your surroundings and exits again.

I don't know if you needed the audio either. I think in the end it added a false sense of crime drama tension that ultimately made me more anxious than helped set the scene.

I think your layout was great: the big north-south spine was easy to tease out, and you kept yourself to a nice shallow, easy to understand structure hanging off of that. The writing was nice and flowed well from scene to scene. I bet it was tough finding all the different unique keywords for scraps of paper :)

Unfortunately I couldn't finish the game. At one point after visiting every room and doubling back to work out the rest of the code, the interpreter locked up: any lines I typed just vanished with no response. I'm curious enough to try again at some point though!

Overall, well done!

Nice! That's definitely a decent arcade game. Good job on the visuals, and the controls felt nice and snappy. I think there might be a bug with the parcel pickup though: I didn't have to press space bar after the first time, I could just drive up to the corner and he'd grab a parcel automatically.

Lovely choice of music too.

Top notch. That was a great idea, it looked nice and made me smile at the end. Cthulhu fhtagn!

Pretty clever, that: it's easy to learn despite the intentional awkwardness and tells a poignant, minimalist story.

Great work!