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Hi Johndo!

Thanks for playing the game and happy to hear you like it :)

You are correct - enemy sprites will not be loaded by the game if you bought it on Catalog - when I was getting it ready for publishing on Catalog I did a few tweaks, one of them was to make the game load faster on start. I compiled the sprites into the internal 1-bit format that the game actually uses, before it was done when the game was starting up (this saves about 10-15 seconds on startup). I did it because I haven't really seen anyone trying to modify it and I figured most people just wasnt that interested in modding it.

But Im super happy to hear you wanna have a go at it! If you send an email to me (redterrorplaydate@gmail.com) with your name and Id be happy to give you a build from itch that supports loading the sprites so you can modify them.

I should probably mention this somewhere on the playdate catalog site for others as well to avoid confusion.  I wasn't quite sure how to approach it so I just didnt mention the modding at all on the playdate catalog page.

Sorry for the confusion!

Amazing game, just got it on catalog. I love how when it gets intense it almost sounds like microwaving popcorn when shooting the enemies.

Thanks for bestowing this treasure upon the playdate community!

Could definitely happen :) Im actually in the process of getting up on Playdates catalog so been bit occupied by that. But I would love to do an update with like a cool end boss or something. Thanks for the kind comment - appreciate it!

Santa has noted your wish :)

I love the idea :)

Awesome :) Looking forward to try it out!

Any update on when this one is coming?

Looks amazing, very much looking forward to this one!

Yeah Im still experimenting with it :) It might be cool to try and throw all the stuff into like the unreal engine and perhaps make some cool tweaks to it as well. I did make a project with sprites in UE before. Might be a fun little project to try out and like recreate the game but with some fancy lighting and such

Very cool game! Love it!

Cool, alright hope it does well :) Id love to see it evolve more

Quite a cool game, I like it!

On my wishlist would perhaps be music in game and perhaps the possibility to make the airplane speed up/slow down as well (might be hard with the limited nr of buttons on the playdate to do this :)

Anyways, thanks for a cool game!

Hi!

Thanks for the kind words - truely appreciate it!

Yeah, the spawning of new enemy waves can be a bit unfair sometimes. It does try to make sure they at least dont spawn right on top of you, but as it gets more and more crowded it can happen sometimes anyway. Perhaps I should make the player invincible to damage the first second or two of a new spawn of enemy waves.

The highscore feature was a bit of a brain scratcher :) the old NES password style was what inspired it :)

Hi! Thanks a lot, happy to hear that :)
I love HROT too, great game.

The music is from various artists, its all from audio jungle. I've put the links to the music (in game and menu) here, I dont think I would be able to put them together and sell them separatly for license reasons. But if you dig them you can purchase them yourself on audio jungle or possibly listen to them on soundcloud or something like that if they have their stuff there. Here are the links:
https://audiojungle.net/item/suspense-dark-drone/45405124
https://audiojungle.net/item/suspense-dark-background/42304902#
https://audiojungle.net/item/dark-tense-suspenseful-music/30070420

Hi! And thanks for playing the game!

Nawh, there are no hidden doors. There is one ”hidden” place (check the devlogs) but it dosent require pushing walls to find any secrets, its just a place that is pretty maze like and ”off the beaten path”. I never really liked this feature in the old retro FPS (having to push up against hidden walls) and just always ignored it, but perhaps some people really liked it?

Thanks :) Yeah I have a lot of fun digging in that kind of stuff, so win-win - the game gets better and extended and I have fun doing it :)

Hi,

when does it crash? You happen to know which hardware revision your on?

I’d probably try uninstalling it once and re installing it and see if that helps. I havent seen any crashes myself.

Its kind of like a DLSS/FSR version but for pixel art :) some clever guys from Lucas Arts way back in the earlier days that put it to use and here we are in 2024 using it on the playdate :)

Hi and thanks for buying the game!

Yes, 1_9 is all you need. I have all the versions available in case someone want to try out an earlier versions to see what the game look like through out the development. Sorry if that caused some confusion.

Oh and forgot to mention - the reason it shrunk from 35mb down to 14mb is that I had used the wrong audio compression for the music. So there is nothing that has been deleted.

Unfortunately I did not receive any feedback on why it did'nt get accepted, there are some guidelines and such but its hard to say since there is no feedback. Im guessing its because it would take them to much time to deal with each entry that gets rejected

Hi!

I did submit it to catalog like half a year ago but wasnt accepted :(

I have re-submitted it with the release of 1.9 as  I think the game has grown quite a lot since then so fingers crossed :)

Thanks a lot for the kind words :) Truely appreciate it!
And yeah I hope everyone enjoys trying out the new stuff! Ive had a blast building it :)

Thanks, I really appreciate you saying that :) And yeah I agree, its a shame, I do think it would be pretty well received on catalog.

I always want to add more enemies :)

But its quite a lot of work to make the graphics for it and therefore also quite expensive. But I might get back at it and put a new one in! I kind of wanna put a boss in. Might try and do that at some point.

I like the idea of a guard dog, Ill keep that one in mind. Would also be a good mixup with what is there already

You are much to kind sir!

Defently appreciate the support and kind words! Makes it a lot more fun to work on the game knowing that people care and wanna support you! Thanks!

Cool :) I hope you find it worth while! Im trying to tune the difficulty a bit as well.

I have thought of adding some kind of prolouge to the game! My dream would be something like on playstation where something is happening and you need to tap the buttons to take an action (i cant for the love of god remember what its called! Something like ”cuute scenes”?) That would be awesome. But would need to buy quite a lot of graphics to make that happen.

Yepp, I will look into the crank to make it better for changing weapons. It is quite janky now.

Big thanks for the kind word, much appreciated!

Really love this font, I've used it in my game "Red Terror" think it looks awesome.
As the game is set in the soviet union time I am now on the hunt for some fonts that support cyrillic as some of the players are from former USSR countries. Any chance to get this font updated to have cyrillic letters? I'd be happy to pay some extra for it.

Hi,

Yeah I agree, the feel there could be improved upon. Im still waiting for some updated weapons graphics and when I get that I think I will try and polish that a bit so it feels a bit nicer. Happy to see your testing out the alternative movement scheme!

Thanks, appreciate it! The mini games were put in sort of just for fun :) They are optional. Id still like to revisit this game and add a level or two and a boss, I hope Ill get the time for that somewhere down the line.

If I remember it correctly the 3 items are a fish, a teddybear and beating/playing the mini game on the ”first level”.

The game should save when you enter a level so you dont need to walk back to it from the start.

Sure there are plenty of ”doom clones” out on the PC (and probably some other platforms too), but I havent seen any of them on the playdate. I’ve also not seen any 1-bit FPS games out in general. Id be more than happy to hear to any ideas of improvement that you have, Im still doing a bit of work on this one when I can I find the time for it. 

As for the price, well that is always very subjective. This game has quite a long playthrough time with varied content through out the maps. It also supports customization for anyone to create their own maps, textures and even enemies. I think the price point is fair especially if you compare it to what else is out there on the playdate.

Thats great advice if you wanna play roulette, I guess.

Happy to hear you like it :) Huh, have'nt thought of that but yeah perhaps your right. Still think it looks way better than the original one that I did myself

Just tried the demo - it plays awesome! The fighting is very satisfying, cool enemies and I like that there are dialogs going on. Music and sounds are superb, graphics are great as well. Very much looking forward to see the final game!

Hi again :)
So I've had the 1.8 version tested out in both hardware revision A & B and it seems to startup and run fine on both.

If your still having this issue I would recommend first to try and uninstall the game from your playdate and remove it on your playdate online account and then reupload it and install it on your device again and see if that solves it. I doubt the game save data could cause it to crash on startup but you could try deleting that as well (you would lose your saved progress though). If that dose'nt help either I would probably need more info on what exactly is happening.

There is some special code to handle the loading of graphics at startup and I did have to update it for 1.8 since it loads some more large graphics. If you dont ”respond” in a timely fashion when loading some graphics the playdate kills your game and it shows up as a crash just like this. 

I have tested this on my playdate (of course :) and it works fine, but they did make a change to the hardware not to long ago. When did you buy your playdate? My guess its simply a bit slower at loading graphics on the new hardware which might cause this issue. If that is the issue I think I can fix it even without the new hardware, but good to know that this is the case

Odd, which version your on? When does it crash? Also what revision of playdate you got?

Thanks :) really appreciate all the positive feedback!

Thank you! Its a lot of fun to try and polish and extended it, Im having a blast doing it :)

Thanks :) yeah wolfenstein and doom were big inspirations to put this together, hope you try it out and if you do let me know what you thought of it :)

Thanks for the tip :)