>> Make a Playdate game based on an infamous screenshot of an unfinished game <<

The Screenshot

Hi, I'm Neven, and I'm a designer working on Playdate. In 2019, I was putting together  the play.date website, including photos of Playdate. Choosing what screenshots to put on these was tricky: the whole console was premised on a bit of secrecy around the games that come with it. However, we had developer tools available publicly, and I myself was working on several games. I used my games' screenshots in several places—just because it's what I had, and I figured that way I wasn't stepping on any toes.

One screenshot was this:

It was a dungeon crawler I had started making in Pulp. It was going to be the kind of thing where you crawl through, well, dungeons—encountering enemies and potential additions to your adventuring party, merchants and oracles. Pulp was not built for this, but that was part of the appeal—I wanted to see if I could build a UI+room+map system using the simple base of Pulp. 

I could not.

Now, the reason isn't that Pulp can't do this—it's that I'm a lousy programmer, and I'm busy with, well, see my opening sentence. Since then, some incredibly impressive titles have been built in Pulp, many of them unrecognizable as the map-exploring games Pulp was designed around. So a faux-first-person dungeon crawler is definitely plausible. This is where you come in.

Can you create a game this screenshot was taken from? 

The Rules

("rules")

• The submission should be made for the Playdate console. See more about Playdate development.
• Your game should be such that the above screenshot should naturally exist as a view in it. This is open to your interpretation, but as with any theme, try to keep it reasonable. Is it a straightforward dungeon crawler, just as I intended to make? Or a visual novel? Do you play as the first-person player, or as one of the three character shown? Is it an idle clicker? A puzzle? This is all up to you, and creativity is encouraged!
• You can use the actual pixels from the screenshot, OR you can reinterpret it. Redraw it, tweak it, make it interactive—as long as your game and the assigned screenshot seem like they are cousins.
• You can make your game in Pulp, or not.
• The screenshot uses Pulp's 200 × 120 px resolution; your submission can do this, or it can take advantage of Playdate's full 400 × 240 px.
• You are free to use any existing code libraries, asset packs, or assistive tools. No need to make it harder than it should be!
• If you use generative AI for your code or assets, I'd appreciate it if you disclosed it. Folks wanna know.
• Note: I'm afraid I lost all the (bad) Pulp code I had written for my game, and nothing but the screenshot above remains. Like sand through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives. Sorry.

Jam Time

This is a take-your-time jam, so no need to rush your project overnight.  You can start it today and submit it by midnight on February 23. If you still run out of time, I'd love to see your game, whenever you finish it!

What do I win?

I, uh, I can make you pizza next time you're in Portland, OR?

I'll put together all the nice submissions and make sure to tell people about them. Who knows, maybe YOUR entry turns into a real game!

Thanks

This is a silly idea, inspired by my abashedness at 1. not finishing this game, 2. continuing to use its screenshot for years, prompting countless people to ask "hey what Playdate game is this?" Thank you for helping me answer the question.