Nice write-up, must be a great experience for all of you. Seems like y’all are having a lot of fun! Looking forward to to play the game, and best of luck!
Ok, I tried the windows version. Great stuff. Two suggestions:
The pre-warm feture: not sure what it does. I expected it to pre-render a few timesteps so that the first frame is already a “fully-grown” effect. This would be very welcome
To make a looping animation, you have to delete the start frames one by one (afaik). Would be nice to have it such that you can click a frame and select “delete all previous”
An option to select between black and white as the particle color
A great read once more, I felt like printing this and reading by the window. I guess this just really is my cup of tea :-)
It all looks great as always, and I like the human factor of skewed pages as you mentioned.
One thing that threw me off was the 8.8mm shell sprite. I considered it an oddly shaped torpedo or when stretching my imagination a looking glass maybe. Having something as large as a torpedo side by side with something as small as bullet just prevented the correct association for me, I think.
In the meantime I tried a bunch of crashing into obstacles in level 11 but (un)fortunately could not reproduce the problem, sorry!
If you have a more detailed description of how to trigger this issue or a video, feel free to reach out to me through email or discord and I can give it another go.
The game requires some perseverance, but can also feel very natural when you get in the groove. It’s all the more rewarding for it when you finish it.
For those that do, I bet you will love my upcoming game Wheelsprung (working title, probably this year). It uses a physics engine for all kinds of small puzzles. It’s mostly inspired by Elasto Mania, Trials and a bit of Hillclimb.
Follow me to find out about it once I’ve got more to share!
It’s good to know that there are extensive settings available, including an option to give yourself 90 lives, that will surely be enough 😉. When you see the game over screen three times in a row, an option to skip the level is offered. But that’ll surely be below your achievement-collecting standards, I think.
I also recommend trying crank, buttons and tilt controls for 20 minutes each.
For those who wander: press the menu button to bring up the map and find unexplored areas.
This game is also available on catalog and to keep things simple it’s best to keep the base price the same. Playdate games don’t typically lower with price there when they are older. I think the game has enough quality and content to justify the price. Definetely a few hours of gameplay in there.
I am open to participating in bundles and sales on Itch.io though. I expect to participate in the Creator’s Day sales this year. Be sure to press the follow button so you don’t miss these 1-day events. I can also create a blogpost so you are aware in advance.
Seems like it was really made for playdate too, with the clean visual style of basic shapes. Those usually work really well on the tiny 1bit screen. Exciting!
Hey there, I’d like to help but unfortunately there is no way for developers to create catalog keys. I have not planned any updates tho, so if you use the latest from itch now, you should be set. The files are the same in both stores.
How do you feel about progress? It must be good to be able to stamp a big fat DONE on one part of the game. I feel you have a healthy motivation to keep going while also spending time on other things in life. That’s something to be proud of as single dev, cheers!
By the way, I think I would go with the silhouette ship images although I agree with your arguments.
Do have an idea yet how the player will learn that a horizontal hand on the angle on bow dial is ideal?
I’m stuck in a dungeon t-section dungeon after evading guards. There appear to be be 3 switches on the floor that do nothing, the door with keyhole is on the left. It is blocked by 2 immovable crates and a third block that I do not recognize. It seems there is nothing in this room that I can do. Am I missing an ability?
Wow, this is incredible. It might be a unique achievement. I myself have never seen the 75/75 score. I played all the levels a few times to set the achievement targets of course, but for the survivor challenge, that is not needed because the goal is always 0. Well done!
Very humbling that someone considers my game so enjoyable that they would 100% it. I’m sorry I don’t have a special badge for this added to the game. I hope you enjoyed the endgame after level 25 at least (no spoilers, ;-)
If you want an additional challenge, set background color “trippy” in the settings and try to complete a few levels. But if you value your sanity, I wouldn’t recommend that.
Thank you so much for playing, and I hope you enjoy your Playdate a whole bunch more :-)
Sorry to hear you missed the sale, itch.io can be slow in unpredictable ways. If you have a PayPal account, send an email to gravityexpressgame@gmail.com. I might be able to work something out to get you the game for the discounted price 🙂
One of the few games I finished on Playdate.
A lot has to be done right for that to happen. It has to be challenging but not too hard; not have annoying music or sound effects, have a little bit of a story, enough content to keep you coming back… Reel-istic has all that and the music is in fact pretty great :-)
I love how at first you try to catch all the fish to make some money, and later those same fish become obstacles because you want to get to the more valuable fish down below. Great mechanic.
I spent about 2 hours to finish the game, but there is a lot more to collect, definitely worth the price.
The only remark I have is that there are some slowdowns in the game, and during the final boss where timing is important, that could be annoying. Perhaps that could be fixed by not changing scenery during that part.
hint: if you feel you are not progressing: save up for longer line, that lets you fish deeper spots with more pricy fish. Oh and make sure you don’t leave veggie-vision turned on.
Hmm, haven’t heard of it before, unfortunately there is no option to ignore the crank when it is out.
If I had to guess, maybe your crank sensor is faulty?. You can test this with the Input Test app in the system settings. Leave the crank docked and then wiggle it a bit. See if it detects your crank to be undocked even when it is still collapsed…
Another way might be to play using your computer. The game plays really well with the arrow keys in the simulator.
level 10 had me stumped for a bit because disc moved slowly that I didn’t see it move at first. But with playjam games you always that there might be a bug, even if it works as intended, right? Great job
Hey there! Thanks! I just noticed when scrolling through the sales reports that your comment is totally legit; you were the first one to buy Gravity Express. Thank you!
