itch.io

The game runs at these resolutions:

• 853x480 (SD)
• 960x540 (qHD)
• 1280x720 (HD)
• 1600x900 (WXGA)
• 1920x1080 (FHD)
• 2560x1440 (WQHD)
• 3840x2160 (UHD)

You can run the game at any of these resolutions in windowed or fullscreen mode, as long as it is the same or below what your display allows, which means for your hardware, you'll need to run it at 1280x720, the closest resolution that isn't larger than your display.

If you want to try to trick the game to run at a higher resolution than your display is meant to handle, you can open (on Windows) C:\Users\<username>\AppData\LocalLow\Noble Robot\Widget Satchel\options.json and change value of `resolution` to 4 or above. However, I don't think this will work as the game may check it on launch and change it to the highest compatible value. Worth a try, though.

We consulted various hardware surveys and tried to support as many resolutions as we could, but the game should still run perfectly well for you at 1280x720. If you are concerned about pixel-perfectness (though it's not a pixel art game and should scale well in fullscreeen), you can run it in windowed mode instead of fullscreen and only lose a little bit of screen real estate.

As to whether or not we should have included the ability to let players select a higher resolution than their hardware allows and then downcale it, that would be a fair critique as it's certainly not impossible to do. My memory of it is that at the time we were not confident enough in our ability to property test those scenarios and ensure a good experience for all cases, so we decided not to support it.

Oh, thank you so much for the kind words!! 🥰 Glad you've enjoyed Sprocket's adventure!

https://noblerobot.itch.io/widget-satchel

http://noblerobot.itch.io/widget-satchel

Oh, good! I'm glad it was a little hiccup and not a bigger issue. Thanks for playing, and for the kind words!

Hmm, the download is up. I'm able to download it from the Itch page as a customer (I also purchased the bundle!), and my analytics show that it is being downloaded by others each day.

Can you be more specific about what you're seeing? Maybe we can figure out another cause for the problem.

https://noblerobot.itch.io/widget-satchel

I'm thinking of putting together a co-op bundle for this. 5-10 self-published or small-publisher games that are normally priced $10-20 each, for about $30?

Send your game page to contact@noblerobot.com if you're interested (don't reply here).

Creator Day is a wonderful idea. Hopefully it can drives more users to Itch and it can benefit in the long-run, too!

Glad to hear it's up and running for you! It's really very useful to know it was your antivirus causing the problem. It's something I'll want to keep an eye on if anyone else reports a similar issue.

(First off: Thanks for purchasing itch's Racial Justice bundle!)

Huh, that's a brand new one for me. As far as I've seen, the game has never crashed a whole computer before, even during development when there were a lot of crashes to go around! Have you had this issue with other games or apps?

Some technical background: The game doesn't "install" exactly. Like many games, the contents of a folder are simply copied to a directory where you run the game from. When you install it from the Itch desktop app, it works similarly, it just chooses the directory to copy to for you. By default, this is: C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Roaming\itch\apps\widget-satchel\

The game itself has no installer executable, and does not really interact with the operating system. It doesn't create new icons or files or anything like that the first time you run it. This is the same if you manually download the app as a ZIP, or copy it to your system using a client like Itch or Steam. So, the fact that the app icon itself disappears when you try to run it is very troubling, because I can't imagine that the game itself is doing that.

But let's try to solve it! Here are some possible troubleshooting avenues...

When you say "the icon that would be used to launch the game" what do you mean by that? The app package does not contain any shortcut icons. The icon you click is the game's executable, so if that disappears, it's your OS deleting a file! Yikes! Where exactly on your system is this icon?

Are you using a 64-bit or a 32-bit operating system? Widget Satchel is a 64-bit game on all platforms. The way you can check in Windows 10 (as well as Windows 8 or 7) is by hitting the Windows key on your keyboard and typing "About," which finds the About your PC panel/window.  Under "System Type," you should see "64-bit operating system. x64-based processor." If you see "32-bit operating system," you won't be able to run Widget Satchel.

Even though 32-bit operating systems are rare these days, many games, from indie to AAA, still are 32-bit because they run fine on 64-bit machines. Some games will offer two versions, so you might not have noticed this if you don't have a lot of games on your machine. If there's enough interest, I can look into releasing a 32-bit version (no promises!).

It's possible that this is an issue with the graphics drivers or support on your machine. Widget Satchel should select the correct graphics API based on your computer's best compatibility. On most Windows systems, that's DirectX 11. It's possible that it's selecting a graphics API that it thinks your machine supports but doesn't. This is something that I've seen happen with other games on systems with Intel integrated graphics. My wife was just having this problem running Civilization VI on her Surface Pro. Long-shot, but maybe a few system updates or driver refrashes might help?

The game uses your "AppData" folder to save settings and game data. The directory is: C:\Users\[user]\AppData\LocalLow\Noble Robot\Widget Satchel\ (enable "show hidden folders" to browse to it, or simply copy the directory into the address bar in File Explorer). You can check that directory to see if anything made it in there, or you can try deleting the folder it before "re-insalling" the game, although there shouldn't be a reason to. It's possible that your system is preventing writes to this directory (or the hard drive is full) in which case the game might crash. However, if it were the case, you'd be having lot of other problems since tons of apps write to that directory.

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That's all I can think of to try right now. As I said, I've not seen anything like this happen previously, so I'm assuming it's something that you'd also see when running similar games. But of course we can't ever be 100% sure it isn't Sprocket's doing!

Let me know what you discover.

For the record, HyperDot is both content-rich and gorgeous as hell. Don't be fooled by its minimalist elegance, it's a stunner. Save your pennies and get on it!

I'd like to contribute "Widget Satchel" to this bundle. https://noblerobot.itch.io/widget-satchel

Good on you for doing this. I'm from Minneapolis and we've been supporting local groups, but this is a national effort now, so I'm glad I can contribute in a small way.

For anyone else browsing this thread looking for ways to help efforts ongoing in Minneapolis:

• You can donate directly to George Floyd's family here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/georgefloyd
• The Minnesota Freedom Fund provides bail for protesters (and others who can't afford it), and is a great community advocate: https://www.givemn.org/organization/Minnesota-Freedom-Fund
• We have a lot of African immigrant local business in Minneapolis, and a local org has just set up a relief fund (remember, COVID is still happening!): https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/rebuild-african-immigrant-businesses
• My beloved Lake Street, with many minority -owned businesses, was was site of a lot of damage in the first days after George Floyd's murder. The Lake Street Council has set up a fund with no overhead (100% will be distributed) to help repair storefronts, etc: https://www.welovelakestreet.com/

Sorry about that 😔. The game has a separate publisher in Japan, so as a courtesy to them and the work they've put into the game (they helped with QA and provided the Japanese localization included in all versions of the game), I asked Valve to restrict sales of this version on Steam in Japan.

The itch version sold here is, of course, fully unrestricted and, I'd argue, is worth $15 even without a Steam code! 😛

Feel free to gift the code to a friend, but as a personal favor I ask that you do not resell it (unless you donate proceeds to charity, then I'm cool with it!).

If you haven't already, you need to go to the Jam page and submit your project there after it's been made public.

Make sure your game is "published." When you save your project page for the first time, it puts it in "draft" mode. You need to edit it again and a new option appears at the bottom to make it live. It's a bit confusing.