itch.io

It’s on sale thru halloween 🎃 so pick it up if you’re interested! 

I also discovered today I can directly load images/screenshots from the playdate to my iPhone using the Apple Lightning to Camera Adapter with the Playdate in Data Disk mode. I’d imagine most Android users can to the same but without the proprietary adapter. 

Yeah, I think it's definitely worth implementing a true "restart current app" type thing to ease re-initialization. 

It would be trivially easy for me to pass along the relevant config info (just write/load the settings to/from a file).

I think you might be able to implement it today using playdate.file.run. Basically you make the first step of your app to be load a pdz for the actual game. If you specified an explicit context var for `_G` for the pdz I think you could subsequently re-run playdate.file.run again with a clean context and the first global context would get garbage collected away. 

Mostly it's been a learning experience reminding me global variables and variables created at lua import are the devil (unless they are effectively `<const>`). Especially in something like Lua where it's easy to hold onto stale references forever.

This is because the extension on the uploaded file is not set incorrectly.  The current file `music_box_1.1.pdx` is not a PDX archive, it is a zip file containing the PDX archive.  If you rename it to `music_box_1.1.pdx.zip` then play.date/account/sideload will happily accept the file.

Hey Jordan, you’ve got the feel for it. The original style of gameplay does not allow you to precisely aim — put away the crank and you’ll see the aimer auto rotates and so you are timing your button presses rather than precision aiming.  Watching your video I can understand that perhaps I should revert to the rectangular aimer in the original to give a better sense of which direction the shot is heading. As for strategy, I never play with the crank aimer and my on-device high score is 35. Maybe I’ll make a youtube video with my strategy if I managed to capture a high scoring game on video. 

I’ve been working on creating a mode which more faithfully mirrors the original, but likely it’ll be at the expense of being visually smaller or requiring holding the device rotated. If you’d like to try the original, just google for gimme friction baby and archive.org has a copy running with an in browser flash emulator. Thanks for making the video. 

Parachute 22 is a simple paratrooper shooter based on the Parachute game originally included in the iPod Nano 3rd generation.  It's a really fun time with the Playdate crank.  If you don't have a Playdate yet it works great on the Playdate Simulator included with the PlayDate SDK too (two finger trackpad scroll == crank). Source code available too if you wanna peek behind the curtain.

Since the game is open source, @chughes87 actually implemented this on a branch. It's not my cup of tea, but if you want to try it out  I uploaded a build on GitHub.

It is the intended behavior to have shots remain below the line there with no collisions. The behavior I fixed was that it no longer sticks around through subsequent games.  

My high score on the playdate is like 42, but  IIRC something like 131 for the flash version, but they have different aspect ratios / firing angles & firing distances so are very much distinct games.  The canon in the original only supports firing in multiples of 2 degrees, but I made the playdate version rotation slip a bit doing 1.99-2.01 degrees each frame to mix it up.  I may add a way to play the original Flash aspect ratio of 0.833 (400x480) as I opted for an aspect ratio of 1.04 (250x240)  to use a few more pixels on the Playdate. Could likely do 0.833 at  200x240 or 240x288 portrait without too much work.

Please try 1.1.3. I finally nailed down the issue (Itch was creating zips incompatible with the playdate). I believe 1.1.3 is working for everyone who has tried it. 

@grid Can you try and extract the PDX file from the zip archive and try sideloading that instead? I believe the playdate device software extracting the zip files provided by Itch.  If not, ping me on Twitter (@notpeter) and I can DM you a working zip.

Yes. The BundleID is used to identify individual apps.  I intentionally changed it in the hopes that this would resolve some of the folks who have been (so far) unable to install on their Playdate because they are getting an install error.

I understand this sucks and you'll have to manually delete the old app. Glad to hear you got 1.1.2 installed though :D 

I've released 1.1.2. Please try and report back. Full release notes here.

I've released 1.1.2 under a new bundleID. Please re-download and let me know if you're still having trouble.  More info here.

This should be fixed in 1.1.2. See the 1.1.2 dev note or commit for more info. Thanks!

That was my error. I was building in a dirty git tree. I've released 1.0.2 (version 6 on itch?) with a fixed card.

I was able to reproduce. I've uploaded a new zip. Let me know if works -- you really deserve the complete experience including custom wrapping paper :D

*Update* You are totally right. I've replaced the zip file with a new one which should work.  Alternative you can decompress and select the PDX  file on https://play.date/account/sideload it'll work that way too.  It appears to be something with the archive created by the built-in MacOS zip compressor.