itch.io

I hear ya! I have trouble with small things on the Playdate too! I’m afraid the font is as large as I can make it without redrawing a new font, and I won’t have the time to do so any time soon. I tried to find a compromise between having enough text on screen to see context clues and a large enough font to be comfortable, but I understand it can be tricky.

As a workaround for now, could you perhaps play it on Mirror?

Found a lead: games built with newer OS versions may just not appear at all on devices still running older versions of the OS. You can check to see if this is the case by going to your Settings on the Playdate, then System -> System Update. If your device is behind, that should start the update!

Also note: some of the updates are applied in sequence, i.e. it needs to download and apply them one by one. Even if you do get an update, once it restarts go and check again, it might need another turn!

I hope so! I’ve never done it before, and it also doesn’t seem like I have any control over the process, but it does seem like you can get a refund if you contact Itch support via https://itch.io/support

Apologies for the difficulties, I hope you can get it worked out!

Hi! Did you manage to get it working? Are you using the side loading method where you upload it to the Panic website?

Ah, I apologize, but I can’t maintain all the required binaries to make the game compatible with every platform the simulator runs on.

I hope you do get, and greatly enjoy, a Playdate eventually!

Would it happen to be a particularly testy file? If so, no actually! Unfortunately there is a bug right at the end of the game that I’m patching as we speak, hope to get it out ASAP.

I will say though, that if that’s the one you’re talking about, then you’ve already discovered all the pieces of the story. All that’s left to do is forget about it.

Hit a tiny snag and unfortunately had to pull it. Working on a fix, should be up ASAP!

Thanks!

No other changes as yet. I did experiment a bit with alternative cranking speeds/responses after your last comment, but I’m afraid I couldn’t find any other version I liked better, apologies.

Thank you :)

Oh no! That sad face makes me sad too :(

Have you taken a peek at the tips in this post? They might help you get over the hump. Once you get past the middle point of a document, I find everything sorta slides into place!

Oooh, thank you! Very kind of you to say, super glad you’re enjoying it.

No plans for an expansion yet, but bring-your-own-content? Well, let me think about that.

There is not, unfortunately. Would you like one? I’m afraid half the fun is in verbalizing the feature you’d like to guess about, I don’t think the Playdate has enough processing power to analyze speech :)

I can sort of imagine a spy guessing game that was one player, but it would have to be substantially different. Maybe that’s inspiration for another game!

Many thanks for the comment, Logan! Delighted that you’re having a good time.

Yeah, D38813 may be a little harsh messing with you when you reload. I’ll have a think about that. It’s worth noting that it won’t do that if you just sleep the device. Also, the game doesn’t save unless you change something, so there’s a soft limit to its malfeasance.

You know, I’ve noticed the dead zone thing too. Not super certain what that’s about. I tried to counteract that a bit by adding a little curve to the crank so that smaller cranks scroll less, letting you crank farther to get more precision, before ramping up to much faster when you, err, crank it. Going to have to experiment over time to find the best feeling response. Thanks for the input! Always great to have more insight.

Aww thanks, Tonus_ very kind of you to come here and leave a review. Much appreciated! Glad you’re having a good time with your Playdate 💛

Hey friend, thanks for playing!

I’ve collected a few FAQs and tips for making it through SCP-D38813’s defenses in a new blog post. I hope they help!

It’s a relatively simple concept: the articles are ciphered and you have to rotate the letters to decode them. It takes a little lateral reasoning to figure out, but if you like word games, I hope you’ll enjoy the process!

No, it’ll still be a while I’m afraid. Please look forward to another short game to pop out before that one!

Lol, it is! Well spotted :)

Hilarious! Love the humor.

The interface, samples, and crank I think already give you the quaint vibe. You could have infinitely long pieces of music and it'd still feel just as nice. Heck, I'd even like to explore something generative like a couple of randomized arps that just made endless tinkling runs.

We'll certainly need more capacity if we're going to transcribe a few Wintergatan songs in here!

It's good to see this story told in this format. It's also very brave to share this part of you, well done.

Aww, this was a fun throwback! You were only missing one convention from the old days: just entering look or examine by themselves should give you your surroundings and exits again.

I don't know if you needed the audio either. I think in the end it added a false sense of crime drama tension that ultimately made me more anxious than helped set the scene.

I think your layout was great: the big north-south spine was easy to tease out, and you kept yourself to a nice shallow, easy to understand structure hanging off of that. The writing was nice and flowed well from scene to scene. I bet it was tough finding all the different unique keywords for scraps of paper :)

Unfortunately I couldn't finish the game. At one point after visiting every room and doubling back to work out the rest of the code, the interpreter locked up: any lines I typed just vanished with no response. I'm curious enough to try again at some point though!

Overall, well done!

Nice! That's definitely a decent arcade game. Good job on the visuals, and the controls felt nice and snappy. I think there might be a bug with the parcel pickup though: I didn't have to press space bar after the first time, I could just drive up to the corner and he'd grab a parcel automatically.

Lovely choice of music too.

Top notch. That was a great idea, it looked nice and made me smile at the end. Cthulhu fhtagn!

Pretty clever, that: it's easy to learn despite the intentional awkwardness and tells a poignant, minimalist story.

Great work!

Ponies!

I didn't know I wanted a My Little Pony version of Robot Unicorn Attack, but i did! Nice graphics, nice audio, I like the double jump; Well Done. ^__^

This was super interesting. I have to admit the mechanic was actually rather annoying: I just couldn't figure out a reliable way to swing the sword, and many a sword swing seemed to do nothing to the enemies :(

Having said that, it's a testament to the sheer quality of your presentation and the interesting storyline you have going that I genuinely wanted to keep playing. Kudos! I also have the sneaking suspicion that maybe the frustration is deliberate and motivated by the story?

Unfortunately I crashed on after the little blue fellow who gives you the gentle reminder. I caught a glimpse of the the exception in the console window before it went down: I think it was a memory corruption trap that was caught during SFML.Audio.sfSound_play, with OtterTemplate.Entities.Enemy.Hurt() in the callstack. I was mid swing through a field of enemies.

I'll give it another go later!

Thanks DrMelon! I really appreciate the kind words ^__^

I'm definitely going to tinker with it some more: I have an appetite for working on the combat now and want to try some things. Primarily I want to make the switch button add an attack when mid combo, so swipe - swipe - fire, or fire - fire - stomp; that sort of thing. Then I have ideas for enemies that make you want to use those. Thematically, I have this vague notion of having my characters bond in the player's head by cooperating in combat, the way that the characters in Ico bonded by helping each other out.

Lol Toonguska. Not quite yet, but maybe someday!

Thanks for playing my game again, Jupi :) always a pleasure ^__^

Hey Sir_Obvious, you're absolutely right! Thanks for the reminder to fix that, I've patched in a fix!

Thank you for the kind words too ^__^

Holy crap, that was hard. Great idea though, well executed.

Unfortunately on Mac Safari and Chrome the mouse clicks didn't seem to work. I could run around with the arrow keys, but I couldn't pick up the weapon. Shame, it looked really cool!

That's a fine design there, I too liked that you went for a grow/shrink mechanic rather than an instant death.

That was a really interesting mechanic. I really liked seeing the little humans change color to show their allegiance!

That was a neat idea, but it was really hard to play on a laptop.

Was that vignette on the 64x64 grid? It looked surprisingly smooth.

This looks like a really neat game, but I couldn't get the controls to work at all on a Mac, neither in Chrome nor Safari :( The game would start, but the arrow keys wouldn't have any effect on it.

Hey, that was neat! I really liked the variety of monsters species, and I super appreciate the little landing intro cutscenes.

The one bummer was the boss laser: you may want to put a second or so of invincibility on your player after it's been hit, that way the boss laser won't drain all your health if it happens to line up just right!

That was pretty well made, great 90s throwback :)

One note: you probably want to warn people in safari that the game won't be playable: the mouse capture doesn't work, so while you're trying to play the mouse will leave the window.

Really nice gameboy style graphics and audio, nice stuff. Damned hard though, it took several tries before I could work out the jump distance for those spikes!

Aww, that was really cute. I really appreciate that you did a narrative project. Two thumbs up ^__^