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Oh, duh, forgot that uploads get locked for Jam submissions until the voting period is over. Guess the update will be out on 1st March then.

Mostly I'm modifying a few of the level layouts (either shortening things which went on a little too far past being interesting, or just some minor visual tweaks to aid readability), and I'm replacing what will probably be around 8 levels entirely that were either too similar to other stages or more frustrating than I feel good about subjecting others to with ones featuring mechanics I ran out of time during the Jam to implement.

The build that's up at the moment is still the Jam build. Planning on putting out an updated version as soon as I've got time to properly do a test run of it, probably next weekend at the latest. That version will probably be more or less complete, though.

Thanks for the detailed feedback - really appreciate it!

I think I'd probably be the first to admit that I'm probably a terrible judge of what is fun versus tedious in this kind of game - I'm coming to the realisation that maybe level design is not my strongsuit and that I should probably be more aggressively getting friends to playtest some of this stuff before release.

Just commenting on my own page in regards to asset reuse -

I'm recycling a bunch of existing code (most the menus are modified from Prop of the Class, and I'm reusing the most recent update of my cutscene code that I recycle in everything. The character art in the tutorial is almost entirely from the Prop opening.

There's some graphics in the opening and the ending cutscene that are recycled from either Prop or Dangercourse - slightly under half I think. I reuse three bits of music from Prop and Dangercourse in the cutscenes as well. I reuse the explosion sprite from Escapepion, but I put that in everything because I think it's funny. I also reuse a spike image from Prop, though the rest of the gameplay art is all new.

Think that's about it.

Thanks - appreciate you taking the time to drop some feedback.

There are certainly a couple of levels I'd have probably swapped out for being a little too mean if I'd spent more than a week on it, though at a certain point I guess I spent enough time replaying things that I maybe got a little too good at manipulating the controls - "If I can complete it then it's probably fine" isn't always the best mindset to have when putting together stage designs!

Yeah, it's probably going to be a struggle on the simulator without using an actual PD as the controller.

That said, you can pair a game controller (such as an xBox controller) to the simulator and use the right analogue stick as the carnk. Probably not going to get you past some of the later stages that require pretty precise control without a lot more practice than on a Playdate, but I found it relatively workable when I tried it (turning down the sensitivity in the Config menu helps a little there as well)

Thanks!

Yeah, those last few levels are pretty mean.

For anyone looking back later, this is now fixed, and the oversight was even dumber than I thought it was.

Thanks for the kind words (and genuinely appreciate hearing that someone finished it!)

I'll take a look at that bug when I get a moment - I've got a rough idea what might be causing it, but I'm not going to have  access to the source code until next week.

There's a Playdate Simulator as part of the Playdate SDK you can download from the official Playdate site that can be used to play packaged games. That said, it's a bit of a miserable experience for anything like this game which uses the Playdates Crank input as the primary gameplay mechanism as there's not really a good substitute for it as part of the standard PC input.

Thanks!

I'm a little stumped on this at this point, unfortunately. I appreciate you giving that a try.

I'll need to have a think about it - it seems to only be effecting some users, which is absolutely the worst kind of bug to figure out because it's possibly only going to happen on their devices. There's a few things I can maybe do to reduce the amount of garbage generated whilst initialising the title screen that I can give a try, but that's going to take a while to look at and may not fix the issue.

Sorry that's not a super-useful response, but this just has me baffled at this point.

Hiya,

Thanks for responding - I appreciate it, as I don't particularly want anyone to have a bad time with this.

That said - I have to admit I'm completely baffled by this one. There's not a huge difference between the games first boot and restarting it, mostly just the first time you start it creates a header file for each of the save slots, then checks for any completed stage files so that it can total up the number of collected coins. I'm guessing it's not going to be the 10 second "I think your game is stuck in a loop" Playdate OS crash.

Does the game still crash when restarting if you exit without having created a save file?

Does the game still crash when restarting if you exit immediately after entering your name (whilst the opening sequence is still playing), or is it only if you have played a stage or two first?

I've uploaded a second version of the game labelled as Debug above - if you have time (no pressure - don't really want to put anyone out) could you give that a try a tell me if it's still crashing and reporting an error or not? I've moved some of the initialisation code in the hopes that it may report a proper error message if things aren't being done at boot time.

Hiya,

Thanks for the feedback - I appreciate it!

I'll have a look at adding something into the pause screen... as an interim measure, uploaded an updated version that adds a running total to the Stage Cleared screen (which is the only point the total gets updated anyway) that should at least make that a little more visible mid-game (it also fixes an occasional crash-bug, so worth updating regardless!)

In terms of the dialogue text, altering the timing on that stuff is a little on the tricky side with the way it's hanging together. Allowing the opening sequence to change timing based on button presses opens up a whole bunch of additional worm-cans that I'd rather not have to try and tackle. You can skip the entire sequence by tapping A+B at the same time though.

Ah, OK. Is this when you select the save data slot or when you are booting the game?

I have just uploaded a patched version which fixes a crash bug which can occur under some circumstances when you transition between the save select to the main menu. Not sure if this is the one you are encountering here or not, though.

Did you happen to catch what the reported error was? I've bleached my install and resideloaded it via the PD side using the version I uploaded and I'm not having any issues.

If you want a Track and Field alike, may I point you in the direction of my previous game that this one is riffing off. That's waaaaaay closer than this one is - I kinda started this one by trying to think of a way I could reuse some of the assets from that game to make something else!

Hiya,

Thanks! Yeah, I have difficulty with balancing difficulty so things are reasonable to people who haven't spent weeks staring at the game.

As far the controls - if you tap Left on the dPad on the title screen until the symbol in the bottom-left of the screen is an "A", it should switch things so that crank and turntable rotation matches. I personally find that a little too twitchy, but the option is there (and I really need to tweak the UI to make that more obvious!)

Thanks for the crash report!

Not entirely sure what that could be. The only thing I've got an inkling that it could be related to is an odd SDK bug relating to collision routines that is an absolutely nightmare to get to reoccur consistently. I'll try sticking the work around I'm using in another project into this when I get a minute.

Thanks for the feedback.

I hadn't realised the stage select wasn't going back to the last stage you played when you exit the game, honestly (this is definitely working on something else I've been working on recently...). Not allowing you to Next Stage from something you've already cleared is also a good point. I'll take a look at it when I get a few minutes spare. I should probably update this to put in an icon for the new list view anyway.

The S, A, A1/2 was something I patched in after the fact to address some other comments so didn't really put much of a nice UI on it. It changes the crank behaviour in game - A setting means that 1 rotation of the crank rotates the turntable all the way around, whereas A 1/2 means one crank rotation moves the turnable half the way around. S is the standard setting I playtested the game around.

Thanks!

Really like this - it's extremely well polished for a Jam game and there's a good amount of content. Fun interactions too!

This is really neat - the different ways in which the jams themes are integrated into the gameplay are really smart as well. Cracking stuff.

My best run was 187m!

This is fun. I think adding basic sound effect when interacting with a store or clowns or hiding would probably have a pretty huge effect on game feel - I died on my first go because I wasn't sure if my interaction with the coffee store was having an effect or not.

Thanks! I appreciate the comments.

Thanks for the feedback!

You can immediately fail the stage so you can restart using the A button, but I'll have a think about adding that to the directional pad as well. Level number is a good idea and I'll look to get that patched in once the voting period is over.

Cheers!

Yeah, the slow movement on stage 10 is deliberate, but in retrospect if I'd taken a few more minutes to think about how someone who wasn't inputting the stage data would see it, I should probably have either have changed the rate at which the objects bob so signify the differences in movement speed or made an object that looked heavier than that (or both). Oh, well, something for me to think about as an update!

Thanks! And I don't know about that, there's certainly some strong competition!

Thanks! I kind of enjoy trying to think of ways to make use of the uniquely analogue nature of the crank when making these things.

Thanks! Appreciate the comments. It's kind of hard to judge the ramp-up and how long to keep the stages a little on the easy side.

Thanks!

To be fair, the bucket game is a little broken to be honest, but it was a Gamejam project and I kind of ran out of time to fiddle with the controls and the collision detection on that a little more.

Thanks, appreciate it

Thanks!

Oh, wow, I'm impressed you managed to clear it - I had to do it for testing, and at a certain point I was wondering if some of the stages were a little too mean.

I did patch it some alternate control feels in an update (see other comments here) - obviously not much use if you've finished already, mind you, and not sure if either of them would particularly feel better for everyone.

Thanks, I really appreciate the feedback.

I am pretty unhappy with the way the event introductions ended up - the original plan was to do each event introduction as an image so that I could includes some diagrams pointing out some of the key aspects, but I ended up running short on time so just fell back onto whacking some text into an ordered list and throwing it on screen with a drawTextInRect command. It was very much a "something is better than absolutely nothing" solution. I feel like the shotput event in particular is a little cryptic about what it's expecting.

It's funny you should mention the hurdles, though, as the penalisation on that is actually bugged out and slightly less impactful than I was intending. I ended up leaving it because I liked the way the sound effect looping as a result of it sounded, but it does mean there's actually two frames of the electrocution animation that never display.

I do hope to do a tidied up DX version at some point -  I want to rewrite half the code for the ball throwing event, and I really want to put in the egg-and-spoon race I wanted to do but ran out of time for - and adding some extra feedback on the stamina gauge is probably something I'll have a major think about there.

Thanks!

The stamina was actually mostly there to disincentivise players from just wailing as hard as they could on the crank - I tend to feel like there's a line between "Playing games with a crank is really fun" and "Oh boy I feel like I'm going to accidentally scrape all the plastic off the side of this console" that I wanted to try to ensure people stayed on the right side of and that immediate feedback felt like a good solution to it.

Thank you! I really appreciate the kind words.

You really nailed the basic feel of just moving the rocket around - manoeuvring it feels really fun even before you have things to dodge!

Thanks! I appreciate the feedback. And yeah, I completely ran out of time for (a) good instructions and (b) any kind of actual game balance.