Playdate chat thread | Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (Mars after Midnight)

Lots of great stuff in there, but the headline is Mars After Midnight by Lucas Pope launching March 12th!

twitter.com/playdate/status/1765072205329928249

^ The Playdate online store, Catalog, is having a sale from March 7 through 14!

The Playdate Community Awards Shows 2023 runs from 1900 (UK) tonight on YouTube. Click here to view the video.

Good luck to OrangeRKN and his super Resonant Tale game which is a nominee in several categories :-).

The game that was on the stream just now, Midnight Raider, looked fantastic!

Really impressed with the quality of some of these games, always fun to see how the limitations of something can push creativity

Congrats ORKN, Resonant Tale did great! Really pleased for you!

That was a fantastic show!

Alongside the excellent games nominated for awards, it was so good to see a range of great-looking new games coming soon; a lot was packed in.

I genuinely feel more excited about the upcoming Playdate game roster than I do for the PlayStation and Switch "Direct" shows; it just felt positive and exciting not to have the £70, "Deluxe Edition" and DLC BS that we're so used to now. I'd love to get a Playdate!

site23 wrote:Congrats ORKN, Resonant Tale did great! Really pleased for you!

Thank you! There was actually a bit of an awkward oscars-style mix-up and Resonant Tale actually won three awards including Best Adventure, which was announced differently in the video. To cut a long story short, I was told ahead of the show which awards Resonant Tale had won so that they could get a quote from me to display on the store page, so I went in expecting to see Resonant Tale get the win and was confused when it didn't. It's all been resolved now but I had to hold off posting anything on socials immediately after the show while it got sorted - apparently it came down to a spreadsheet mix-up and miscommunication, and I feel very bad for the game Post Hero that has had the award taken back! (I did suggest we could share it, but that's not what they decided to do in the end.)

Couldn't be happier with the wins regardless! Pulp Game of the Year, Best Adventure, and Pulp Technical Achievement is an amazing set, alongside the other nominations :wub:

jawa_ wrote:That was a fantastic show! ... I'd love to get a Playdate!

One of us! One of us!

Jenuall wrote:The game that was on the stream just now, Midnight Raider, looked fantastic!

Midnight Raider looks great for sure! Given what's upcoming for this year, I'm very glad Resonant Tale released last year haha

Just to highlight a few others:

Sketchbook Masters

Pokemon with famous art. It's genuinely genius, with different art movements as the "types" and the player making accurate copies of the 'mons in their sketchbook as the "capture" mechanic.

Comet

An adventure game that uses a crank powered lamp as its central mechanic, this started as a Pulp game made by one person like Resonant Tale but has become a full SDK game made by a team, definitely one of my most anticipated games on Playdate!

Diora

Monument Valley/Captain Toad style puzzling, and very impressive looking for the Playdate. Some really smart stuff going on!

Otto's Galactic Groove

A crank-based rhythm game similar to Trombone Champ but more serious. Rupert (who did the Resonant Tale soundtrack) is also composing the soundtrack for this :wub:

Crank War

A tile-based RTS played out on a rotating drum world (crank to spin, naturally) with amazing art. You have to take down kaiju with Advance Wars style tanks!

OrangeRKN wrote:There was actually a bit of an awkward oscars-style mix-up and Resonant Tale actually won three awards...

Oh! Congrats on gaining three (3!) awards, Orange - a shame about the mix-up! It was a lot of fun watching the show; it moved at a very fast pace with awards and games announced thick and fast. And...

jawa_ wrote:... I'd love to get a Playdate!

...I genuinely would. I was surprised by how good the music tracks and the graphical styles were during the show. I'm a little frustrated with mainstream gaming right now and Playdate seems to have a much more exciting, positive vibe about it.

I will get a Playdate but not for a while. In the meantime, I'll keep my eyes on the Playdate scene.

Enjoy this OR. Won really important awards too (like Zelda TotK won Best Adventure Award at the Game Awards).

Re. Technical Achievement in Pulp. I wish I knew about game development, I guess creating Resonate Tale in 'Pulp' you must have really stretched the capabilities of the tool (like the equivalent of creating Donkey Kong Country with the snes hardware or whatever). Not familiar with Pulp but can tell creating a game of that calibre must have been a mighty accomplishment.

OrangeRKN wrote:(I did suggest we could share it....)

strawberry floating boss move man :wub:

I suddenly want a Playdate

twitter.com/playdate/status/1767604292406710315

^ You now have the option of using Swift to code games on Apple devices for Playdate.

twitter.com/playdate/status/1767597070989627739

^ Mars after Midnight has been launched and I love the presentation; it looks great!

The titles available on this look brilliant, love the creativity and variety. I’m still keeping my eye out on getting one but it’s still out of my price range right now.

Have they said if they’ll introduce a backlit model in the future?

ITSMILNER wrote:...Have they said if they’ll introduce a backlit model in the future?

Nothing official, Milner, although I'd imagine that they may do so at some point. I believe that most folk feel that the current screen is pretty decent... although maybe we'll seek OrangeRKN's perspective on this!

jawa_ wrote:
ITSMILNER wrote:...Have they said if they’ll introduce a backlit model in the future?

Nothing official, Milner, although I'd imagine that they may do so at some point. I believe that most folk feel that the current screen is pretty decent... although maybe we'll seek OrangeRKN's perspective on this!

Sure! First a bit of technical pedantry - the type of screen used by the Playdate can't actually be backlit, but frontlit versions do exist. I believe some kindles are similar in that the screens are frontlit with light provided uniformly from around the edges of the screen. It's a consequence of the screen being highly reflective, which is what makes it look really good in well-lit environments and even bright sunlight.

As for the chances of a frontlit model being made, I personally think it is unlikely. The biggest reason for that is probably battery life. Networking on the console is very locked down despite a high demand for it from devs wanting to make games with online features and multiplayer, and that's primarily because of security concerns and battery life concerns. Similarly bluetooth can't be used even though it's there in the hardware. While a frontlight would presumably be user controlled and able to be turned off, I think Panic would rather have more control over the experience to avoid complaints shifting from the screen to the battery.

Technically if you buy a Playdate today it's already a second revision ("Rev. B") as they changed chip early in production because of supply issues. The Rev. B chip is better than the one in Rev. A units (like mine) but is throttled to behave the same. Panic have spoken about the large impact switching chip mid production had on their small team and I imagine they will be trying to avoid further revisions for the forseeable future rather than creating new ones.

The lack of light is definitely a limitation on the device. As I say the screen looks great in well lit conditions, and is probably the best device I've ever owned for visibility outside when it's very bright, but you obviously can't see it when it's dark. It's definitely something to consider before buying, but if it isn't a dealbreaker I wouldn't hold out on a new model. Of course I could be very wrong!

Anyway, Mars After Midnight. This game has vibes. It's essentially an easy, kid friendly and funnier Papers, Please, and I like it a lot! It's probably the highest profile game to have released on Playdate, certainly since the season one games it launched with, and I'm glad for the attention it is bringing to the console. It's probably not a killer app on its own, but I see it being a mainstay of Playdate discussion and recommendations.

OrangeRKN wrote:(lots of useful stuff about the Playdate's screen/hardware)

Hey, Orange, ta for sharing that info. It would seem that the Playdate hardware is likely to retain the same spec for quite some time and that could be a positive in terms of developers understanding the system and how to get the most out of it.

OrangeRKN wrote:...Mars After Midnight. This game has vibes. It's essentially an easy, kid friendly and funnier Papers, Please, and I like it a lot! It's probably the highest profile game to have released on Playdate, certainly since the season one games it launched with, and I'm glad for the attention it is bringing to the console. It's probably not a killer app on its own, but I see it being a mainstay of Playdate discussion and recommendations.

It sure does look neat! A smashing addition to the Catalog :-).

Yeah, my issue is I don’t play my handhelds in areas where there is a bright light source behind me so it would probably make this harder to play. Maybe one day we get a revision with some kind of light source added but we will see

During the day I can play it pretty much anywhere in my house. In the evening if I'm in the living room we usualy just have a lamp on, so I have to sit in the right spot to have the lamp behind me. In my office as long as my laptop is on and there's a relatively light coloured screen I can swivel on my chair and play by that light (this might sound weird but if I'm doing dev on it then it makes a lot of sense!). So it's not as bad as an original Game Boy for example, but it's still limiting.

Playdate chat thread | Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (Mars after Midnight)

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