Ciao. I just released on Itch.io my first Playdate game. It's a roguelike-flavored, single-player shifting-maze card game for Playdate, where you're the Minotaur trying to get out of your own labyrinth.
You can download it from free from here: Minotauros
I wrote it in Lua. Instead of using png, all the graphics and animations in the game has been done by using Playdate SDK graphics primitive, dither patterns, and perlin noise function.
The music instead is coming from Ovani; Humble Bundles are great for getting game assets
The game is built as a love letter to board games like Ravensburger Labyrinth and Matagot Room 25.
Lastly, the game is supposed to be in version 1.0, but I do not exclude to make updates. Thus feel free to reach out to me for any feedback, suggestion, or question.
As I was playing it, I found myself wishing that there were some kind of extra layer of information that could help me make strategic decisions, ala minesweeper or dungeon sweeper Dragonsweeper. Or, if you’re going for something a little more like solitaire, where there’s minimal strategy, but it’s just kind of fun to move the cards around and hope for a good draw, then maybe balance it to be a little more friendly. After a few rounds, I felt like I understood how to use the cards effectively, but I still only won one game out of 10 or so rounds. Maybe I just got unlucky, or I’m overestimating how well I understand it, but it seems low for the default mode. A quick search says that regular draw-1 solitaire has about a 33% win rate, and draw-3 is about 11%.
Thanks for making the game, and good luck with it.
Calibrating the game difficulty has been the most challenging task of the project. At the beginning the game was too easy, and eventually I landed on harder side. Still it’s possible that you have been quite unlucky. In fact the winning rate of myself and the beta tester is around 25%-30%.
Anyway, your suggestions are very useful. I’m afraid that inserting minesweeper-like info would impact too much this game (but I’ll think about it for future projects…). Instead I’ll try to make another round of calibration, aiming at making the game more balanced and more fun.
I played a bit more, and my win rate has improved. Some luck, I think, but I’m also understanding more. I realize now that a big value of using the gear and hourglass are not just their effect on the board, but also as a way to clear them from your hand, so you can hopefully get an eye or an arrow next. So maybe the balance is fine, and it was more about my lack of knowledge.
In terms of low-impact gameplay changes, consider speeding up the animations, so that a player could play more rounds faster, and thus learn from mistakes more quickly.
PS. In my last post, I got the name wrong for Dragonsweeper, by Daniel Benmergui. I’d recommend it if you haven’t played it yet. It packs a lot of information into the game in very subtle ways. I’d avoid reading the comments on the itch page if you want to have a chance to discover some of the “secrets” on your own. That game does a pretty good job at using iteration to train the player at what the optimal amount of risk taking is, which I think is one of the things that I wasn’t getting right with Minotauros at first.
@Allantopoles The fast speed is great! Very nice. Instant is interesting as a demonstration of how much animation changes the feel of an interface.
When I sideloaded the new version through the playdate website, it didn’t automatically download to my playdate. I had to go into the Game Library app and delete the old version and then re-download manually. I think this is because both the old and new version are listed as V3 in the game metadata.
