Hey everybody! we wanted to share a build of our game Pullfrog 2-BITS. We've been working on it for a while now and we just got the main mechanic down and feeling pretty decent. It's been a learning experience as we've gotten more and more familiar with the Playdate's SDK.
So here it is!
give it a spin and let us know what you think. It's not a game yet and there are definitely still some bugs we're trying to work out. But it's a nice little playground that will set the base for our game ideas.
Tips:
-Press "M" to toggle music
-Press "L" to bring out our Testing Menu
UP and DOWN to navigate
LEFT and RIGHT to toggle options
A to confirm
Check out our devlog if you want to know more about the process!
and feel free to ask us anything
-If the game starts behaving weird, like lines are not clearing, it's because of a life system that's kinda buggy. It happens after you die THREE times. to fix it, Just cmd/ctrl + R to reset. Sorry about that.
-Another quick thing: Some feedback is that the game is very difficult. yeah... sorry about that we left the blocks' falling speed high for testing and completely forgot to put it back a a decent pace. We'll put up another build soon with adjustable speed on the debug menu. (This only happens on the simulator, It should be fine on device)
Love.
Oh my. This is great.
It plays really well on the playdate and the visuals are super crisp.
I think there is a really nice balance between the size of the tiles and the screen size. I was worried that it would be too small but I think it is just right.
There is also a lot of attention to details I really appreciate. I wanted to comment for example on how tile that falls on you try to push you first but I realized it was basically the topic of your post. There is also little shakes when pieces cann be moved I think. It is really nice and play nicely.
For the game itself I wish there will be stuff to do when waiting the pieces to fall down. Maybe things to pick up, optional matches to get something special. Maybe there is already and I didn't find it yet.
I really like the base mechanics! When I first heard of this Playdate version I played the PICO-8 original quite a lot. The extra attention to detail and the cute music and animations are great.
I think if I had main problems with the base game (playing on the simulator with a decent gamepad), it feels too hard to drag blocks side by side with the vertical tongue aiming and it's something I try not to use because it feels awkward to control, i suppose that would become more useful if you get power-ups to increase tongue length like in the original.
I look forward to seeing how you expand on the game mechanics in future updates ^^
Yes found the same issue as you while playing for long periods of time in the device, we have the plan to try out an auto aim system so that it's a little bit easier but we need to find the correct balance for user input and auto behavior.
We are currently working on a small (at least we are trying to keep it small) game in Godot where we are exploring a lot of the mechanics we want on the new Pullfrog power Ups and it's been great!
As soon as we finish that new project we are coming back to add everything we have learned back to Pullfrog 2-Bits.
This looks AMAZING. Sad to see you got rid of the Downwell esque shop. That looked so cool in the GIFs you had and I loved the little sprite of the shop keeper.
Two things of feedback (that you could ignore because I know nothing)
I feel like the main character sprite could be altered to look a little better. I dunno, there’s something about the eye size/design that looks a little off to me. I kinda like how it looks in the demo file posted above - so much cuter imo
Also don’t know what you have as far as power ups go, but I wonder if a wall jump and or double jump could be a cool power up.
Anyway, soooo pumped for this game. It looks so fun and well designed!!!
Cutting the shop was sad but immediately made the whole thing less complex haha so now the game is almost done thanks to that cut, at the end I think it was worth it :).
I know what you mean about the character sprite BUT we made a lot of test and on device it's helps a lot with readability even though it may look a little bit weird on the GIFS, but who knows maybe we have stared too long at the playdate screen haha.
In terms of power ups don't want to spoiler things but at leas one of those made it to the final game :)!
