Pogo Arc
A downloadable game
This is my first game for the Playdate! Obviously I had to use the crank as the primary input.
To install:
This is for the Playdate system. If you don't have a Playdate, you can play the game through the Playdate Simulator, but it probably isn't going to be the greatest. The zip file contains the .pdx folder. You can sideload it through the Playdate website, or you can just download the Playdate Simulator. More info on this is here.
To play:
Use the crank, bounce on the thicker arcs of the circle, avoid the floaters, get the highest score you can!
Download
Comments
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love this game!
super fun and a great hi-score chaser.
I noticed that the music gets jumbled if the game is reset when music is playing. It sounds like two tracks are playing out of sync with each other. I can achieve the bug consistently by rapidly pressing B at any time.
what do you think about having the pogo follow the crank directly? I have made a habit out of starting the game while the crank is in the lowest position so the on-screen movement corresponds to the actual crank position. implementing this correlation in-game would probably be most easily done by having the pogo start at whatever position the crank is currently in (instead of always starting the pogo at the bottom).
thanks for developing such a great experience on playdate!
Thanks for playing and the feedback! I really appreciate it, especially how to replicate the music bug (I had seen it but hadn't reproduced it yet).
I hadn't really thought of starting the player at the CURRENT crank position honestly. The movement should be 1-1 so 1 rotation of the crank is 1 rotation of the player, but I think that there's a little bit of crank "drift" over time as well (just a limitation of the hardware I think?), so sometimes the crank movement doesn't correlate 1-1 all the time, but it should be fairly close. I can see how starting the player at the crank's position could be helpful, I'll have to look into that.
I'm working on another Playdate game at the moment, but I'll definitely look at an update to PogoArc at some point.
Nice song!
Has me wantin' to keep playing just to hear it.
I wasn't aware there was a music track 😮
Thanks! I didn't make the music, but the music is a little bit dynamic (there are 6 different loops and it changes them up a bit at random). I've made the game a bit easier now (will push in an update soon) so that you can get to where the music really kicks in faster :)
Where did ya get those loops?
The second one is really good. 😳
Love it! I look forward to more features like scorekeeping! Thanks for letting us have a try!
Thanks for trying it! It's very fun/easy to make stuff for the Playdate!
I barely know how to spell SQL, so I'm curious if you're an experienced programmer and are merely ("merely") porting your skills to C/Lua/Pulp are nbd or if you're a newbie to it all (and are now an inspiration to us newbies who want to develop for the Playdate)?
I've been programming for most of my life, and develop games on the side (mostly Unity over the last 8ish years, though that may change soon). Lua is a bit odd in some ways and I did have to learn how to structure my code (honestly the code for this is pretty rough right now), but generally once you're comfortable with 2 languages, it's not too difficult to learn another.
Pulp is a great way to dip your toes in development! It's a bit limiting unless you do a bit of coding, but I'd recommend it as a starting point if you don't have any experience! Just play around with it and set some simple goals on what you want to make. Your perception of "simple" in gamedev terms will change quickly, but it's a lot of fun!
Thank you for sharing and the encouragement!