Omaze
What started as a Playdate version of his alt.ctrl.GDC LED-based game RotoRing turned into something more – a single-screen puzzle… platformer? called Omaze (part of Playdate’s Season One). In Omaze, you control a small circle with a dot in it, kind of like an eye. You move centrifugally around circles with the crank to make it to the goal circle on the other side of the screen, switching between circles at certain points where they connect with the B button. You learn additional moves (dashing) and encounter new obstacles (rotating lasers, enemy circles that roll toward you, circles that change sizes) as the game goes on, but each level is just the one screen to solve, and you have unlimited do-overs. It’s very minimalist, perfect for the sharp contrasts of the 1-bit screen.
I liked it, but it really made something clear that I’d love as a standard option in the Playdate: reversible crank directions from the Home menu, like a Y-invert in your FPS game. No matter how many circles I circled, I would keep cranking the wrong direction and collide with an enemy, forcing many more replays of these levels than necessary. I was actually only able to get about 80% of the way through the game because I got frustrated with the controls… it’s like when someone hands you a controller for GoldenEye with the wrong axis selected, and you don’t have time to change it because you’re already in the middle of a match with friends. It just feels… wrong, and you’re never able to make it feel right. It still takes me two tries, every time, to scroll the right direction on my Playdate home screen and look through my hundreds of games. A system-wide reversal would be invaluable. If not, maybe it could be implemented on a game-by-game basis? Think of the accessibility! (I emailed Panic about this to see if it’s possible. They got back to me very quickly and said… maybe! It’s not in the works currently, but it’s also not the worst idea they’ve ever heard. Can be done on a game-by-game basis, though!)
Anyway, Omaze is still a cool little game, and you can clearly see the hardware-based game inspiration. That’s one of the things that’s so appealing about the Playdate, too: the crank makes it feel like you’re actually interacting with a physical gadget instead of a game on a screen. I love making music, but there’s just something about holding a real instrument in my hands vs. drawing lines on the screen with my mouse while sitting at my computer. The precision in the control you get by moving around circles with a 1:1 crank control feels great! I just wish my brain would tell my hands to crank the other direction when something is coming after me.
(Included free as part of Season One.)