It started with a new technical ability
Until now, Playdate Pulp games have been technically limited in size. I mean technically in the literal sense. There is a frametable limit to the number of frames that can exist in a Pulp game of 32,768. That sounds like a lot until you start jamming in full-screen artwork! Additionally, as a project grows in code, art, music, number of rooms etc, the browser studio grows difficult to work with and at those larger levels of content. You have to really start testing on device to ensure you’re not loading too long as the game can be reset by the watchdog (in the form of a crash).
So yeah, that sounds like trouble, but this is generally a good thing as it forces focused design and thinking around limitations! However as expertise on the pl…
It started with a new technical ability
Until now, Playdate Pulp games have been technically limited in size. I mean technically in the literal sense. There is a frametable limit to the number of frames that can exist in a Pulp game of 32,768. That sounds like a lot until you start jamming in full-screen artwork! Additionally, as a project grows in code, art, music, number of rooms etc, the browser studio grows difficult to work with and at those larger levels of content. You have to really start testing on device to ensure you’re not loading too long as the game can be reset by the watchdog (in the form of a crash).
So yeah, that sounds like trouble, but this is generally a good thing as it forces focused design and thinking around limitations! However as expertise on the platform developed, devs have brought out larger and more ambitious projects. Pine is an adventure game made by intellikat that was split into 3 parts. To be published on Playdate Catalog, it had to be combined into a single downloadable, so Shaun Inman of Panic (and creator of Pulp, based on Bitsy) put together a project file that could act as something of a ‘Disk Switcher’ to swap between Pulp games and even SDK games!
As soon as the rest of us in the Pulp dev community heard about it, we cajoled them to release it as a tool and Shaun formalized Pulp Game Switchers
So now we had advanced capability. Using the switcher a single dev could make multiple small games and automatically or explicitly combine them into a single larger project. This enables episodic games that come out in chapters, perhaps over a period of time. One of my original goals with ART7 was to have rotating shows in the gallery that I could just update and then archive the previous versions of the game. That was very much not possible then, but *It Is Now. *
Other uses could be for game dev courses to have students build a number of games in teams and package the course together into one executable. OR many devs could come together on a unified theme and build something unique. Kind of like a game jam...**
Then the name Ware-wolf
Thinking on all of this, naturally *Warioware *surfaced as an idea. There are a few Playdate games that are mini-game or micro-game collections, but none as cohesive as *Warioware *and others of its sort. With this structure, that idea instantly became much more feasible to pull off.
It was October. Halloween was on the horizon. Ware.. Were.. werewolf. Ware-wolf.
WARE-WOLF
As soon as that got in my head, the course was clear. Time to make a game.. games.
Then, a jam or a collab?
This is a busy time of year, and making dozens of microgames is not feasible for me.. But maybe the community would be into the idea? How should it be organized? I had been thinking of running a game jam at some point, but to do this properly, it would need to have some technical guidelines regarding how data is saved and variables used.
So, I put the idea out to the Playdate dev community on the PD Squad Discord and posted about it in Reddit and on itch.io There was immediate interest! My commitment was to learn and build the switcher, as well as hosting the game and working on marketing etc once it’s out. I polled whether it should be run as a game jam with strong technical rules or as a collaboration - collab won out.
Why not both?
It really ended up being a mix of jam AND collaboration. The project was open to any dev that wanted to submit a game (limited to Pulp games for this first outing, may open up to others in the future). Where it became game jam-like was that we were on a pretty tight deadline. We formalized the idea on October 8th and were shooting for a release date of Halloween! That’s nuts, but it got everyone motivated.
I set a cutoff of October 19th for submission/guarantee of inclusion with the remaining time before release dedicated to polishing and building out the switcher and all the additional assets needed to launch a game.
Then 14 dev teams
There was a hell of a response to the idea from a few newcomers to some of the most knowledgeable Pulp devs we have. I’m just going to put this right here...
Every one of those games is quality. Even the unreleased ones are shaping up to be unique and fascinating!
I’m going to post a link to a review article here from Playdate Unofficial since @theGameLLama gave a description of Every game in *Ware-wolf! *It’s a great article, but also the devs that participated in this release made focused and interesting (spooky) experiences that could easily be expanded upon. The conversations and contributions from everyone in the Discord channel have been a massive highlight of my year! It’s been so fun to see creativity come together for a shared purpose, gifted to the community that we all value so highly.
Then the switcher
They ALL did their part, so I had to do mine. It would have been easy to just make a screen and a menu to launch each included game, but the concept needed to be more than that! So we have an idyllic lake, campers telling stories around a campfire.. and something lurking in the woods.
If the art style looks familiar, it was my attempt to emulate one of my favorites - Sword & Sworcery - and because we don’t outright support child murder, there is a happy ending to each night spent around the fire.
With a shocking number of games submitted to the project - 14! - you’ll have to play a few nights to unlock all of the stories, but once experienced, each one can be endlessly replayed from the **counselor. **
Then a gift to the community!
WE RELEASED ON TIME and as of this writing have several hundred downloads so far. The game pdx was posted here on itch.io just before global Halloween and will be available for FREE going forward.
BT from Grackalope Games even found time to make us a trailer literally after having a newborn
At this time, there are no plans to release on Catalog since we would have to charge a minimum of $1. That’s not such a big deal, but with 15 dev teams in the mix, dealing with taxes and profit sharing would be sticky at best, even though we would all love the increased exposure. Because this was a collaboration between devs, to keep everything simple and friendly, we made it a FREE release. *Ware-wolf *is a gift of passion from Pulp devs to the Playdate community!
**SO TELL YOUR FRIENDS! YOU CAN JUST HAVE THE GAME FOR FREE AND SIDELOAD. **That’s the beautiful part of Playdate - the process is so easy that it has become accessible for anyone!
Now the tech learnings - it’s all about the save data
This is the reason it had to be a Collab. All the games in the project share the same save data. So if someone uses the variable playerHealth in one game and stores it, any other game that also uses a variable called playerHealth would be affected.
We solved this by requiring each game to choose a unique *prefix for any variables they wanted to write to disk. So game1PlayerHealth *is a different variable than game2PlayerHealth and so on. Variables that are not written to disk do not need the prefix as they do not affect other games!
Additionally, no game can use a general toss****. *toss *erases the save data of the game. The Whole Game. *fin *is fine as it just resets the current playthrough and doesn’t touch save data, but a toss without attached specific variables will just wipe it all. And if that’s not what you’re going for, that is a bad thing.
So far as moving between games, the overarching project is watching the savedata for a variable called gotoPDX, and as soon as it sees that stored it will switch games. So if there is a final message one project wants to use before moving to the next one, the *gotoPDX *variable storage should be wrapped in a *say... then *format.
A good practice would be to send the player to a black room first and handle all *gotoPDX *switches in there. Any tiles that might be under a *say *box persist for a moment during the transition, so this would be a good way to avoid that. The issue is minor however, and there wasn’t time for a rewrite before release.
RUBDUBDUB
What we DID sneak in at the very last moment was a community secret until TODAY!
Help discover the secrets hiding in your Playdate library... 🕵️ : r/PlaydateConsole
Orkn has been working on a community cheat code behind the scenes for months (years?), and a number of games have implemented code to do any number of things by entering *RUBDUBDUB *somewhere within. See the Wiki for details!
**RUBDUBDUB **(right up B down up B down up B) can be entered on the opening scene of Ware-wolf, but you’ve gotta be quick! If you have already beaten the game and unlocked everything, you could reset the game and try again at the lakeside screen when you have a little more time. Then you can unlock everything instantly from the **counselor–>aid **menu.
It will unlock *music mode *which gives you a nice idle mode to listen to the songs in the launcher at any of the scenes you prefer!
The CREDITS again, for good measure
**Ware-wolf Concept **- Ledbetter Games, Art/production - Dylan Warren, Art - Robyn Heffler, Music - Eva Belmont (ART&.. More, Off-Panet Dreams, Hall of the Dwarf King)
Spirit Game by banana (Aurora Oasis Adventure)
***A ****Bump in the Night - *Grackalope Games/BT - game/art, Eva Belmont - music, assets used from Teaceratops Games Pulp pack (clap-along)
*LOVE and HATE - *Design, code, art, sound by Serrotonin/Austin Serr (Eye to Eye), Music by Eva Belmont
*The Devil’s Preference *by Zach Hazard Vaupen // Emo Sludge Games (I’m Not Allowed In That Store Anymore)
*The Spirit of the Law - *Game Design by intellikat, Sound Design by beanpear & BeepsNBoops (Quest for the X, Pine)
Witch Ware - Game by orkn (Resonant Tale, Lolife), Music and sound by samplay (Bullet Shoot Chronicle: Crazy Mobs Mania)
*As Dead as a Doris *by Pixel Ghost (Life’s Too Short series, Shadowgate PD)
*Candy Catch - *Art, music, and gameplay by Swansonge (Date Nite)
***Antigonish ***by Afifyoram (Tatters of the King), Music & SFX by Eva Belmont
All is Whale. by DarkNStormyGames, Orkn helped with scripting questions, game was built off of Neven Mrgan’s two-tile-tall player build (Gilly and the Isle of Sorrow)
Panic! at the Patch by Tijn & Jazzie (Voidblazers, Hopper, Soko)
*Otherworldly Effigy - *James Gameboy: coding, battle design, music, sound | Buizy: art, story, battle design (Initial Daydream) | Bandcamp
***The Exhumer ***by Pixel Potemkin (The D.B. Keplar Art Gallery)
A Night to Behold by qhoang (Solar Descent)