Sorry for the delayed response! No, a companion app isn’t necessary, the Playdate just has to be unlocked and preferably on the home screen. It works with Playdate OS 2.5.0 for me, so I’ll need some more info to look into this if you’re still having trouble.

• What version of macOS are you using? (can be found in Apple menu > About This Mac)
• Is this an Apple silicon or Intel Mac? (the “chip” or “processor” field in About This Mac)
• Do you have the Playdate SDK or official Mirror app installed, and was either one open at the same time as Rorrim?
• Can you describe what you’re trying to do and what exactly doesn’t work? For example, is it crashing, does it not show your Playdate in the list of devices, etc?

If you don’t want your answers to be public on Itch, you can email me at veggie_cheetah.0z at icloud.com

There is an issue I’m aware of (and working on) where the Rorrim app crashes occasionally while mirroring, but in my experience it does work for at least a little while before it crashes.

Are we allowed to use existing code (e.g. helper functions or classes from a previous jam game) at all, just so long as the gameplay is all new? Or does all code have to be written during the jam period?

Not having any isolation between games seems like a massive security/privacy issue unless I’m seriously misunderstanding the situation.

• Any game or its analytics/ads could essentially see a list of every other game a user has played that saved anything locally. This seems especially serious since itch.io hosts a lot of NSFW games as well as games geared towards marginalized groups.
• A troll could upload a game that messes with or deletes saves from other games. I know the public listings are moderated, but itch.io is often used for game jams where people share direct links to games that haven’t been checked yet, which bypasses moderation. Even an unintentional bug in one game could wipe saves from others.
• Some of the game-making tools at https://itch.io/tools/platform-web run in the browser and also save to local storage. This means that a malicious game/tool could steal someone’s works in progress, or private games they are making for themselves and don’t intend to share, if they use any of those tools.
• the user granting any permission (location services, camera, microphone, notifications, etc) to one game would grant that permission to all games

Don’t believe me? It’s right there in the OWASP cheat sheet: “ Avoid hosting multiple applications on the same origin, all of them would share the same localStorage object, use different subdomains instead.”

Just a heads up: it looks like you left the placeholder “com.organization.package” as your bundle ID, but I already had a different game on my Playdate that used the same one, so yours overwrote its metadata on the sideload page and showed up as an update replacing the other game. You should probably use a unique bundle ID so that doesn’t happen.

Edit: unless you, uh, want to overwrite other people’s games?

Quick note: the game itself doesn’t explain anything and is still sort of unfinished. The description on the game’s page might help you figure out what to do

It sideloads fine now, but it looks like the card image is the wrong size – the title is off center and the bottom and right sides get cut off.

Is this in Pulp? Impressive either way.

Love the graphics, they’re full of personality for how minimalist they are. I think this would be fun to figure out without a manual if it wasn’t so punishing for building the wrong thing at the start – it seemed like there was just barely enough money to build anything basic and if I built the wrong stuff or got unlucky with the meteors(?), I had to restart the game, unless I was missing something. Being able to get money back from demolishing buildings would be more conducive to experimentation and learning, I think.

I love how this game doesn’t give exact instructions (e.g. how hard to tighten the screws) but lets you figure it out intuitively with clear, immediate feedback, just like real DIY crafts. I also like that you don’t constrain the player to only do it right – I had to try making like 5 random cuts and leaving the screws halfway out just to see what would happen, and laughed when I saw the lopsided chair at the end.

Simple but surprisingly addictive! I liked that the crank was needed to get started but gradually became irrelevant, because that would have been tedious to have to keep cranking. I also liked that the prices increased the more you bought, which meant that I had to continually evaluate which tier was most cost-effective and kept the lower tiers relevant.

Fun when it works, but buggy. Most of the time, the character immediately falls off the cliff the instant the game starts, before I have a chance to crank, but other times, he stops at the end of each platform until I start cranking. There’s also the crash after two respawns, as others have mentioned. Here’s the full crash log:

main.lua:53: attempt to index a nil value (global 'bgm')
stack traceback:
  main.lua:53: in function ‘initialize'
  main.lua:286: in function 'gameOver'
  main.lua:253:in function <main.lua:115>

The game’s RAM usage doubles on every restart, so I think it’s just running out of memory.

This game has a lot going on which has the potential for pretty deep gameplay, but also makes it a little confusing, and none of the individual mechanics seemed like they had enough of a gameplay impact, or at least they didn’t have enough feedback for me as a player to see that.

You’ve got the cranking to speed up, ok… but that makes the hurdles not really matter, because as long as I kept cranking they didn’t really slow me down. Then there’s also cranking to pass the baton, which was nicely implemented, but it seemed weird having the crank do two different things (why am I waving the egg around to run faster?). Then there’s the UFOs… was I supposed to avoid them or get in them and destroy them? I couldn’t really tell. Did it ever matter which lane I was in? I’m not sure. It never seemed like I had much control over the gameplay except having to crank to keep my speed up (or jump, but I couldn’t tell if I was timing the jumps right) and pass the egg whenever it let me.

Was there actually something chasing me from behind? I don’t think I ever saw it or felt threatened by anything other than the timer to pass the egg.

Don’t take my criticism the wrong way; with some tweaking, all these mechanics could be put together in a really interesting and satisfying way, I just had a hard time seeing how it all fit together while playing it.

I played it on the simulator using the physical Playdate as a controller, made it in 253 seconds.

I liked the music (although the crank and movement sounds were a little repetitive and covered up the music) and the variety of levels (the different layouts and obstacles were reminiscent of a Metroid game).

With the physical Playdate controls, I thought the cranking was tedious and didn’t really add much to the gameplay – it felt like a barrier between me and the game. I didn’t feel like the batteries were that useful, because I still had to crank the same amount to do anything and I didn’t want to just sit there cranking and not moving while it charged. Not being able to use the a/b buttons at the same time as the crank was frustrating. One way to improve this might be to give the player an alternative way to build up charge – from defeated enemies, for example.

This is the kind of game that makes you hate yourself for the slightest mistake but is so satisfying when you get it right. It’s the first playdate game I’ve seen make full use of the crank’s ridiculous sensitivity.

This has promise! I found it a little frustrating but kept wanting to see more from it (e.g. variety of challenges/obstacles). If the playdate can handle the physics calculations for this, I’d like to see more momentum/rolling based elements like jump ramps.

A couple bugs I ran into:

• I can fly infinitely by mashing the jump button. This feels like cheating, but it was the only way I could pass some obstacles. It also allowed me to skip most of the obstacles and just come down to get coins, and fly forever past the end of the floor.
• sometimes I would jump while touching the edge of a platform and it would instantly kill me

Hey I just made the game, y’all are the ones rolling back odometers! 😉

Thanks! When you’re cranking too fast, the odometer stops turning and there is some screen shake that I added at the last minute to try to make it noticeable, but I agree that it’s not enough, especially when you’re right at the limit and just briefly go too fast. I have a few ideas to improve that if I expand the game.

Love the visual and auditory style! I really enjoyed the game and liked the difficulty curve at first, but kept waiting for it to get truly chaotic and hard, which never happened. I also wanted a reason to care about my score (and by extension, keeping the crank in the slice for the full time), but the score felt unimportant with endless levels and the need for lives. I wonder if this could be solved by either:

• having predefined stages and tracking high scores per stage, so there would be fixed points where players could compare their score
• having a timed mode (score driven) separately from endless mode (life driven)
• unifying score and lives into one stat, so it subtracts score when you miss and the challenge becomes maintaining a high score

Can you provide a .pdx.zip? The playdate sideloader doesn’t accept rar files

If you add a bundleID to your pdxinfo file, it makes it possible to sideload wirelessly. Docs

For those of us developers whose social media accounts are on the Fediverse (Mastodon, etc) it’s important to be able to set up a reciprocal link to those accounts using the rel="me" HTML attribute. This allows Mastodon to verify our ownership of the URL. From Mastodon’s documentation:

You can verify yourself as the owner of the links in your profile metadata. For that, the linked website must contain a link back to your Mastodon profile. The link back must have a rel=“me” attribute.

Since itch.io only allows Twitter handles in our profile settings, I tried using the HTML view of the profile editor to manually add a link to my Mastodon account with that attribute, but it appears to be stripped off when I view my profile page. This means that a link from my Mastodon profile to my itch page won’t show up as verified on Mastodon.

Ideally, itch would allow us to link to any social media account and not just Twitter, and automatically add the rel="me" attribute. Barring that, itch should stop stripping the attribute from links in our pages’ HTML.