‘The Dark Souls of Invisible Platformers’
With Off-Planet Dreams launch on Playdate Catalog, in many ways, the release of this game is a Full-Circle moment for me. OPD expresses an idea I’ve carried for seven years and brings closure to a little piece of my heart that had been lost.
Fantastic Arcade 2017
Indie games have long been my passion. I delight in seeing the creativity that a small team or single creator can push forward. That’s why I love the Playdate community so much! But before there was Playdate, there was Fantastic Arcade. FA was an annual showcase of some of the most singular titles I’ve ever come across. This is the first place I was able to go hands-on with Obra Dinn, Wheels of Aurelia, Donut County, Untitled Goose Game, Mountain – so many. It’s funny then that a boutique, arcade-style machine stuck with me far beyond all the other incredible titles I’ve experienced there.
A concept that sticks with you
How do you bring something different to the Platformer space? Mario has done it all it seems, and where Nintendo has not gone, there are SEGA and a multitude of indie studios over the last dozens of years iterating in the genre. So many game verbs distill down to jumping or shooting or some mix of both. UP was different.
First, in presentation, UP was a bespoke arcade machine. It was a single joystick wired to a wood-housed, vertical LED panel. Little more than an LED strip, in fact – it was vintage hardware programmed to do something new. The display showed a red dot, your character. The machine described a single vertical slice of a platformer level and your character, limited by the display, could only jump vertically. The trick was that as you played UP, the level came into focus around you, in your mind’s eye. Learning a level that literally could-not-be-seen was revelatory and stuck with me for years.
And in those years, I lost track of the game. So it was that I went about my life with the kernel of that gameplay idea smoldering and waiting to light even as the remembrance of its maker faded.
Here’s a left turn
I’ve lost pets over my lifetime as have, I’m sure, many of you. It’s always been my feeling that while they’ve left our lives, they’re never truly gone. In my teens, my dog Calpurnia got loose and was hit. That was hard. She was My Dog and we had bonded over many lonely country summers. And yet, a year after she passed – possibly to the day – I was in Austin and a black lab her exact size and build came running up to me in front of my mother’s house. We visited for a few precious moments and then it went on its way. That stayed with me but also let me move on.
More recently, we lost Dooglas. If you’ve played ART7, you may have seen a very ‘Dapper Doog’ portrait. In my Panels comic, A Ghost in the Gallery, you are searching for a ghost dog. I’ve been in one way or another, trying to deal with his death for a while now. Some things just stick with you.
Dreaming
And that’s where we come back to games. Games – as all art – can be a powerful form of expression. We are writing and making and building worlds to be played and enjoyed by others. In the end, what we are really doing is communicating. When something is stuck in you, it doesn’t start to move until you move it. Tears are effective, but that which drives tears, just as readily drives creation.
I pictured a kid, a dreamer, sitting in a tree house looking up at the stars. To me, that kid is waiting. There’s something lonely but also otherworldly in those dreams.
I pictured a blob. A blob that moved up and down, in the most basic of verbs for a game. The world moved around that blob, as the world moves around that kid. What would it take for their worlds to meet? How do they come together? I needed one final piece.
The importance of sharing
I found inspiration in Fantastic Arcade, and I am constantly finding inspiration in the Playdate community. More than that even, there is a spectacular climate of sharing – code, techniques, ideas, example projects. Enter @Nicknack
Nick posted an example project file in the #pulp channel of the Playdate Squad discord. It showed how a smooth-movement platformer could be achieved within the top-down, tile-based framework of Pulp. To be clear, this is not an easy thing to do. It is not what Pulp was built for.
Nick’s demo however, could be loaded in and studied and was exactly the boost I needed to dig into the concept behind UP. As this was fomenting inside of me, that kid kept surfacing as well. I wanted to bring purpose to the platformer, and I wanted to bring the kid and the blob together.
OPD began its life as 1-1(bit) which is a reference to Mario level 1-1 and the 1-bit nature of the Playdate. It morphed over the course of development as the ‘story’ took hold. Where Off-Planet Dreams might have originally been a sidekick adventure game or somesuch, at some point it became the reason I had to push forward on 1-1(bit). The two concepts merged into what we have today. I won’t spoil Off-Planet Dreams, but I really hope you give it a play through and manage to Wake Up.
Playing it forward
So here, we have the iteration of Nick’s demo, the evolution of UP’s gameplay and the story of the Blob and the Kid. I’m sure in many of you readers, there are disparate motivations that you will one day put together. I will tell you that when I finally played through my own game, I wept. And for Dooglas, I think I can finally move on.
We may stand on the shoulders of giants, but really I think we just inspire and share and communicate and iterate. Sometimes the giants are our peers. If we are putting things together and putting those things out there, then maybe we will be the giant for someone else.
Oh and yeah, I lost the thread on UP years ago, but after a little detective work, I found the creator. It was my distinct pleasure to reach out to him and tell him the story of a game that could only exist because he made something truly different.
Ledbetter Games on Playdate Catalog
Credits
Ledbetter Games – Dylan Warren
Art – Robyn Heffler
Music – Eva Boyd, Kevin Flatt
Inspired by UP!
Developed off a shared example project from Nicknack
+Dreams+ content from the Games Y’all Community and Dev Friends
- Chelsea McGovern, Tarvaris Baker, Coby West, Daniella Covarrubias, Henry R., William Reeman, Alan Lauer, Thomas G., Brett, Abby
- Additional levels by Kyle Saldana and William Monroe
Testing/Feedback by James Gameboy, orkn, Toad, Nnnn, Ron Lent, Adams Immersive, Fatnose Games, Scenic Route Software, Niah_Naiad, Xania Lasagna, rae, Kodiak Games, Mark LaCroix, Kyle Saldana