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Shaun Inman

@shauninman

The first wave of Playdates received Ratcheteer this morning so I thought I'd write something to mark the occasion. This thread contains light spoilers (item names and the presence of a certain secret). https://play.date/games/ratcheteer/

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Shaun Inman

@shauninman

I was sold on Playdate the instant Panic showed it to me. Mobile gaming's race to the bottom, the resulting rise of microtransactions, the vastness of Steam, and the relative difficulty of publishing on a major console had me losing interest in game development.

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Shaun Inman

@shauninman

No prospect seemed especially promising. Touch or motion controls? Microtransactions? Gatekeepers? Pass, pass, pass, and pass.

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Shaun Inman

@shauninman

I was immediately drawn to Playdate with its physical controls and timed release of a season of games. A high contrast black and white screen, two buttons and a d-pad—and a crank!? Reasonable constraints, reliable input, and novelty, that's literally a recipe for engaging games.

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Shaun Inman

@shauninman

Like most things I see through to the end I can't really pinpoint the genesis of the idea. I have this cryptic note from January 12, 2015: "The Ratcheteer idea evolved from the Crank Bots idea I had over the weekend." So I guess it was always going to be Ratcheteer.

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Shaun Inman

@shauninman

By the 20th the protagonist was walking and swinging the Wrench Sword. Two days later jumping and gliding. The next day the oppressive darkness that permeates the first half of the game and the lantern that pushes it back.

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Shaun Inman

@shauninman

Two more days and they were blocking with the Drill Shield. Another day later dashing off in the Roll Armor. All the core abilities (minus the final one) were done by the end of January 2015.

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Shaun Inman

@shauninman

Things moved quickly from there. Room transitions, text boxes, tilesets, threats, and bosses. Levels were designed in Tiled with a web-based preprocessor to make the resulting files a little more digestible to my game engine.

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Shaun Inman

@shauninman

In April 2015 I emailed @8bitmatt about music and sound effects for the game. In March of the following year I emailed @sproutsnout about illustrations for the ending. I think Matt and Charlie both knocked it out of the park. As usual.

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Shaun Inman

@shauninman

By the end of January 2016 the entire map was done. The ending was programmed by April 2016. The final final edits to the map landed in October of 2016. Yes, I've been sitting on this game for a while.

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Shaun Inman

@shauninman

But that's only half (a third of?) the story. The game was doing too much and the framerate was becoming an issue. By the end of March 2015 I was already casually reading up on object oriented programming in C. Just in case...

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Shaun Inman

@shauninman

I optimized as much as I could as I went but it was a losing battle given the scope of the game. In October of 2017 I began the 3 month process of porting the already complete Lua version of Ratcheteer to C. Or rather Cross.

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Shaun Inman

@shauninman

Wait, what's Cross? Well, C and I didn't get along. OOP in C is convoluted at best and I couldn't abide the redundency of separate header and source files. So I created a superset of C called Cross that precompiles to standard C and addresses my biggest issues with the language.

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Shaun Inman

@shauninman

The final third of the story is the hidden developer room (and the kids we made along the way). When I first created that room I pixeled Lincoln as a bundled up baby. A couple years later I repixeled him as a toddler. A year after that I repurposed his baby sprite for Sydney.

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