I effused in my Colossal Cave post about my love of Sierra On-Line and my childhood dream to work for the company and to make awesome adventure games. That ship sailed off before I ever had a chance to get on board, but it didn't mean that I couldn't go on a similar trip later in life (just avoid those three hour tours, though).
Introducing One-Armed Space Bandit for the Playdate, a recreation of the nefarious gambling sequence from Space Quest 1. When people first see the crank on the Playdate, they often think of a fishing reel, but I thought of the handle to a slot machine. The crank is exactly the type of thing which gives the Playdate its unique bit of whimsy, to stand out from the crowd of other game consoles.
This is my first game for the Playdate. Following the sage advice of other game developers, I started with a small project — which still took roughly a year to complete. Even before I started the game development in earnest, I had created a font and a dithering graphics plug-in, both which were instrumental in my design and construction of this game. This project was a lot of fun to work on by mixing my love of Sierra games, Monty Python, and 1-bit graphics.
The game can be downloaded for free from my itch.io page and then side loaded onto your Playdate. But if you don't have a Playdate, it is still possible to play the game by downloading the Playdate SDK for your computer and then playing the game in the Playdate Simulator.
Get cranking and earn those Buckazoids!