Omaze

gamedeveloper.com:

Game: OmazeDeveloper: Gregory KogosRelease Date: 16/05/2022Platforms: PlaydateNumber of Developers: 1

My background is creating alt.ctrl custom hardware games. The most successful one is RotoRing -- a circular puzzle platformer played on two LED Rings with a rotating knob and a button that runs on Arduino. 

To help provide a better understanding of the following article, here’s the video of RotoRing gameplay [below].

Since its creation in 2017, every time I saw a product with a physical spinning input (Microsoft Surface Dial, Logitech Craft keyboard or even Nintendo Labo) I reached out to make a "port" of RotoRing for it. Unfortunately, I had no takers. Still, when I saw the Playdate's crank I did the same, but this time I was lucky that Nick Suttner -- who was helping Panic with finding devs -- had already played RotoRing at a festival in Busan and was very enthusiastic about it.

My initial pitch was "port RotoRing to Playdate”. But as the development went on, the actual process was more like “remix RotoRing ideas for Playdate and see how it goes!"

The first trial was placing two rings in the center of the screen simulating original RotoRing. That didn’t work well. I quickly realised that I had four colors to use on RotoRing to indicate the player, enemy, exit and background. On Playdate there are only two colors, and while I could’ve got away with dithering and geometric shapes it simply didn’t look good. 

The inner circle was also too small and crammed, and then I had all this unused space on the sides of the screen just sitting there. So, I decided to get rid of one orbit and instead make players switch between the inner and outer sides of the big circle. Eventually this layout morphed into the game's boss levels.

However