Zipper

gamedeveloper.com:

Back in 2015, Bennett Foddy of Getting Over It and QWOP fame was asked by Playdate maker Panic to create a game for the radiant crank-laden handheld. When I caught up with him last year for this Q&A I knew almost nothing about the project other than it's name: Zipper.

After going hands-on with the tactical, turn-based puzzler in recent weeks, however, I feel comfortable saying that Zipper is one of Playdate's most compelling Season One titles -- a punishingly brutal fable that sets players on a path of revenge as they take on the role of a swift swordsman delivering vengeance upon a castle full of enemies.

The project is based on 8-bit isometric classics from the ZX Spectrum and MSX era, and according to Foddy is actually the culmination of an old Flash prototype he made back in 2007 when, by his own admission, he was "a total novice of game design."

To learn how the New York-based developer pulled that prototype into Playdate era, we caught up with the man himself.

Game Developer: Panic said that one of the most exciting things about Playdate is that it actually gives creators some constraints -- providing a different kind of challenge to more conventional development. With that in mind, what excited you about the hardware from a technical point of view?

Bennett Foddy: When Cabel pitched me on the device, in early 2015, the hardware was still more of a giddily-described set of ideas or aesthetics rather than something that was locked down. I think at that point in history I was still captivated by the idea of working with the semiotics of retro aesthetics. As Jesper Juul describes in his book, I think a lot of indie designers were using historical visual styles to signify a 'handcrafted', artisanal style in their designs,