Bug fixes

• Launch: Fixed a crash when the crank moved during initial game launch

Bug fixes

• Delivery editor: Fixed a graphical bug where an area's trait stuck around when switching to River
• Title: Fixed a bug where the 'daily delivery' button wouldn't reset at midnight

Interface tweaks

• Cards: Updated cards with Enduring to display their actual time stat instead of an infinity sign
• Collection: Added auxiliary cards to the collection next to their primary card
• Collection: Added auxiliary traits to the rules when necessary (eg: Stampede will now display Charge as well)
• History: Added new music
• Play: Added a slight offset to the card slide in animations
• Play: Added auxiliary traits to the rules when necessary (eg: Stampede will now display Charge as well)
• Play: Improved screen offsets when viewing the rules for played critter cards
• Preview: Updated the play time display to truncate seconds for puzzles with more than one hour played

Bug fixes

• Collection: Fixed a bug when clearing text while using the rename cheat code
• Gameplay: Fixed a bug where some trait descriptions would overflow when viewing rules (eg: Adaptable)
• History: Fixed a bug when there were no puzzles available in the current grouping
• Results: Fixed a bug where the hint unlocking sound effect wouldn't stop correctly

Interface tweaks

• History: Adjusted grouping and sorting labels

This is the third post in a dev log about Spilled Mushrooms, a turn-based card solitaire puzzle game available exclusively for Playdate.

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As noted in the previous post about inspirations and design philosophies, I wanted Spilled Mushrooms to guarantee every puzzle is solvable. During the initial prototyping phase, many puzzles were simply unsolvable, which led to a lot of frustration. If I struggled to solve a puzzle, there was no way to know if it was because I was missing some key strategy, or if the puzzle just sucked.

This is the second post in a dev log about Spilled Mushrooms, a turn-based card solitaire puzzle game available exclusively for Playdate.

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Story

When I started developing the prototype, the theme I had was that you were controlling an army of ants to conquer various regions by building anthills. However, this presented more of a score chasing play style than I wanted, and not even a very good one at that. Because it was only 7 turns, perfect scores were compressed - almost always right around a 30. It also wasn't ever immediately obvious that you could have done better at a particular deal, so you never felt the need to retry for a higher score, and consequently never felt the sense of accomplishment for playing the deal better. By swapping the theme to destroying anthills instead, every deal became a proper challenge: can you destroy all of these anthills in just 7 turns?

This is the first post in a dev log about Spilled Mushrooms, a turn-based card solitaire puzzle game available exclusively for Playdate.

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Principles

Every game starts with a concept. To find mine, I laid down some design principles that emphasize my favorite part of the Playdate: its extreme portability. In my opinion, games excel at hyper portability when they have:

• Little to no narrative: lots of narrative means lots of important details that can be missed when playing in busy environments
• Highly interruptible: games that require remembering a lot of context or that have real-time actions can also be difficult to focus on in busy environments
• Quick play sessions: longer sessions are more difficult to weave into the small idle spots of daily life

It's important to note that these principles are't essential to have in Playdate games! These are just the principles I wanted to develop with. Many Playdate games are heavily narrative-driven or feature longer gameplay loops.