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).

Something I mention is saving screenshots of each map at varying stages of completion as I worked. I put together a simple site where you can playback or step through that process for each map (spoilers, obviously):

A while back @8bitmatt and I had a nice chat with @antichrista about creating the Season One Playdate game Ratcheteer.

Anyway, I hope you'll check out Word Trip. See you on the scoreboards!.

. so you're never served an unsolvable pair (you can still drive yourself into a dead end though so keep your eyes on the road). This step took almost half an hour on the Intel, it takes 10 seconds on the M1.

One nerdy bit of trivia. Word Trip development started on my old Intel 2013 MacBook Pro and finished on an M1 2021 MacBook Pro. Part of the build process is generating a solved.bin which maps every possible path between every word in the dictionary to the rest. .

Word Trip randomly generates new word pairs but sometimes serendipity strikes. and other times it looks like it might be even more tired of Twitter than I am. Let me know if you come across any interesting pairings.

The goal is to travel from one four-letter word to another by creating new words using one letter from the destination and three from your current word. How far can you go before running out of gas?.

Word Trip is a light-action word-building game meant to recall the urgent menu-ing of the ATB-based, Final Fantasies. But don't let that scare you off, there are three levels of difficulty plus a stress-free free-play mode and online scoreboards.

If I still used Twitter I'd probably tell you all about the new game I have out in Catalog, @Playdate's new on-device store. It's a word game—I'm just as surprised as you, you can barely even see the individual pixels!—called Word Trip:

I'll be updating this as questions pop up here and elsewhere so feel free to ask away. (Bosses can be a common chokepoint so I'll be starting there, I've already added hints for the first two.).

I hate getting stuck in a game but also don't like having a solution handed to me. For Ratcheteer I created a simple, spoiler-free hint page to help guide you towards discovering your own answers if you ever get stuck:

Tet oui ghuf dryd dra Astral myhkiyka eh Ratcheteer fyc ehcbenat po Al Bhed vnus Final Fantasy X?.

It's pretty neat that every Monday a new wave of players get to experience Ratcheteer. Was this your week? I wrote a bit about it on the first week. I have some more spoiler-y production stuff to share too. Just trying to figure out the right time for it.

(cues up A New Beginning) I hope you'll give it a listen and show @8bitmatt your support. And in case you missed it I also wrote a bit about Ratcheteer's production yesterday:

And a special Ratcheteer Deluxe Sound Version is available on Bandcamp:

Ratcheteer Original Sound Version is available on all major streaming platforms

The one regret I have about the soundtrack is that I had to compress it so much to fit under the 100MB download limit. Fortunately @8bitmatt mixed and mastered every track in glorious stereo for the soundtrack releases. Yes, releases plural!.

The variations of Master's Hands and the Astral theme offer a quiet and playful contrast to the various adventurous region themes, the driving energy of the dungeon theme Oubliette, and the mystery and dread of Crater.

And I think Ratcheteer has some amazing music. The main theme Odyssey is a perfect, triumphant call to adventure. It's the first thing you hear on launch and when you set out from Mechanic town for the first time and later for the last time.

I think the closest a dev can get to experiencing their own game as a first time player might is that moment, after months of toiling on mechanics and the mundane glue that holds it all together, they launch the game and are greeted by its title screen music.