After a year of development, One-Armed Space Bandit, a slot machine game for the Playdate has been released!

When many people see the crank on the Playdate, they have thoughts of a fishing game (which, oddly enough, there have not been many such games for this platform).  However, I saw the handle on a slot machine.

I grew up on a steady diet of Sierra On-Line's adventure games.  A number of the 80s games included some sort of gambling sequence, and one of the most nefarious sequences was the Slots-o-Death at the Oasis Bar from Space Quest 1.  Following the sage advice from other game developers, I wanted to start small.  This seemed like the ideal starter project to learn how to develop for this curious, yellow device.  

But even before I started development on this game, I spent time on developing a 1-bit graphics plug-in to assist in creating graphics and a Sierra-like font for the game.  So, even a "small" game isn't necessarily so  easy, as a fair amount of initial work needs to be constructed for this new gaming platform.

The general gameplay closely matches what was in Space Quest 1, except there is a Difficulty option.  The Hard mode is the same challenge as playing the game in Space Quest 1, which is fiendishly difficult without save scumming.  Not impossible, but the odds are against the player.  The Easy and Medium difficulties make the game far more feasible, yet still challenging, especially when it comes to hitting the unlucky 3 Skulls.

The Credits screen was quite a bit of fun as it is a nod to my favorite About screen in any application, the one from the old Mac program Disinfectant 2.7.

Time to get cranking and earn those Buckazoids!