Gimme Friction Baby for Playdate Now Available!

Welcome all!

After nearly a month of work I've published my first game for the PlayDate console here on Itch! It's a tribute to Gimme Friction Baby, a 2007 casual flash game by Wouter Visser.  This is not the first game I created for the PlayDate, so I decided instead of just writing it from scratch that I would attempt to port it from the original ActionScript for Shockwave Flash to Lua for the Playdate SDK.  And somehow it actually worked!

The game itself feels quite true to the original.  Due to limitations on the device there are a few small cosmetic changes, notably the numbers on the balls are randomly rotated +/- 15 degrees but it turns out arbitrary sprite rotation is expensive on the Playdate device and ugly on the 1bit display, so we simplify! There have been many Gimme Friction Baby clones over the years, notably Orbital for iOS, but they all had a very distinctive feel -- while fun, they were very much NOT the original.  With this game, we are using the original equations to determine the physics/friction and it feels great!

For those who have never played this game you're in for a treat.  It's a very simple premise, simple enough that no instructions are included.  I've literally handed it to a five year old who had it down in less than 2minutes.  In addition to the traditional automatic rotation of the shooter angle (Pure mode) if you pop out the playdate crank to use it as a precision aimer.  If you'd like to experience the original it's available on Internet Archive for playback in-browser.  

In the end I've created a very compact game at a svelte 1.7MB. Notably since 1.65MB of that is sound! A sound-free "lite" version weighs in at a mere 37KB! Because this was a port and not an original creation I've also published the source code on github.  The original was a dozen functions, a dozen global variables and a few images. The port is largely similar, but because it's a port of something messy, it's not necessarily the easiest code to read.  But it's there in case you wanna mess around.  Pull requests welcome!