Welcome, Playdate aficionados! Come in, Elena Temple fans!

What started out as an afternoon distraction from my more complex games in development has now turned into The Fall of Elena Temple. I wanted to make a game for Playdate ever since I saw its reveal, but dedicating too much time on its development would be quite a bad business decision, as the install base is pretty small and chances to recoup the invested money would be nil. But with their tiny new engine, Pulp, making a cute little game is a much more feasible approach, so I decided to give it a try, just for the fun of it.

After an afternoon, I already had a small prototype. At around noon the next day I had the fully functional prototype with the undo mechanic, plus a neat name for the game - The Fall of Elena Temple - because the gameplay revolves around her falling and using the crank to restore her back - clever, right? Right? Well, a friend said it's clever, so I'll settle for that.

With this small prototype, I decided to spend a full week to see how far I can get it. I paused my other projects for this small vacation and I started working, adding mechanics, art, sounds, menus etc. Once I had three levels, I showed it to a few friends and they were delighted by its gameplay and visual style. So I continued to work some more until I had five final levels, all the game flow and everything included as polished as possible. I even reworked all the input code to have more control over collecting and interacting with items, as opposed to letting Pulp handle these things (autoAct = 0, for connoisseurs).

Here's a big list of what v0.2 includes:

• first 5 rooms
• basic mechanics: moving, jumping, collecting coins, falling, restart on taking damage, finishing a room and going to the next one
• restore system: rotate the crank to go back to the last place you've fallen from, but only if you have collected the undo crystal
• mechanics: gate blocking the exit until you get all coins, magical gateways with one destination, magical gateways that cycle through a list of destinations, spikes
• thought bubbles: interact to hear Elena's thoughts and to learn about various game aspects
• sounds for all interactions
• various room decorations: grass, mushrooms, roots, vines
• HUD tracking picked up items, undo slots and collected coins out of the total for the room
• pause menu: resume, restart, toggle music, exit
• main menu with room selection and toggling music; completed or locked rooms are marked accordingly
• game card and list icon
• basic tune - temporary, will update it with something catchier

Next step was to prepare some marketing assets with lots of Playdate yellow and two shades of gray - what a lovely color scheme! Updated my website with a page for the game. And prepared everything for an Early Access release. Looking back to the similar release for The Adventures of Elena Temple here on itch, I missed that feeling of making something small, releasing new versions quickly and talking about your progress with any audience that might listen. I made games of all sizes these past years, but I don't think I ever felt as indie as I did back then. That's why The Fall of Elena Temple is also launching in Early Access.

New versions should hopefully come weekly, until I have the final build with at least 20 rooms. Depending on the game's reception I'll include more rooms at launch or as post-launch updates. We'll see how it goes. For now this is a hobby project and I'm expecting to make little to no money from it. But, man, I haven't had this much fun working on a game in a while. Big games are great and all, but spending two years or more on one, it can at times take all the joy out of it. Making something tiny every once in a while is magical.

I hope you give my new little game a chance. I'm pretty sure it'll charm you!