Lucas Pope

Lovers of the 1-bit "dither-punk" aesthetic must give "Obra Dinn" a play. Lucas Pope's dev diary on TIG forums is an epic, legendary document describing the painstaking process of recreating the mood of classic MacOS gameplay ;) http://dukope.com/

Further, Lucas Pope recently released the game for mobile OSes, and did an awesome job porting it over. There's a great blog post at his devblog where he talks about the challenges of taking a game originally developed for mouse/keyboard (mostly mouse) and making it work in the mobile form factor. Edit: this one: https://dukope.com/devlogs/papers-please/mobile/

https://jvns.ca/blog/2022/03/08/tiny-programs/ - makes you fired up to do some projects https://x.st/visual-sum-of-cubes/ - nice visualizations https://dukope.com/devlogs/papers-please/mobile/ - amazing presentation of porting desktop game to phone

I had never heard of playdate, and frankly was unlikely to buy one even after I had heard of it, except ... Lucas Pope [1] of "Return of the Obra Dinn" and "Papers, Please" fame is doing his next game, "Mars After Midnight" for it [2]. [actually, browsing his website is how I even heard about the playdate] The day that both Mars after Midnight, and the playdate itself, are actually out, I shall purchase both. [1] https://dukope.com/ [2] https://dukope.itch.io/mars-after-midnight/devlog/261758/mars-after-mi…

A little OT, but I find the Ludum Dare challenge to be just...awesome. I first heard about it when viewing Lucas Pope's homepage (the creator of Papers, Please), and seeing the astonishing work he made in 48 hours (here: http://dukope.com/play.php?g=six as well as this game, which he did for practice but which I think is the best game ever made about newspapers: http://dukope.com/play.php?g=trt). During some idle time today I started reading the Haxe docs...I got into programming because I wanted to make video games and haven't done any game code since college because the games industry didn't seem fun to work in. But seeing the kind of inspired one-offs at Ludum (as well as Pope's Papers, Please) has really sparked an interest in me to create something memorable that is not a web app.

Those afraid of jumping into $10 might want to try the beta/demo on the game creator's website: http://dukope.com/

Good for you. I was about to buy it despite preferring Linux, but seeing all these comments on HN convinced me to save my money for when the developer releases a native version. The developer's website [1] says that it uses OpenFL [2], which advertises itself as "an exciting cross-platform framework that targets Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Flash and HTML5." So why no native Linux version then? [1] http://dukope.com/ [2] http://www.openfl.org/

The guy who wrote Papers, Please, Lucas Pope, has been doing some very creative games-as-political-statements stuff for some time now. He may be the most creative person working along those lines today. For another example, check out his earlier game, The Republia Times: http://dukope.com/play.php?g=trt (It's free and plays in the browser, no download required) The storyline there: you're the editor of a newspaper in a totalitarian state. Each day you see the unfiltered newswire, and you have to pick and choose which stories to feature and where to feature them on the paper's front page in order to maximize public support for the regime. It's a delicate dance; completely ignore events that make the regime look bad and you'll lose credibility and readers, but give them too much prominence and you'll drive public support down rather than up. Oh, and just to make sure your incentives are aligned properly, the regime is holding your family hostage. Fail to get people in line quickly enough and they will all be shot. Like Papers, Please, it's really a brilliant way to take some pretty simple game mechanics and use them to make a point that sticks in the player's memory.

To add to this, the creator also used Haxe to port to Unity: https://dukope.com/devlogs/papers-please/mobile/

( https://dukope.com/devlogs/ doesn't appear to have a feed URL? )

six degrees of sabotage (http://dukope.com/play.php?g=six), made for a gaming hackathon, feels a bit like what this would be.

This looks really awesome. Also, you should check out Republia Times, one of the author's other games - you're the editor of the major newspaper in some country, and the pieces you put on the front page determine the mood of the people etc. It's a really cool game : http://dukope.com/play.php?g=trt

> Papers, Please was originally written in Haxe/OpenFL, a combo of modern ECMA-ish language, Flash-alike API, and multi-platform build system. [...] > When I finally committed to this port my first decision was to rewrite the game in C#/Unity. After Obra Dinn I’m a solid fan of Unity – the editor, the entity/component design, the build system, the ubiquity, just about everything. > I made it a few days into rewriting before finding that although I like C#, I like Haxe more. [...] Still it’s hard to overstate how appropriate Unity is for someone in my position: a solo developer targeting multiple platforms and desperate for a popular, proven, and well-supported engine and build system. > Fortunately, Haxe is a transpiled language, meaning that you write in one language (Haxe) and it gets converted to another language (Javascript, PHP, Python, C++, C#, Lua, etc) before being compiled/interpreted for whatever target you’ve got. So it’s possible to write code in Haxe and have it transpiled to C# that can be loaded and compiled in Unity. Which is how I decided to roll this. From "Cramming 'Papers, Please' Onto Phones" (last year). Original post: <https://dukope.com/devlogs/papers-please/mobile/> HN comments: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32371423>

The iPad store didn't break away from the iOS store until 2019. The original app store came out in 2008, eleven years earlier. While you have as certain point, the division is meant to highlight apps which treat the iPad as a mini laptop, with a keyboard and pencil, vs just a bigger phone. If you've ever coded a website to resize, that's child's play. to actually get an app working properly across both sizes, you've got to put in significant work for each. For developers that don't want to put in that work *, listing in one or the other is fine, and possible Uber the current regieme. * the developer for papers please's blog about the mobile port is indicative of the work that goes into supporting other screen sizes. Asking developers to have infinite time and motivation is just not realistic. also note that it took a few years for the mobile port to be released. https://dukope.com/devlogs/papers-please/mobile/