I just finished a vertical slice of the game and it looks like this:

1. Work the door to admit martians matching some criteria.
2. Everyone makes a huge mess of the FREE refreshments, which you have to clean up.
3. Repeat 1 & 2 a bunch of times until you have enough martians.
4. Choose the next day’s event, where to promote it, and which refreshments to serve.
5. Repeat from 1.

Everything here is alpha level at best, which means I expect some or all of it to change before final. Still, there was a sale on gifs so let’s not waste the opportunity.

There’s a knock on the door. Flip the crank up to lift the window and have a look. Press the A button to open the whole door and admit the entrant or close the window to reject them.

 Hello

Panning around with the D-PAD reveals more of the face, and some satisfying parallax.

 Parallaxation

I experimented with using the Playdate’s accelerometer to control looking around but,

1. The accelerometer is oriented for holding the device flat on its back. You’re looking through a vertical window here so the metaphor doesn’t hold. There’s a missing axis that precludes vertically-oriented readings.
2. The screen, while beautiful, is fairly sensitive to viewing angle when it comes to illumination. Tilting it around means the brightness is constantly shifting. It’s not a typical viewing angle problem, more of a frontlighting-is-best-from-this-one-angle thing.
3. I prefer the explicit control of a D-PAD over wobbly gyro controls.

The 3D effect on the window panel is done by pre-scaling the 2D texture in wide strips and drawing the right ones based on some perspective 1/z calculations. Rough but good enough.

 Texture strips on the window panel

This window action was my original wafer-thin concept for using the Playdate’s crank in a novel way. I threw together the game code and procedural martian generation pretty quickly almost two years (!) ago. Flipping the window open and seeing some random martian is fun. Sometimes even funny. Job done on this part.

Unfortunately the wafer was too thin here. One of those “great where’s the rest” concepts that I didn’t feel the true shallowness of until it was implemented. Working the door at night on Mars is a cool idea but for what? A bar? Gym? Casino? Store? Hairdresser? And once they’re inside, then what? Something cool? Nothing? Maybe more happens at the window? Can you shoot things? I rarely do combat so probably not. The martian faces are procedurally generated, if there’s more gaming beyond the window, how far beyond the face do I need to go? Not far please.

Anyways, some potential but still a lot missing. As part of my strategy to just keep trucking on random shit until an idea comes to me, I put together an exterior scene of the bar/gym/restaurant/whatever.

 Exterior, just before midnight

To inform the player of their current bouncer rules, I made a big sign and filled it with text.

 Big sign, top

“Cyclops Anger Management” sounded good and that was enough to establish that this would be screening for community support sessions — therapy in this case. I figured there were a lot of ways to make visually interesting criteria to match different kinds of help sessions. Ok, so it’s not a bar or a casino, it’s a community support center.

 Big sign, bottom

At the bottom of the sign, I added “Refreshments Provided” to really pack the place. Who can resist free refreshments? This phrase somehow unfurled in my mind and grew to define the game’s core mechanic. What if refreshments are actually provided? What would an angry cyclops on Mars eat, and how?

 Martians eat like this

Martians are slobs and they love their dune bug pie. You let ’em in, they see your nicely prepared spread of delicious refreshments, and they desecrate it. If the food suits them, they’ll toss you a few credits.

 Thanks I guess

Each visitor expects a spotless table, so you’ll need to clean it up afterwards to prepare for the next one.

To clean the table, the game uses a relatively simple stack manipulation mechanic with the slight novelty that you can lift two stacks at once but the left and right hands/tentacles move together. The D-PAD adjusts the position, the B button lifts/drops with the left tentacle, and the A button lifts/drops with the right tentacle. These controls take some getting used to.

 Cleaning up the stacks a bit

There are a few basic stacking rules like plates must be aligned, and n