When I released Shift for the Playdate nearly a year ago, it was mostly an excuse to learn Lua, experiment with the the Playdate SDK and write a little game for this new, goofy device I'd just gotten in the mail a month prior. I figured I'd write it, put it up on Itch (which I'd never even heard of prior) maybe sell a copy or two and move on to other things.

Fast forward a year, and that little game was nominated for Best Puzzle Game by all of you, was in the first Playdate Community Bundle and has made hundreds and hundreds of folks with a Playdate shake their device hoping for one more go. It also roped me into writing a lot more games for this device than I'd thought I would, introduced me to a lot of really fantastic people, and got me involved in what is easily the best gaming community around.

I've learned a lot since Shift's original release, and decided that its launch on Catalog should reflect that. This update has all of the same features that the Catalog version does, with the exception of global leader boards.

What’s New

• Completely redesigned the UI with a sci-fi theme.
• Replaced the triangle row/column indicator with a little droid pal named SAM-Y
  • Additional sound effects just for SAM-Y
  • SAM-Y has numerous facial expressions to react to whats happening in the game
    • Happy, Sad, Confused, Annoyed, Anxious, Surprised, etc

• Added four player profiles, each with their own high scores and saves.
• Top 10 best local scores across player profiles are displayed in the pause view.
• Adds music+sounds, just sounds, and no sounds at all to the system menu.
• In-game “how to play”
• Removes “restart game” from system menu since you can now return to main and restart from there.
• Added ambient background music.
• Vibration effect for the grid when you color shift
• Energy wind-up sound for a color shift
• Sound effect for a color shift cancel.
• You can now return to the main menu, which you could not do in 1.x since there was no reason to.
• New logo
• Updated transitions between game scenes.
• Adds a welcome banner when switching profiles
• New “indicator moved” sound effect
• New home card.
• New launch animation.
• New wrapping paper.
• Removed “crank to color shift” as it never worked that well to begin with.
• Static and animated icons for list view in Playdate OS 2.0

As an added bonus, I've also just released Personal SAM-Y, a silly, free toy for the Playdate featuring the droid,  available now on Itch.

Thank you all so much for playing my games! I hope you enjoy this new version!