Lockspinner

Lockspinner is an experimental sound-based game in which you need to tilt and rotate your Playdate to unlock the level. It was designed to be a more meditative experience to be played with your body and your ears, rather than yet another screen-based distraction. 

The inspiration came from a lockpicking tent at the HAL2001 conference in the Netherlands over 20 years ago. I thought it would be cool to try out using the accelerometer in Pulp, and this seemed like a good way to avoid any complicated tile-based code for a while :)

How to Play

The game has 3 levels currently, with an increasingly difficult set of moves to make, and more accuracy needed with each level.

• Level 1: Tilt the Playdate to the right angle. If you hear one note repeating, then one of the three axis is correct. Once you have two notes, press B to complete the level.

• Level 2: Tilt the Playdate to the right angle, but also set the crank to right position. Once you have three notes, press B to complete the level.

• Level 3: Tilt the Playdate and set the crank as above, but when you press B you will hear a different sound if successful. You then need to keep the Playdate in position while turning the crank at the correct speed, indicated by a series of increasingly quicker notes. A successful unlock will happen automatically, but if you jog the Playdate out of position when cranking, you'll need to start again.

The positions needed are set randomly each game. While the game is in testing, you can also press A during a game to choose a new random position.

You can also make the game less sensitive using the Options menu. Bear in mind that increasing the sensitivity will make it hard NOT to instantly beat level 1, which is already fairly generous!

What next, and how to help

Currently I'm not planning to make any major changes to the project beyond bugfixes and quality-of-life improvements. It's a bit of a demo for what the Playdate and Pulp can do.

If there's reasonable interest then I'd like to do a few things with it:

1. See if the audio feedback can be improved or overhauled to make a sound-based game "feel" better.
2. Tie in either some kind of narrative element, and/or unlockable tunes.

Accessibility

This game is suitable for everyone.

The game uses the tilt controls and the crank. Some levels require fairly precise tilt and crank positioning, or simultaneous and consistent use of the crank for a few seconds. This can be adjusted using an in-game Sensitivity option.

Headphones are suggested but not required. The game uses regularly occurring sound to indicate success, which may irritate people nearby (p.s. hi family!)

Source code

The source is available for download as a separate file - you can import this JSON into a new Pulp game - see the script in the main "game" file for more information.

Lockspinner © 2024 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Adaptations and remixes are welcome, but must be released under the same licence. Commercial re-use is not permitted - any adaptations must be made available for free. (Requesting donations is fine.)