Halfway to Dawn (Playdate)
A downloadable game
Halfway to Dawn is a short (but challenging!) cinematic horror-themed game for the Playdate.
The game follows the protagonist's struggle to survive a night in a dystopian world, where only a few humans remain after a mysterious monster invasion.
During the day, the game is narrative-based as the player scavenges the city for weapons and resources. At night, the game transforms into a top-down shooter survival game, where the player must fight off waves of monsters every hour.
The game is challenging and requires strategic decision-making, quick reflexes, and some luck (and sometimes wildly swinging your knife with the Playdate crank as your last resort!)
Can you survive until dawn and outlast the monsters?
Art, game design, coding & audio - Andrea Baroni - andreabaroni.com
SPECIAL THANKS TO:
my wonderful family, my Patreon supporters, Rodrigo @ Paradnight Studio, SquidGod, Brighton Indie Social and Canteen.
🎵 SOUNDTRACK ALBUM NOW AVAILABLE:
GAMEPLAY NOTES & TIPS:
- You will need a good amount of bullets to be able to pass the night. The place where you decide to scavenge will of course affect what you are going to find, even if there's always luck involved.
- Situations might have random results, or fixed. It's up to you to risk it and find out which are the possible outcomes.
- If a scavenging session ended up being disastrous you can always restart the game from the Playdate menu. Or you can try to survive anyway and make the most of what you have found!
- Knife is a powerful last resource, but also a good way to save bullets when the situation is not too dangerous. You will need two swings of the knife to kill the littlest of monsters before they hurt you, so you need to be quick (please don't break your Playdate crank though!).
- If you don't like the knife game mechanic you can always disable it from the Playdate menu. In that case, monsters will damage you but they will also die automatically when reaching you. When the knife is disabled you can also use the crank to rotate the weapon if you like.
- When approaching monsters are very close by to each other you can try to kill both of them with a single bullet... very efficient!
- Skallarach (the shooting monster) will die on its own after a few shots... just in case you run out of bullets and you have no way to hit them. Pray you won't die before them though.
- In Hard Mode there will be a final monster. A big one (no spoilers!). But don't despair. There is a way to kill it using just two bullets ;)
HOW TO INSTALL:
After you download the zip file containing the pdx you need to sideload it into your Playdate account.
Please check this handy guide from Panic or this nice how-to video from @Ledbetter if you don't know how to do that.
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $5 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Development log
- v.1.2 released - the MOTHER updateJun 08, 2023
- v.1.1 released - new EASY & HARD gameplay modesMay 20, 2023
Comments
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game is cool. Mechanics could be better explaining in game. But, like, charging 5$ for a 20 minute game seems a bit too much
Thank you for your feedback!
I believe part of the game challenge is to understand "how" to survive, so I think the first run is a sort of test, or discovery run, where you learn how traps work, or what different damage a shotgun makes compared to a gun, etc... But I appreciate it might not be the best approach for everyone. I hope the UI helps as much as possible without giving away too many clues.
Re: price. To be honest I think it's pretty much in line with the Playdate game prices. If you beat the game in 20 minutes, in hard mode (so probably on your first or second run), it means you are really good (or lucky!). Again, might not be for everyone, but for the amount of work it takes to create a game like this and the replayability it has (at least until you beat the game in hard mode) I hope it's worth the price and players' time. But again, I appreciate your opinion and feedback of course.
it mostly depends, this game has lots of replayability since every time you start you get random scenarios of where to go, how many supplies and bullets you get, and what enemies you get. For me it's totally worth it.... If I could make a suggestion, I would make it that you have to survive more nights, would make it more engaging and the stakes could be even higher. I still love the concept of this game!! :D
Thank you so much for your kind words again!
Yes, extending the game would be really cool, I thought about that too. Maybe as a PC game too... but as a little studio (single developer mostly) it is a bit an intimidating project right now! :)
This game is truly amazing… i completely didnt know it was just one run, i thought it was a survival game to see how many nights you could survive. But its nice for quick runs, and a simple but engaging monster invasion story. It kept me wanted more, short but totally worth!! I recommend :)
Thank you so much for your kind words and for taking the time to write this review, you made my day :)
I am really happy that you enjoyed the game!
really great game! One rec I have re the controls: it would be cool if there was an option to use the crank to control the guns and then a direction on the d-pad to control the knife swing. To me the knife swing with the crank is hard to use but I’d still want to be able to use the knife rather than disabling it.
Thank you so much for your precious feedback!
Yes, you can use the crank to control the guns if you disable the knife from the options. In that case the monsters will damage you but will die right after.
It would be cool to control the knife with the d-pad. The only risk in doing so is that if I the knife becomes too easy to control then it can become too powerful. Maybe I can add a random miss/hit thing or add quite some delay between each swing (when using the d-pad). I'll think about it!
looks amazing！any plans to release this on Catalog?
Thank you!! :)
Yes, it should be released on the Catalog around the end of August.
wow(￣∇￣)！congrats！！！