The Heist of the Argonaut Limited

Play the part of a witless criminal, hired for a daring train heist where everything goes wrong. Made in the style of classic RPGs and text games; read, roll, and choose your way through this thrilling adventure with countless paths and dozens of unique endings.

accomplishments

Playdate Catalog Feature. Featured on Panic's Playdate Catalog, meaning the game had to fit their standards of quality and accessibility.

Best Narrative, PCA 2024. Won best narrative at the Playdate Community Awards, meaning the game was nominated by the community and then voted on favorably by a panel of judges.

my contributions

Wrote and Designed. I was the sole writer and designer on the project. This included:

writing more than 15,000 lines of dialogue,

developing a sustainable workflow for branching narrative,

and designing an economy of knowledge to inject scenes with reactivity

Created the 'Engine'. Using Lua and the Playdate SDK, I engineered the text adventure systems that contains the game. This included:

a dynamic text printing system that was responsive and accessible,

a templated scene structure that was performant and permitted rapid development and testing,

and seamless connectivity with audio and visuals

notes from me

Argonaut Limited is effectively the first game I ever made, so a lot of the development process was a journey of discovery. You can read the whole story on the dev blog that I wrote leading up to the release of the game.

Though I was the 'sole developer' of the game, I paid an artist and a musician to make some amazing art and music, and I was continuously supported by an incredible community of Playdate developers without whom I would never have been able to finish the game.