Polygondwanaland for Playdate
A downloadable album
What is Polygondwanaland?
Polygondwanaland is a free 2017 album by Australian psychedelic rock band King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard.
Wait what? It's an album, not a game?
Well, yeah. But you download it to your Playdate like a game, and it is kind of playable... you can explore the album art with the D-pad or scroll through the lyrics with the crank as you listen.
So is this... legal?
This album was made free, as in free speech, by the band upon release. The masters are available at https://kinggizzardandthelizardwizard.com/polygondwanaland. Anyone can publish this album, and so this is me publishing it for Playdate.
This release of the album is also free as in free beer. If you like this album and want to spend some money, you should buy a copy of Nonagon Infinity, another great album by KGATLW.
You mentioned art?
Album art is included in this Playdate release. All the artwork is rendered in 1-bit graphics, and all of it is much too big to fit on the Playdate screen, so you can use the D-pad to scroll about and explore the details of artwork. Press the 'A' button to change the image.
So what does the 'B' button do then?
'B' button presses change the operating mode:
* Single click 'B' to display lyrics, crank to scroll.
* Double click 'B' to adjust volume (you can of course set volume from the system menu, but that pauses the audio... grr).
* Triple click 'B' for track select mode; here D-pad left and right will select the track, and the crank allows you to scrub through the audio of the current track.
Anything else?
Help and About screens are available via the system menu.
How do I install it?
Sideload to your Playdate as per any other sideloaded game (instructions at https://help.play.date/games/sideloading/). It is a full album... despite the fact that the audio is compressed and the art is (obviously) rendered in 1-bit, it takes up a little over 100Mb of space, which is a lot for a Playdate game. It will take a few minutes to upload to your Playdate account, and about 15 minutes to download to your Playdate.
Playdate albums are great I would like to make another one!
If you want to release an album for Playdate and you like the system used here, you can get it from github: https://github.com/YoursTruly2095/playdate_album
Download
Install instructions
See https://help.play.date/games/sideloading/ for installation instructions.
Comments
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Amazing, thanks! I started looking at adding this as a release to Discogs, but it was challenging—there doesn't seem to be a Playdate format… yet…
The master release is here: Polygondwanaland.
This is awesome—as a huge fan of the band, I dreamed of someone packaging Poly for Playdate. Thanks for doing it!
I have a small bug report: in pdxinfo, the imagePath is
graphics/launch.png. There's a note on this in the docs: "Image files are compiled to Playdate .pdi files by thepdccompiler. When referencing images in code use no extension or the .pdi extension." This bug causes the launcher art to not be shown in some situations.Thanks for this; I've been away from Development for a few weeks, I will get round to updating this though.
Just about the coolest fucking thing I've ever seen - the breakdown at the end of Crumbling Castle, lyrics on screen, a 1-bit picture of some clouds, man alive - what a band, and what a cool way of packaging it up!!
this rules so much and is tailored so specifically to my interests!!! thank you for making it!!!
You're welcome, I'm really pleased it's getting some downloads and folks are enjoying it :-)