PointlessQuest

A Multiplayer Online RPG for Playdate

PointlessQuest launches Saturday 13th June at 2pm UTC. You can sideload the client now to name your character ready for when the server goes live!

Hey! You may remember me from such Playdate delights as Legend of Etad and Tau. I'm back with the first(?) only(?) online multiplayer RPG game for the Playdate: PointlessQuest!

I'd call it a MMORPG, but the first M may be a little enthusiastic given the potential audience size...  Nonetheless, this is a multiplayer online RPG with no real cap or limit on the number of concurrent players. Let's call this a crazy experiment that I'd love all Playdaters to get involved with! 

For now, PointlessQuest is completely free-to-play. All I ask is that if you enjoy it and want to support the game, consider donating.

Features

• A Playdate-sized world to explore
• Melee and ranged mostly-auto combat
• NPCs and quests
• Chickens!
• Mini bosses that you can group up to kill
• Loot!
• Equipment, inventory, and stats
• Cats and dogs!
• Coins and shops
• Chests
• Text, emoji, and real-time voice comms
• At launch, hand-authored content from level 1-10 (about 5 hours straight gameplay)

Controls

The game has control prompts throughout, but here are the basics:

• Dpad - Move / navigate menus
• A - Targeting mode / menu select
• B - Menu wheel / menu cancel
• B [hold] - Voice chat

Gameplay and Tips

• Move around with dpad, melee attack enemies by bumping into them
• Interact with NPCs by bumping into them
• Use A to enter targeting mode (for inspecting enemies and initiating ranged combat)
• You'll eventually find or be able to buy a bow for ranged combat, don't stress it too much!
• Open the menu wheel with B, all menus have control prompts and should be self-explanatory
• Watch your health and hold a direction to (attempt to) flee if you're close to death
• But also, don't fret death too much - you'll respawn without penalty (at least for now)
• You'll need time to recover after a fight, and if you flee.
• Some enemies are bosses that have way more health than regular enemies - team up with other players or come back (much) later!
• Find gear by killing mobs, completing quests, collecting coin and using shops, or by opening chests
• You'll need keys to open chests. Again these can be gained through mobs, quests, and the shops.
• Most loot drops are personal, except (currently) items that drop from chests. You can drop items, which will then be available for anyone to pick up.
• Kill XP is shared by damage done, so don't worry about "kill stealing" with mobs/players around your level. Help each other out!

Roadmap

Nothing official yet. I'm already working on the next two areas of the game and they'll be in within two weeks of launch.

What happens after depends on you! If the game grows and maintains a player base, then I'll keep adding to it. The hosting is reasonably cheap, so I can keep it running indefinitely.

There's a discussion board here for suggestions and feedback, and I'll maintain some kind of list of known bugs and forthcoming features/content.

General Notes and FAQ

• Your player account is tied to your Playdate save game. I offer the option to provide an email address for future account recovery. The email is only ever used for sending one-time passwords, and it's totally optional. If you skip it at start, you can provide an email later via the options menu.
• The server is located in Eastern USA, as I'm well aware the majority of the playerbase will be US-based. That does mean that everyone else (me included!) will suffer a little lag - but the game doesn't require precise timings of any sort.
• The game will be battery-hungry due to the constant use of wifi. In testing, I've been getting around 2 hours play on a full charge.
• I've also found in testing that the Playdate wifi stack suffers from micro-dropouts quite often. You'll notice this in game as hiccups/lag spikes that last a second or more. I've mitigated this as best I can. My best suggestion is to be as close to your wifi access point as possible.
• If you do find yourself unable to connect again after a dropout, exiting to home and then relaunching the game usually does the job.