Otto’s Galactic Groove

Christa Mrgan: Tomie, the alien music producer you live with, is looking for inspiration. As her tireless and very coordinated pet sea slug, it’s up to you to comb the galaxy and find fresh tunes.

Welcome to the Playdate Podcast, bringing you stories from game designers, developers, and the team behind Playdate, the little yellow game console with a crank. I’m Christa Mrgan. Today I am talking with Rupert Cole, Edie Woolf, and Elliot, also known as Pawprints, About Otto’s Galactic Groove, a rhythm game where you’ll travel to distant planets, meet funky characters, and play their even funkier tunes.

And just a heads up: this episode contains some light spoilers for the game’s mechanics and a few of the characters. Okay. Let’s say hi and hear what this game is all about!

Elliot aka “Pawprints” : Hi, I’m Elliot. I’m the lead developer and, I guess, game designer on Otto’s Galactic Groove.

Rupert Cole: Hi, I am Rupert. I’m the soundtrack composer for Otto’s Galactic Groove.

Edie Woolf: Hi, I’m Edie. I’m the artist and writer for Otto’s Galactic Groove.

Elliot aka “Pawprints” : Otto’s Galactic Groove is a rhythm action game for Playdate which makes use of some of the kind of unique elements of the Playdate. You know, one is the crank. We’ve got this control scheme where instead of just having to like, be on different frets, like on Guitar Hero or something, you have this kind of full control over the notes. And so you can follow the notes up and down. And we have this incredible original soundtrack written by Rupert with all the sorts of genres and all sorts of styles. And it’s music written specifically for the control scheme as well.

Edie Woolf: It’s like Katamari mixed with Trombone Hero. I was very influenced by a pushy sort of elder character and tiny main character being forced to do the elder character’s dirty work and generally just get bossed around and put in weird situations while you’re also listening to some super funky music. And, yeah, trying to survive, trying to get this little sea slug, to collect inspiration for the pushy music producer that he lives with.

Elliot aka “Pawprints” : Edie has invented these incredible characters, and storylines to follow along with these original comics. We’ve also been building out a level editor, so that our players can create their own levels and hopefully share them and build a community around the game even after we are done with our part of it.

It was a bit long for an elevator pitch, but.

Edie Woolf: elevator. It’s a long elevator ride, yeah.

Christa Mrgan: That’s fine, we’ve got time. And there’s a link to the level editor in the show notes!

So I wondered how Elliot, Edie and Rupert got involved in making Playdate games in the first place, and how they got together to make Otto’s Galactic Groove.

Elliot aka “Pawprints” : So I’m very much an amateur game developer. I picked it up properly during the pandemic and started making games with JavaScript. I was really lucky to be in the first batch of Playdate orders, so I was very excited to get my hands dirty on that one. I ported a game that I’d already made for web called Skwish. And it was very popular and I was very happy with it.

Christa Mrgan: ish was nominated for Best Puzzle Game in the 2022 Playdate Community Awards.

Elliot aka “Pawprints” : I’ve also made some smaller games in Pulp, but I really wanted to make a rhythm action game. I’ve always liked music games, stuff like Guitar Hero and Gitaroo Man, Dance, Dance, Revolution. A friend told me that he knew a composer for Playdate games who might be interested in working on a music game.

He mentioned Rupert Cole. So I sent you a friend request on Discord, Rupert, and just said, " Hey are you interested in collaborating on a game?" And you were like, “yeah, absolutely.” And we just started jamming on ideas from there.

Rupert Cole: Yeah, so I’m a soundtrack composer for films and games and TV and animation and like, Elliot, I was, I interested in Playdate from pretty much the day it was announced. I was like super psyched to pre-order, super psyched to get it delivered. So I’d done a few games for Playdate before. Resonant Tale was one that kind of got a little bit bigger, which Scott and I were super psyched about.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. Resident Tale won three Play Date Community Awards in 2023!

Rupert Cole: And then actually the story that Elliot refers to was because I just tweeted out an idle thought of just like, “oh, it’d be so cool to do music for a rhythm game one time.”

And that was clearly the manifesting. I don’t really subscribe to manifesting, but maybe I should 'cause that clearly did work. And thank goodness I accepted the bizarre friend request from Pawprints that day. That was a lucky one. Yeah, so that was that really. And I think we pretty much landed on the idea pretty quickly as well, which was really exciting. Like It just came together.

Elliot aka “Pawprints” : And then I’ll you how we got Edie on board, which was: a few months in, we like had a prototype. We had some like vague story ideas about someone traveling a galaxy and collecting musical inspiration. I was in Cardiff and I wentto a shop called Arthole, not to be confused of any other words, great shop. And they had a zine on display called “My Life in Rhythm Games.” And I was like, huh, this seems relevant to what I’m working on at the moment. I read through it and it was all about how the author Edie, had played all these rhythm games as she was growing up and how much she loved them. And I was like, “huh, I wonder if this person would be interested in working on our game?”

So I just cold emailed Edie and I was like, " Hey we’re making this game for this like esoteric little indie console. Would you be interested in

working on it?" And somehow she said, "yes. "

Edie Woolf: I did indeed. Yeah. So I’ve never made anything for a video game before. I love gaming, I love video games, and mostly I love rhythm games, and that’s why I wrote that zine.

And yeah, it ended up in Arthole. Shout out Arthole. I love that shop so much. It’s so cool. And yeah, I was on a residency in Japan and I got this email outta nowhere and I was like, this actually looks awesome. I would love to do this. And you know, it seemed legit. You get an email outta nowhere and you’re like, " are these people, like, for real? Do they actually know what they’re doing?" But they did. And yeah, I thought, why not? Give it a go. I’d never done like pixel art or anything like that, but I’ve written a lot of comics. I’ve done a lot of character design, so I thought most of the skills are transferable. So yeah, when I got back from my residency, just started having a crack at it really.

I’ve just always wanted to make a video game and specifically make a rhythm game, so I was like, I’ve gotta let this opportunity, I can’t let it pass, basically.

Rupert Cole: And then, yeah, in terms of getting Edie on board, there was another funny side to it, probably not too relevant. But I was down in Bristol with my good friend Nick, who’s another audio guy. And I was telling him about this cool new project I had. I was like, "oh yeah, and we’ve got this really cool artist on board. She’s this comic artist. And then my friend was just like, he just started cracking up like so much. And I was just like, try and be a polite friend. I was like well, it’s not actually that funny. But I’m glad that Nick’s enjoying the story that much. But he very politely let me finish explaining in a lot of detail all the ups and downs of Otto’s Galactic Groove thus far.

And, when I’d finally finished he just said, oh, yeah, is that. Is that ededie by any chance? And I was like yeah, what the heck? Nick is like one of my closest friends, and then he just said, oh yeah, Edie and I have been dating for about, six months or something.

I think it was at that point, wasn’t it?

Edie Woolf: It’s a really weird coincidence. Yeah.

Rupert Cole: An absolutely wild coincidence.

It was all good. Omens, basically from top to tail.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, I love that. How cool. And clearly everyone on the team loves rhythm games. So I wondered if they had any favorites, or which games might have helped inspire Otto’s Galactic Groove.

Edie Woolf: I think the first one I ever really got into was, Dance, Dance, Revolution. Because my grandparents lived in Brighton and we’d go to Brighton Pier, which is like an arcade, and me and my dad would do the dance mat, like as many coins we had to fit in the machine, I’d play it.

And then I got into Guitar Hero as a teenager. I have an older brother and that was the first game I ever beat him at. And so I was like, okay, this is good. And since then, yeah, II’ve really been influenced by Rhythm Heaven or Rhythm Paradise. I think it has multiple names, but for Otto’s Galactic Groove, that’s been a big influence for me.

Like it’s just so chaotic, but it’s also like really purist. It’s really hard to do. It’s very strict, but like goofy at the same time. So I love that one. Yeah, pretty much any rhythm game I can find, I enjoy.

Rupert Cole: I got a shout out Patapon is my kind of sacred text on the PSP. Back when I was like, I dunno, 12 years old or something. I just remember losing so many hours to that game. It’s a rhythm game combined with strategy and action and fun art and design as well.

So it’s not just a pure rhythm game. It’s got a lot of cool stuff going on, but feels very unified. That was definitely cool inspo and yeah, like I say, formative text.

Edie Woolf: Oh, I gotta mention Taiko no Tatsujin well, the taiko drumming game. I played that a lot while I was in Japan. Super fun. Love that one. So silly.

Elliot aka “Pawprints” : Gosh, I was definitely inspired by like some of the kind of Y2K-era sort of rhythm games. I think I mentioned Gitaru Man. Guitaru Man? However you pronounce that one, Is one of my all time favorite games. It just has this ridiculous anime space opera storyline, wrapped around these very catchy tunes. PaRappa the Rapper as well. Some rhythm games are a bit bland, where it’s just like, here’s a bunch of dots to pop while EDM plays in the background. I find it more compelling when there’s an emotional aspect to it and a context to the songs you’re playing.

Christa Mrgan: And that’s what Elliot, Rupert and Ededie were going for: a rhythm game with a fun narrative.

Rupert Cole: Once we got Edie on board, it was just like these characters, you don’t even have to read a word about them. You know that they’ve got some crazy backstory. Her character design is just so fire, you know, you are just intrigued and excited by them. You want to know more even just visually. So I think it’s a natural evolution of that.

Edie Woolf: The guys told me like space theme and I think from there I did get those sort of the Katamari kind of thought in my head to go with that, but it has been like a collaborative process, along the way, like I’ll come back with stuff and be like, “what do you think of this? What should we do here?” I always need help with naming characters and planets and stuff. We’ve just got Shark guy for a long time until he got a name.

Rupert Cole: I was gonna claim credit for that. Yeah, exactly. I love stepping in shouting out the names for Tomie and Otto.

Edie Woolf: They still are mostly nicknames to me. Like, I forget their real names. I’m just like, yes, it’s fish guy. I would say it’s been pretty collaborative throughout and continues to be somewhat.

Rupert Cole: Yeah, the seed of the ideas was really where we worked together. We established core themes. It starts with the music and we said, okay, this genre we went for like PJ Harvey type music or whatever the case is.

Edie Woolf: And then that kind of turns into a story and then a kind of an idea, and then I kind of run with it after that.

Rupert Cole: So we have that, spark of a vibe at the start, and then Edie goes in the art direction with it. I go in the music direction with it and it’s a good way of it being like us interpreting it through our own creative lenses, but still being on the same page, aesthetically. Rhythm is definitely one of the leading aspects when I’m conceptualizing the music and I’m approaching the tracks. It’s difficult, because I haven’t really had to think about music in terms of level design before. Basically, that’s new to me. When I’ve worked on games before, I’m thinking about atmosphere or mood or story, those types of things. But then when it’s technical, the midi note I’m putting in it being the actual equivalent that Mario’s jumping off, or whatever the case is.

That’s a difficult one and it’s a bit of a balance. So the example that we given before, like that wistful nineties, yeah, indie lo-fi alternative rock stuff was a good one to do a completely different style of melody because for Otto’s Galactic Groove, you’re just playing the melody.

You’re playing along with the melody. You’re not playing along with the bass line, or the drums. It’s all about the lead instrument. So yeah, conceptualizing different types of melodies for that nineties, alternative rock style, it’s lots of long sustained notes with sliding pitches.

It’s like a later level in the game where if you mess up the pitch slide halfway through, that’s the note gone, and then you’re left without melodies. You don’t hear it anymore. 'cause when you miss a note the melody drops out basically. That’s a different challenge to lots of rhythmic focus of just lots of short, quick notes.

like. Essence of fun. That’s one inspired by video game music from Y2K, era. That’s a lot more staccato. For the Jet Set Radio stuff, that was a funny one because I was just having too much fun with the samples. I was just going ham with the samples, having a great time, and then I handed the track over to Elliot and he was like, " dude, this track is great, but I don’t see how you’re gonna play along with it." That was, a bit of a puzzle, wasn’t it? So, that was a bit of reverse engineering.

And then I mean, the other challenge was working with a vocalist and trying to make that work which we did for the punk tracks, inspired by Otoboke Beaver and Le Tigre from that era.

And that’s a whole other one. For those tracks. Actually, I encouraged the singer, ’ cause I’m not really a songwriter. I’m a composer really. So I was working with her, giving her the lyrics that Edie wrote and I helped write as well. I gave her the instrumental, gave her the lyrics and said, "okay, what feels good for you? Try to include a few slides, try to include a few shouts and things like that. Then it just a bit of a back and forth of throwing ideas back and forth, refining them and shaping it into a level.

In terms of working with Elliot on refining stuff, luckily he did the programmer’s ideal approach, which is that he builds the system in which I can do it on my own. So he doesn’t have to have the hassle of me sending him 500 WhatsApps of being like, can you tweak this? Can you tweak that? So, he built the tools for the editors. I should be gunning for a designer credit actually in this game, shouldn’t I?

Anyway, so yeah, I was getting super familiar with that browser-based tool you put all the notes in and you put all the values for the height and how sustained they are. And we were actually more back and forth on the design of the tool than the actual design of the tracks 'cause as long as that works, then I can do it. Even side loading the levels that’s a super easy process. I can just get those notes, get those audio files, get them on my Playdate, give it a spin, and see how it feels. 'cause with Rhythm Games, it’s all about the. Feel, like it’s either right or it’s not, intuitively. And so it’s just a case of giving it a spin each time and being like, okay, this note needs to go up five points or this slide is a bit too much. Little tweaks like that.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, definitely. So they wanted to get it into people’s hands to see how it played.

Rupert Cole: Elliot, you were telling us about you doing 2:00 AM play testing the other day, weren’t you?

Elliot aka “Pawprints” : Late night drinking with colleagues? No, but Edie’s been taking it to a playtesting group in Bristol actually.

Edie Woolf: Yeah. Well, I work at a cafe; one of the regulars, he has like a game development group and they do play tests. And so when I mentioned that I was making a game, he was like, oh my God, he should bring it along. So I only managed to bring it to one, but it was received very positively. It was a room full of video game nerds and none of them had played the Playdate yet. So they’re all lining up to try it out and um, yeah, they’re all very just, they were all just very excited about it, to be honest. They need to bring it back to them for one more go before it gets released.

I think at least one more.

Rupert Cole: I think that was like a formative moment, though. They did a, they did it on Twitch, basically. So they did a video live stream of the play test and there was only one song on there. Is that right? Or maybe like two songs or something. It was very early. But they featured it on screen for maybe a few minutes, which is all it really needed, just to give it a quick spin and get the feel. But then Elliot, do you remember there was one of the players there who you could see on the live screen while they were playing.

She was just sat on the floor playing the Playdate, playing Otto’s Galactic Groove for like half an hour when there was only one song on there. And That was the first time I remember thinking like, okay, maybe we’ve got something here. Because clearly even on the most bare bones minimum content like, it’s got its hooks in to a player already, which is super exciting. That’s exactly what you want.

And I also wanna shout out my wife Beth as the inspiration of the left-handed player, because she’s left-handed,

Edie Woolf: You gotta consider the lefties!

Rupert Cole: Even now when I give her the game to play test, I forget to flip it over to left-handed mode and she goes, I’m trying it with my right hand, but it’s not working. Yeah, she’s very patient.

Elliot aka “Pawprints” : The aspect I think I’ve play tested the most in that one level that I really wanted to get in early was the tutorial, where I was like, Rupert, I need you to write a song. It’s gonna be super basic. It’s gonna start with some staccato notes, and then there’s gonna be a gap, and then there’s a slightly longer notes.

But I really wanted that tutorial to be super accessible. 'cause I feel like, rhythm games can be challenging and off-putting, or they’ll just throw you into a tough song sometimes. And I wanted to make sure players were shown exactly how to control it, how to use the crank if they’ve never used it before, and are ready to be thrown into the story mode as soon as they’ve finished this tutorial.

And so I’d like to think that it’s doing a good job of introducing people.

Rupert Cole: Yeah. And that was one where you had to say to me a few times, mate, gonna have to make that a little bit easier. Roll that one back. My instinct is always just, yeah, let’s make a banging tune. Like, let’s just get going. And then it’s like, no, this is a functional

level, remember, my friend. So we got there in the end didn’t we? Butneeded some wrangling.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. plus There are different difficulty levels. So in terms of level design, they also had to make the songs work for different degrees of skill.

Rupert Cole: So, basically the way that I do the level design is that the song is finished and I’m locking in the melody because it’s quite laborious to put the notes in, and very precise and fiddly. So that’s my first checkpoint. I start with the most difficult level. And then the next stage is. I do a one-to-one replication of the melody as it is, as precisely as I can get it, that it’s playable. There may be some moments between notes where you need to do a big jump, where I might make it shorter, where it’s just not possible to move the crank that quickly or something like that.

But yeah, so I get that locked in first and then basically I test that. Lock that in next. So I do a few more iterations of that because the process is copying and pasting all the notes onto the one difficulty lower and then going through and adjusting them. I’m removing notes or I’m making longer notes shorter.

It’s a bit of a soft process. Like I don’t really have precise rules, because also Elliot did a super smart thing, which is add like a intensity level within the difficulty levels as well. So it’s not every single “easy” difficulty track is the same difficulty.

It’s a bit like the Japanese Taiko game where you have the star rating, don’t you? Rather than like easy, medium, hard. Which is a lot more helpful. Although even then I feel like I can still get swindled on like a two star. But I dunno, that’s beef for another day anyway.

Elliot aka “Pawprints” : If I could add the other part of the difficulty story is allowing users to control the difficulty for themselves with assist settings. I love how these are commonplace in games these days and how many games allow you to like, just make things so much easier.

I think I first encountered them in Celeste, which really made them popular, but like, if you don’t wanna use the crank, you can just turn that off and it’ll move the tracer up and down for you. If you don’t wanna press the buttons, we’ll do that for you. If you wanna use the d-pad, that’s an option.

If you’re left-handed, you can flip the whole thing upside down. So, I tried to make it accessible from that angle too that the players have lots of different options. And then in the story mode we’ve tried to do a kind of branching structure where if a planet is too hard, you can skip it.

Completely different planet go to the next one. So hopefully, players won’t get too stuck on a certain level, even if they’ve chosen a hard difficulty level.

I did some rhythm games for the web using JavaScript, a few years earlier. And I learned through watching YouTube tutorials and stuff that the key to high precision is to move the sprites along to the song. So they shouldn’t be kind of. being moved, kind of one pixel each second or something, they should be tracked to exactly how far through the song you are.

And that’s how you achieve that level of precision. And then once you have that in place, like everything’s quite straightforward, because you can guarantee the notes are gonna move even if your frame rate starts to drop, which it does occasionally in these alpha versions and hopefully won’t in the final version.

At least the notes won’t be out of sync and your player won’t be going wait, what? This isn’t in sync.

Christa Mrgan: And compared to creating the music, which was of course the focal point of the game, creating the sound design was pretty quick and straightforward.

Rupert Cole: I just had fun selecting some sound effects for the menus. That was a good day. I would call it like digital archeology. 'cause I found a bunch of old sample CDs from the naughties that were on archive.org. And I was just going through like like pressing down and just hearing all the different, like woo, all the vinyl scratches. Wack, wack. Yeah. That was very fun. Yeah. And then I just chose a bunch of those, put 'em in a folder and then I was like elliot, you deal with them now. So then you’ve assigned them to the various buttons and end screens and things. Done a brilliant job with that. So, yeah. Thank you.

Christa Mrgan: But while the sound design was quick and easy, Edie had a little adjusting to do when it came to creating one-bit pixel art.

Edie Woolf: Yeah, I’d never done it. Like Elliot. Got me onto Pixaki, the program, and I just do it on my iPad, like I do most of my art. So I think at first I had no idea what I was doing, but I think I’ve kinda got the hang of it now.

I think I kind of Understand it a bit more now. And we’ve got some pretty, pretty simple animations. I’m doing a comic per level, as well, so that you can like scroll through with a crank, which I think is really cute and smooth. I think we are trying to work on an archive mode at the moment as well, so you can read through them all when you’ve unlocked them.

it’s pretty similar to my usual style. The brief I was given was like outer space and like Y2K. And from there I started with the like main two characters, which are Otto and Tomie, and Tomie’s like an alien music producer. She’s just like a cool, Y2K girl.

She’s too cool for everyone and she’s mean about it. But I love her. And um, Otto, I don’t know why I went with sea slug, but I did, and I love sea slugs. I think they’re really like funky. They’re so cute. And like I just really wanted to make a sea slug character. And so that’s where Otto came from.

He’s named after this dog on my artist residency in Japan. The owners had a dog called Otto and I’d just come back from it and I was missing him so much. So I was like, I’m gonna name this sea slug Otto. And then from there the characters are a slight departure from what I usually do because I don’t usually do kind of like-- there’s a lot of anthropomorphic objects in animals and that’s not usually my kind of thing, but I wanted to have fun with this and you know, when we first started making it, it was a fun exercise at first. And so, I was able to really just kinda let go and like, try making like a shark guy, he’s like a surfer bro with like tattoos and like pearl necklace and like.

Blonde hair and like, a sad fish who just got broken up with and he’s like playing his little guitar and he’s got his little beanie. And we’ve got, I don’t even know what they’re called, the like wiggly tube guys, that are outside of like petrol stations.

Elliot aka “Pawprints” : I believe the official name is Sky Dancer.

Edie Woolf: I did not know that.

Christa Mrgan: They were created for the Olympics, right? Like…

Edie Woolf: Oh, really?

Christa Mrgan: Yes, really! Sky Dancers, also known as Tube Men, and originally called The Tall Boy by their creator, Peter Minshall, were developed for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia.

I don’t know how I knew that, but you can probably tell from that terrible little bit of original audio I left in there that I was very excited to have remembered that in the moment.

Edie Woolf: Oh my God, I need to do my research.

Christa Mrgan: No need. I looked it up on Wikipedia. Thank you, Wikipedia.

Anyway, speaking of funky characters: I wondered who everyone’s favorite character in the game was!

Edie Woolf: I think it might be Otto. I’m trying to think, like either Otto or I love Scoria the protagonist of the Fire Planet because they’re initially like this super scary punk character, but they turn out to actually just be just a sweetie pie.

And I feel like that’s my experience with like Metalheads and punks. They have this initial aura of intimidation and then you speak to them and they’re actually just the kindest, sweetest people in the world. And that’s what I was going for there. So yeah, I’d say definitely those two.

Rupert Cole: Mine’s gotta be Tomie I think, just on the basis of a fellow musician committed to their craft, ready to shut the door on anyone that’s gonna interrupt them, but also running out of inspiration on a regular basis. That’s all too real. Thanks for that, Edie.

Elliot aka “Pawprints” : There are some mushroom people who we’ve yet to integrate into the game properly. I hope they make the final cut. But I really like the look of them. I’m very excited for them.

Edie Woolf: I’m gonna push for them to make the final cut, I think.

Rupert Cole: All right. They’re in. I’ll write their tunes next.

Christa Mrgan: Yay! And I’m so glad that Elliot and Rupert decided to just reach out to Panic to see if there’d be a Playdate Season Two.

Elliot aka “Pawprints” : Rupert and I had been chatting about this for a while. Like, there’s a Season One, that implies there’s gonna be Season Two, and Rupert was like, we should just cold email Panic and just be like, “Hey, if you’re working on a Season Two, do you wanna include our game?”

And I was like, " that’s never gonna work."

Rupert Cole: I’m a freelancer. Can you tell? Yeah. It’s worth a go, basically.

Elliot aka “Pawprints” : I was very pessimistic. And so I did email and Panic said, “plans are very early, but, maybe uh, you know, we will think about it. Like we’d love to hear more about the game.” And then, what was it just like a month or two later, and then we got the official email being like, " you are invited to pitch your game to us." And we’re like, " well, we’ve got a game to pitch!"

Rupert Cole: Those, creeps that camp outside like Walmart before opening hours or whatever. That was us, pretty much. I think we’re both big Playdate nerds really, aren’t we? So yeah. Big fans. Definitely. So, yeah, and also actually we were talking a lot about whether or not we wanted to do season two even pitch in the first place because we were thinking do we wanna just do it on our own terms? Do we want to just get it out there? And I’ve worked with game publishers before. It can be a bit of a bumpy road sometimes. But yeah, I think in the end, our main motivation was we just wanted as many people to have fun playing it,

really. it That was our calculation in the end was just about, okay, how many people are we gonna be able to get grooving, and we were counting the number of toes that we were gonna get tapping. A big Excel spreadsheet of toes. Decided that Season Two was gonna get us the most. Yeah. Sorry if that’s gross.

You said you didn’t play too many levels, but I’m interested to know if you have a favorite song from the levels that you did play. I’m just, fishing for compliments, basically.

Elliot aka “Pawprints” : Who’s being interviewed here?

Christa Mrgan: Well, the game wasn’t fully complete, and I had only played a few levels at the time of the interview, so I felt like I couldn’t answer fairly.

Rupert Cole: Yeah. You gotta give them all a spin.

Christa Mrgan: Okay. So now that I’ve heard all of the music, Rupert, I think my favorite track is Blue Slushie, but I played that at the top of the episode. So my second favorite is this one, Sugar Rush’d. And it’s because both of these just feel very Nintendo to me, which I love. And they just kind of feel like the vibe of Playdate and this game, I’m not exactly sure why. Although special mention for Our Inferno. I loved both of those punk kinda tracks.

So listeners, what will your favorite track be? I really hope you have fun finding out as you crank your way through the cosmos in Otto’s Galactic Groove! You can find out more about the team, check out the level editor, and learn more about other stuff we talked about— crucially, including Sky Dancers— via the links in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening and stay tuned for more episodes from Playdate Season Two, coming soon to the Playdate Podcast feed.

Rupert Cole: Thank you so much.

Elliot aka “Pawprints” : Thanks so much, Christa. This was great.

Edie Woolf: Thanks for having us. Thank you. Bye.

Rupert Cole: Bye.

Elliot aka “Pawprints” : Cool. It’s gonna be a big week.

Very exciting.

Christa Mrgan: The Playdate Podcast was written, produced, and edited by me, Christa Mrgan.

Cabel Sasser, and Simon Panrucker composed the theme song. Additional music was composed by Rupert Cole and comes from Otto’s Galactic Groove. Huge thanks to Tim Coulter and Ashur Cabrera for wrangling the podcast feed and working on the website, James Moore for making me an awesome Paydate audio extraction app, Kaleigh Stegman for handling social media, and Neven Mrgan, who created the podcast artwork and site design. And thanks as always to everyone at Panic. Playdate Season Two is available right now on the website and on Catalog! And of course, Playdate consoles are available at play.date.

Rupert Cole: Shout out Nick. He’s the fourth team member. He doesn’t come to the meetings. He’s not pulling his weight.

Edie Woolf: No, he is not. We need to get him involved more.

Rupert Cole: Yeah,