CranKronos

Five eras of dogfights, one dial: wherever the crank points, the plane follows.

CranKronos is a top-down dogfight for Playdate that travels in time. Your plane sits in the middle of the screen with a ring of ticks around it, and the crank is its heading: point the notch and the plane banks round to meet it. The sky scrolls past, squadrons come in from every side, and every kill lights part of the gauge along the bottom. Fill it and the era's flagship crosses the sky. Bring it down and the year rolls over: 1910 becomes 1940, then 1970, 1982 and 2001. Each era brings new enemies, a new sky and a new plane of your own. After 2001 you are back in 1910, and everything is faster.

What the crank does

The original arcade stick set the direction you wanted, and the plane turned toward it. The crank does the same thing with no notches: a quarter turn of the crank is a quarter turn of the plane. You can lead a target, swing round onto the fighter on your tail, or turn into a homing missile and shoot it down. The left thumb fires on the d-pad while the right hand cranks. With the crank docked, left and right steer and A fires.

Features

• Five eras, five skies. Biplanes that throw grenades over a white morning sky, prop fighters and a four-engine bomber, helicopters and homing missiles at dusk, jets at night, and saucers among the asteroids in 2001.
• Your plane changes with the era. A prop racer, an early jet, a swept fighter, a flying wing and a ring-wing ship. The warp rebuilds it while the year rolls over.
• The original's rules. 56 kills fill the seven-plane gauge, and the flagship takes seven hits. A whole squadron is worth 2,000. The parachutists you catch pay 1,000, then 2,000, up to 5,000. Ramming the flagship clears the era and costs a plane.
• Arcade mode follows the cabinet's rules, with high-score tables and three-letter initials, at Cadet, Pilot or Ace. Zen has no deaths and no table.
• Sorties are fifteen authored missions, three per era, with par times and gold, silver and bronze medals. A bot has cleared every one of them through the real game.
• A daily sortie picked by the date from a pool of sixty, with a streak.
• Fourteen feats and a rank ladder from Cadet of 1910 to Chronaut, with the next rank always in view.
• Music in every era. Each era plays in its own key, so you hear the warp as well as see it, and the guns and hits land on the beat.

Controls

• Crank: set your heading (the plane turns to follow the notch on the dial)
• D-pad (crank out): fire
• D-pad left/right (crank docked): turn
• A or B: fire, hold for autofire

First release

This is version 0.1.0. Bots have flown every mode and cleared every sortie, and I have played it in the Playdate Simulator, but nobody has run it on hardware yet. If something feels off on a real Playdate, tell me in the comments and I'll fix it.

Credits

CranKronos is an original Playdate game by geistpro (Kai Kunze), made as an homage to a 1982 time-travelling dogfight arcade game. The scoring and most of the rules come from the original service manual, and the gaps it leaves are filled in. Sorties, the daily, feats and ranks are new. All code, art and music are original.

How to Install on Playdate

1. Download the .pdx.zip file from this page
2. Go to play.date/account/sideload in your browser
3. Sign in with your Playdate account
4. Upload the .pdx.zip file
5. The game will appear on your Playdate!

Requires a Playdate console to play.

More crank games

CranKronos is one of a series of crank-first homages: CranKest (tube shooter), Crankoids (asteroids), CranKommand (missile defence), CrankLander (lunar lander), CrankAttack (demon shooter), CranKlown (seesaw and balloons), and the puzzles CranKen and CranKuro.

If one of these earned a minute of your evening, a rating on this page is what puts the next one in front of other Playdate owners.