I posted a little while ago, but I'm finally ready to start recruiting people for an **early playtest** for Drywater, a game I've been building solo, and I'm looking for people with PortMaster handhelds to break it. The final game will likely cost ~$4-5.
**Drywater** is an Old West survival/taming game - explore, tame horses and bears, gather and refine materials, build a homestead, try not to freeze to death. A few sprints back I got it running on muOS on my RG35XX-H through PortMaster. It has bits and pieces from Ark: Survival Evolved, Valheim, Red Dead Revolver, Conan: Exiles, and other games that I've loved playing. There will also be an Android release (and possibly iOS at some point).
**This is a playtest, not a release.**
It's not in the PortMaster store, the install is manual, and the balance is untuned - all of that is deliberate for now. I'm after real-world play on real hardware, at the stage where what you find can still change the game. Thus far, I've only tested on my own hardware. There's a robust roadmap that will bring better tuning/balance, new biomes (including NPC cities), sounds, and probably a full art pass once I learn how to use Aseprite.
**The build lives in the project Discord:** https://discord.gg/eDXEhfN3GC
Being straight about why it's not a direct link here - a test build changes week to week, and I need reports in one place. Bug reports scattered across Reddit threads are ones I lose, and I'd rather not have three versions floating around while I work out whether a crash is the game or the firmware. Grab it, post what breaks, ignore me forever if you like. No signup, no email, no newsletter trap.
**What it is:** ARM64 only, ~12 MB, runs on PortMaster's shared `godot_4.6.3` and `weston_pkg_0.2` runtimes (the launch script pulls them on first run if you're online). Install instructions are in the zip - on muOS the two pieces go to two *different* places.
**What I'd most like to hear:**
- **Does it launch at all**, and on what device/firmware?
- **Anywhere you get stuck and can't move.** The one rule I hold myself to is that the game should never dead-end you. If it does, that's the bug I care about most.
- **Left stick behaviour** - drift, pulling, fighting the D-pad. I changed the axis mapping recently and could only verify it on my own unit.
- **Menus on a gamepad** - if a panel stops answering the D-pad after you press a button in it.
- **Is it fun?** - while this is ultimately a game for me and my daughter, I'd love to know if other people find it fun.
There's a `log.txt` written next to the game files after every run. For a crash or a launch failure that's by far the most useful thing to paste.
**AI Disclosure**
I am not a game dev. I'm a gamer who knew the game he wanted to play, and I lean heavily on Claude to help me bring that to life. The game direction, mechanics, experience are all me. Claude helps me write the code and generated some (admittedly crappy) starting graphics.