Waternet - first impressions

High Hugh,

I'm aware of the small puzzle area but the game is port of my arduboy version of the game which in itself was a port of the gameboy version i initially made. The game screen (including text / menu's) all use the same system for drawing. Basically the screen is divided into 10 by 10 grids (arduboy was 8x8) and i don't give screen positions in my functions but provide grid positions (to that set_xy function). If i increase the size of the tiles for the puzzle area, the size of the text increases as well and i would have less space to "write" something on the screen in for example menu's or so.

Also the game is a port, which means i basically copied original C Code inside the espruino ide and i adapted all (mostly graphics) functions to work with the bangle 2js, i did only minor adaptions to gameplay and so but i did not reposition anything or so. You can see here its basically the same game as my arduboy port but just way more tiny. The arduboy had a 128x64 resolution screen and i did adapt the game for the bangle js2 to use bigger tilesizes so that about 176 pixels in width can be used, but the arduboy had a bigger (physical) screen also so things where more visibly on it.

One way i see i could go around the above mentioned issues is to potentially use separate images for text and puzzle tiles and reorder the puzzle area so that the text on the sides is displayed below the puzzles. I could give that a try eventually but initially i wanted to just do a port that more or less worked :)

I'll probably try to improve it sometime later once i have the rubido game finished at least that game does not have these issues about small area's. I'm also working on another playdate game so not sure when i'll come to it but i will give it a look. I kinda hop from one project to another and sometimes doing multiple projects at once :)
regarding your points

Using the whole of the screen, hide widgets, no point in having them on when in a game.

there already is an option to hide the widgets but it does not affect the drawing of the puzzles, it does affect the input rects of where you have to "touch" to simulate the directional movement

move all the settings and options out to a settings app that can be called via the Bangle 2 menu.

That should be possible was not sure this was needed, so i kept it inside the game as thats how the original game mostly had it but i did add extra options for the bangle. I'd have to make sure if i change this that people don't loose their progress though, as the options and level unlocks are all saved in the same file, so i'd probably would need to split it up.

maybe a little video to show how to play each game using the different controls.

have you checked the readme on the app loader page or the ingame help, it contained some information about game rules. But I could try todo a video also but it would probably be recorded using the emulator as i have no easy way to record the watch, i'll see what i can do about this