When Mooselutions first launched, I knew about the Steam Deck. I figured it might be cool to eventually launch the game there, but it would require porting the game over to Linux, and I didn't have time to do that before (or after) the game went live.
I had no idea there's this thing called Proton, which allows you to run pretty much any Steam game that also runs on Windows.
Needless to say, it came as a surprise to me that people were even able to play the thing, let alone that some of them were having a good time doing it.
I wasn't able to do much about the Steam Deck while I was in the hospital recovering from heart valve surgery, but once the doctor cleared me to drive, I made it my mission to see what's going on. I met up with a friend in town who happened to have a copy of the game running on his Steam Deck.
The game mostly played how it should. It's just that the puzzles looked really squished on the small screen.
Normally, on large screen devices like my Windows gaming PC, I can fit the entire puzzle on the screen in high resolution. It looks beautiful, and I can see every element in the puzzle.
That's not the case on the Steam Deck. You've only got 1280 by 800 pixels. Fitting the entire puzzle on the screen and making it look good wasn't going to work.
That's why I've decided to have a camera that centers on the player and scrolls, like in Zelda games.
At first, I was concerned that you won't be able to see the entire puzzle at all times. But I tried it out, and it still feels very playable. You can get a feel for a puzzle by walking around. Most puzzles give you the freedom to explore in this way, and if you're in the center of the map, you can usually see the whole puzzle.
The only real problem I noticed happens when there is an angry moose offscreen. You might have angered him and not know about it. To make this more clear, I turned on the game's moose danger map by default. That way, you can always see which areas will cause a moose to get angry, even if he's offscreen. This only happens in a handful on puzzles.
Since I'm not shipping a fully native Linux port for the Steam Deck, there are no native Steam Deck controls. You will need to enable Steam Input to play the game on the Steam Deck.
My friend Dylan Sheffer has uploaded a truly fantastic controller scheme for the Steam Deck that I use when playing on that platform, so definitely look for it.
steam://controllerconfig/2287140/3131215773
I will write a community guide explaining how to set that up so it's crystal clear.
As always, thanks for playing the game! I'm so thrilled to see so many of you enjoying it.
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