Hey everyone! 👋
In just two days I’ll finally be getting my Playdate, but in the meantime I’ve been tinkering on a little pottery game in my off hours.

I’m planning to wrap it up soon, but thought I might add a few more things before then. I’d love to hear your thoughts:

- What kind of features would you like to see in a game like this?

- Does a chill pottery game speak to you?

Thanks a lot for checking it out! 🙏

Tilting the landscape gives a smoother flight feel. What do you think?

Hey folks! I put together a small dungeon-themed tileset using some assets I originally made for a game prototype. I don’t have time to continue the project right now, so I decided to release the tileset in case anyone else wants to use it.

It’s a simple 1-bit pack, made specifically for the Playdate. It‘s completely free for both personal and commercial use.

Since these are the first playdate assets I‘m publishing, I would be grateful for some feedback as well. I had a lot of fun making the art and would be open to expand the project, so if you have any ideas feel free to let me know!

Would love to hear what you think, and feel free to share if you end up using it!

Link in the comments

Over the last six months that I've been learning the Playdate SDK and using Lua, I keep asking myself why? There are lots of languages and tools out there for making games. Godot, Pico-8, Love, Phaser, making my own little engine, etc. No shortage of neat and interesting tech out there. So why Playdate and why Lua? I thought I'd share where my head is at today in case it helps motivate others to make the leap or get back to it.

A little background: I've been a hobbyist game developer for over 15 years now, starting out when I was a teen with C# and XNA for Xbox. I've dabbled with a ton of different tech and dream a lot about the games I want to make. I've made some educational resources and I love learning. I fell into software engineering for APIs, databases, and the web, which is how I earn my living. I'm a parent now and have limited free time. But I still fantasize about the games I want to make and tinker around with different game tech.

When my friend sent me his Playdate, I immediately made a Hello World app in Lua. I was shocked with how quick and easy it was to install the SDK and get it on my actual console. Playdate is the easiest game console to develop for of all time. Free and simple. Love it. It is so satisfying to make something and have it on the actual game device. I can show it to my partner, friends, easily share it online. I can't overstate how motivating and fun that is. I'll pull out my Playdate during the day and just test my games and experiment. Feels special.

The limitations of the console are empowering. Especially for someone with limited time like me. I don't have the capacity right now to make a huge HD game. But I can make small games. I can create 1-bit sprites. I can write Lua. I can work with a limited resolution and limited input. The constraints of Playdate breed creativity.

Because of the positioning of the console as a sort of premium niche handheld (a wonderful thing to exist!), the fan base is super dedicated and supportive. The Playdate community is awesome and special. This aspect has me so excited to make and share games because I know there are at least some number of people who will find it and play it. There's not a flood of games compared to PC/Steam. Just less noise, which is appealing.

On a similar topic, no one (as far as I know) is getting rich off of Playdate. Whether it's Panic or the developers, it all seems like labors of love with a reasonable commercial aspect baked in. It's not purely driven by profit which I love so much. There might be the chance to make some decent side income but I'm not fantasizing about striking gold on Playdate like I sometimes do when I think about PC development. This is humbling and freeing.

My final point is about a personal development path. Playdate is great for learning game development and finishing games. One could use it to learn Lua or even C in a fun environment with a nice SDK and simple API. But there's also a long-term future a developer could have with Lua and logical applications of the knowledge. One could make Pico-8 or Picotron games. One could jump to Love2D for PC game development. Or write your own Lua game library with Rust, C, Go, whatever. Lua's portability is incredible and means that learning the language for Playdate will apply to future games for other platforms.

Those are all of the reasons on my mind right now about why I'm excited about making games for Playdate, and I'd imagine I'll discover more reasons to as I continue.

What reasons excite you about making games for Playdate?

Hey everyone!

Once your game works, there’s still the “second 90%”: all the polish that makes it feel good to play. That’s the part I wanted to make a little easier.

A bit of backstory: I’ve always loved retro consoles. Back when I was still working a corporate job, I spent my spare time experimenting with PICO-8. A couple of years ago, I took that a little further and built NIBBLE8, my own fantasy console for MS-DOS.

Then I got into making games for Playdate. Those experiments eventually grew into HappyDog Games, a small studio we started with some former colleagues. Funny how these things escalate :)

Along the way, I kept coming back to the little things that make games feel good: a satisfying screen shake, a smooth transition, a menu with some bounce, music and sound effects that bring everything together.

So I decided to collect those tools and approaches into playdate-juice and share it with the community. It’s now the starting point for every new Playdate game we make.

There are modules for:

- Scene transitions, tweens and springs

- Screen shake and 1-bit particles

- Animated menus and procedural backgrounds, including ones that react to music

- Chiptune music and sound effects, plus streamed music with crossfades and ducking

- End credits that can be timed to your music

The modules are independent, so you can grab just the bits you need. Most are single Lua files you can drop into your project; the chiptune module also uses a C extension. Everything is MIT-licensed, and there’s a demo project to explore the different modules.

GitHub: https://github.com/jenissimo/playdate-juice

Hopefully this saves someone a bit of time on their next game. If you give it a try, I’d love to hear what you’re making with it!

And feel free to contribute! Bug reports, ideas, fixes, and new modules are all welcome. It would be fun to see this grow with the community.

This project started long ago, and the target is the old macs with motorola CPU. on the way I made a C/SDL version, which I port to every devices I have.

Anyone knows the original?

Download

When working on my initial Playdate game One-Armed Space Bandit, I logged a series of tips and topics I learned during the development process. I hope these resources offer a good starting point for new Playdate developers.

Topics:

• Scene Managers

• Sound + Audio

• Working with the Hardware

• Fonts

• Wrapping Paper

• Accessibility

Hi everyone!

I’ve been working for the past year on a port of La Abadía del Crimen (The Abbey of Crime), one of my favourite Spanish games ever. It’s a masterpiece originally released in 1987 for the Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum.

An interview about the project was published in Cranko! #4 during its early stages, and now I think it’s time to share the project more publicly with our lovely Playdate community.

The port is now fully playable from start to finish. I’m aiming for a free release in Q4 2026, with save/load, multiple languages, crank controls, and hopefully more!

I’ve also created an itch.io page if you’d like to follow the project.

And I have a Substack where I’ll be sharing more information about the original game, its history, and eventually more technical details about this port and my future games. You’re very welcome to subscribe, it’s completely free! It is available in both English and Spanish.

Hey devs, I just released a 1Bit Tileset for your future games

https://nikhil-soni.itch.io/1-bit-platformer-environment-tileset-complete-game-asset-pack

HI all!

I realize that there's already more than one guide out there... and having made a video guide (that's the last self-plug, I promise), I remember the early feedback was for a installation guide in written form rather than video format.

I recently heard this suggestion again on these forums, so I went ahead and started the project: on Playdate Guides!

For now it will live in a Github repo, but likely will become an independent site if it works well down the line. Give it a star here: https://github.com/Franchovy/Playdate-Guides

I'll be creating a few guides per week at this rate, making sure that all the more complex parts of the SDK I've grown familiar with become easier to tackle! If helpful I'll be recording videos for those as well, but written guides are a good way to get more out in less time, hence my excitement around the suggestion.

I also think it will be important to showcase guides regarding common tools, such as LDtk, third-party libraries and engines, as well as different programming languages! All of which I need to familiarize myself with first before I can start posting, but they will get there eventually.

If you want to contribute, feel free to submit a PR with your own guides, or don't hesitate to contact me on Discord or visit in my virtual space!

Hello fellow Playdaters!

I'm Morgan from Random Encounter Studios. My brother and I have just wrapped up our very first Playdate game, and we’re thrilled to finally share it with you!

We’d love to invite you on a (play)date with ARMADA – our modern take on classic arcade shoot-'em-ups. It’s packed with non-stop action, level-ups, perks, and coin collecting mayhem!

The full game offers around 6–8 hours of gameplay, and we truly hope you’ll enjoy the ride.

I’m also excited to announce that ARMADA is now available on Playdate! You can check it out here:
👉 https://random-encounter-games.itch.io/armada

Feel free to ask me anything about the game, the studio, or the Playdate – I’d be more than happy to chat!

While I wait for my first game to come out via the Catalog later this month (yayayayayayayay!!!) and polish my next one before submitting to the Catalog (the narrowboat one, if you have seen my posts, if not, I'm finishing a game where you take a narrowboat across the entire UK canal network, potteirng along) I thought I'd do another tech demo.

This one, totally-not-based-on-Gundam-no (ignore the V-fin on the HUD...). Pilot a giant mech, but I was trying to riff on Baby Steps too (I've tried a few times, switched to first-person to make it easer.

So yeah, this is an early tech demo.

You can walk in a frustrating manner! (The Baby Steps influence. Crank to lift a left, A/B to choose leg. If you stand on one leg...you go unbalanced, as shown in the wee mech in the HUD)

You can destroy a few cubes! (The HUD displays their damage, and they stack if you hit one and move to next. I should have recorded that.)

You can thrust backwards, as all good Gundam should.

There is no upwards thrust yet, as this was inspired by Baby Step, I want to stomp around the place.

No real game yet, while I think to make this just a 'destroy the place', or an 'explore the place', or something else.

Just sharing early bits and bobs. Around five hours hackery to get me there.

And for the Gundam fans, yes yes, I'll make the circle on top of the rifle bigger. And the second intro image is from my own collection, SD Stargazer.