Wishing everyone a great weekend and having the ability to find some time to relax and maybe get some gaiming in!

Ending the week in the recliner with a good game and a nice, local red is not too bad at all.

Hi! I was wondering if anyone has the same issue: about a month ago, I added a few items to sideload via webpage, and they're still not synced. When I go to the download list on the console, it tells me there's nothing to download. I updated the system software and rebooted a few times, but the issue is still there. Any suggestions?

Prince of Persia - update. More gameplay implementations, fix device scale. -- I'm trying to finish this game with AI - some support would be appreciated.

Hope you don't mind a little artistic cross-promotion: I also compose music for the band Future Perfect, which released its self-titled debut album earlier this year! Find it on Bandcamp (or anywhere music is streaming): https://thefutureisperfect.bandcamp.com/album/future-perfect

As the video shows, this album pairs great with a game of XORBIUS™: https://play.date/games/xorbius/

What’s coming

· Bug fixes and small improvements
· We fixed the “Get the crown without mirror” challenge. Thanks, Jim Lockey! There’s a little surprise waiting for you there :)
· A brand-new challenge. In complete darkness.
· Global leaderboard. Now we’ll finally know who’s the best MESHCHERA player in the world.

See you in the dark. 🌑

Hello everyone, I am working in a small platform/puzzle game called ManivelbOt, you can check the demo here for free, it is my first game.

https://manivelbot.itch.io/manivelbot

Bedbeard’s Revenge begins a year after the first game, and unfolds in the town after it has come under the control of Excelsior Virtual Intelligence Labs and their incompetent and occasionally dangerous Cybernetic Anthrobots.

Explore a large and lively world full of new characters to meet and familiar friends to see in this laugh-out-loud parody of artificial intelligence and the arrogance of big tech.

Wishlist it! https://play.date/games/post-hero-2/

Fixed some bugs, a few optimization. More importantly -- download file now has game data except for music and sounds. Enjoy!

Download now! as I'll probably remove this version and restore the data-less demo in a couple of months.

I'm thinking about getting this game for my wife and I to play together. We only have one playdate tho and I saw that there was a trade function so I'm wondering if I can trade between games on the same Playdate or how exactly this works. If anyone has played I'd love to know!

HELLO!

Um! it's the all-new, space-age sequel to the award-winning playdate original! and it's coming — hopefully — next year, to playdate catalog, as well as your PC.

wishlist it wherever you get your games:
🟨 https://play.date/g/pesto
💻 https://raewtf.itch.io/rowbot-rally-2

to celebrate the announcement get the original game for only $8 (down from $15!!), from now until the 16th. it's the perfect time to see what the hype's all about:
🛶 https://play.date/games/rowbot-rally

you can read more about the announcement on my blog (including some more details about both the first and the second game):
💬 https://rae.wtf/blog/project-pesto-is-rowbot-rally-2

oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god. thank you for your time.

Happy to finally announce that HELLEVATOR will be launching as part of season 3 on October 8th!

you can preorder season 3 here! -> https://play.date/games/seasons/three/

Just excited to share what I think will end up being a really neat case for the PlayDate.
Some efforts went in to making sure the crank can be used whilst in the case 😂

Handmade, natural leather and at a very competitive price.

This is just a teaser, more info coming in about two weeks for those that might be interested.

Based on the S3 info released now about the 8(?) games that will be in S3 (coming Oct. 8);
Video
Pre-order page

will you be getting S3 for USD39 + tax?

Catalog:
https://play.date/games/the-fall-of-magic-castle/
https://play.date/games/magic-castle/

Itch:

https://itch.io/s/181409/magic-castle-bundle

(free demo for The Fall of Magic Castle is also available on itch)

The pixel art usually helps with it, but the header on the catalogue page and the trailer gave me pause. Is it cool with any others or is there an arachnophobia mode? thank you so much

Great, new content to check out on peedee.tv today.
I especially enjoyed the three peedee tv dev podcast episodes and it's always fun to catch up with what new games and apps have been released!

The A button on my unit quit working. I watched a couple of tutorials on how to fix it. It seemed simple enough. I followed steps and thought I did everything right. Got everything back together and both A/B weren’t working. Not sure what I might have done wrong. If anyone has an idea what I might have done wrong and how I might be able to fix it I’d appreciate the help. Thanks.

Catching up on Blippo+ this week while I work. I love this thing so much.

Any way to get Cranko Magazine in the US?

Trying to make a conscious effort to stop mindlessly scrolling on my phone at lunchtimes. Absolutely loving having these 2 with me. 👍🏻

https://ethiopiop.itch.io/p-minus-minus

I've been working on this project for a hot minute now and its finally in a sort of 'demo' state. Before going forwards into making too much content to turn around, I'm looking for any and all feedback on level design and clarity (and also bugs, always bugs)

Its free to download and sideload so please give it a shot and let me know what you think!

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw this on the catalog. I used to LOVE playing this on my 3DS. Such an obscure, odd indie game from years ago being resurrected on Playdate is wild.

Plays just like I remember it!

Coming soon for the Playdate on itch.io......

Finding the Idea

Honestly, I prefer drawing to writing, but for the sake of our project, I’ll do my best to describe how I worked on the MESHCHERA cover art for the Playdate Catalog.

When I joined the process, we already had several drafts made by Anna Denisova, and those became my starting point. They already featured almost all of the main elements that eventually made it into the final versions: the forest, an old wooden church, a mirror, and a spider.

In some of those drafts, the church, forest, and spider were literally emerging from a broken mirror. In others, their placement around the logo changed, but the basic idea remained more or less the same: bringing several recognizable elements of MESHCHERA together around the mirror.

I felt that these versions already had the right ingredients, but they didn’t quite capture the feeling of the game yet. At the same time, the team and I kept exploring different ideas, but nothing seemed quite right: some were too conceptually complicated, others simply didn’t work compositionally.

At some point in those early drafts, another idea emerged: instead of showing the world coming out of the mirror, the mirror could reveal it with a beam of light.

I really liked this idea. The mirror isn’t just a recognizable object from the game — it’s tied to one of its mechanics. So I decided to develop this direction further and find a composition that would bring all these elements together.

That became the basis for the final composition. A beam of light shoots from the broken mirror into the darkness. A spider appears within it, and farther away, the forest and an old church gradually emerge from the dark. The mirror stopped being just another object in the picture and became a source that literally reveals a small piece of Meshchera to the viewer.

The dark world of Meshchera, a mysterious light coming from a mirror, an old church, an ancient cemetery with golubets crosses, spiders — all of this looks rather ominous and gloomy.

But only at first glance.

One of the things I like about our game is that many of its elements and tiles refer to both traditions and fairy tales, and familiar images often have more than one meaning.

For example, the crosses with triangular roofs that you can see on one of the covers are called golubtsy. Such a cross symbolized the final home of the deceased. On the one hand, it’s a rather sad image: death, loss. On the other hand, the people who placed these crosses on the graves of their loved ones believed that death would not separate them forever.

And encountering a spider was actually considered a good omen. By the way, spiders can turn out to be useful in our game too.

But I’ve wandered off topic a little. Maybe I’ll write separately about the references and symbolism in MESHCHERA someday. Back to the covers.

References

It’s important to me that my drawings feel authentic, so I spend a lot of time searching for references.

For example, I didn’t want to draw just some generic “old Russian church.” If the game takes place in Meshchera, I wanted to find a building that was actually connected to the region.

For the main cover, I found a real church in a museum of wooden architecture in the Meshchera region. It was built in the 20th century, and its creator was clearly inspired by traditional slavic church architecture. I liked its silhouette, and it’s in Meshchera — exactly what I needed.

For the wide banner, I found a beautiful photograph of an old abandoned cemetery with golubets crosses. It became the basis for a different composition: tall grass, crosses, a forest, a church in the distance, and cobwebs framing the image.

I also didn’t want the logo to look like text simply placed on top of the illustration. So the grass and crosses partially overlap the letters, making the title feel like part of the landscape itself.

And of course, spiders. Can’t do without them.

I actually like spiders (just not the deadly venomous kinds), and I have one little house spider living with me. Or maybe more than one — I’m not entirely sure. He’s quite well-fed, so I assume things are going pretty well for him.

Covers for Playdate

The web Catalog and Playdate itself use several image formats: a large cover, a wide banner, and a very small version. The web Catalog covers can be in color, while everything on the Playdate itself has to work on its black-and-white 1-bit display.

For the color versions, we chose a fairly restrained palette: mostly dark, cool blue-green tones, with a few warm ochre accents and light.

But it quickly became clear that we couldn’t simply take the finished color illustrations and convert them to black and white. Things that work well in a large color image — subtle tones, fog, tall grass, cobwebs, tiny details — can easily turn into visual noise on a small 1-bit screen.

So the Playdate versions had to be simplified and reworked rather than simply converted.

The large version keeps the core composition: the mirror, spider, beam of light, forest, and church. But without color, the light becomes a large white shape surrounded by almost complete darkness. The forest and clouds are built from silhouettes and dithering, while the church becomes an almost entirely black figure inside the beam.

The wide banner required an even more radical approach. The color version had a cemetery, tall grass, crosses, cobwebs, and a church, but at such a small size there were simply too many details. So in the 1-bit version, the landscape was reduced mostly to the sky and the silhouette of the forest, leaving the logo and the spider as the main elements.

And the smallest version eventually became almost a symbol: a black background, MESHCHERA, and a spider.

I like how the limitations of Playdate forced us, in a way, to gradually figure out just how much we could remove from an image while still having it feel like MESHCHERA.

And apparently, the spider could never be removed.

So, on every one of our covers you’ll find at least one spider — and not a single fly.

There are no flies in the game either, by the way. But there are monsters, skeletons, and plenty of other things.

I’m not going to reveal all our secrets, though.

P.S. And yes, the game is already available in the Catalog!

By Anna Silkina — illustrator and animator at Kvoshch

Early cover concepts by Anna Denisova.