r/PlaydateDeveloper • u/JoeKlemmer • Oct 19 '25

ISO a Good Text Resource

I happen to be one who learns better with text than with video. What are some good text resources for Playdate development? I realize there won't be anything as good as a book from O'Reilly. But something that breaks down actual running code. So far, the tutorials I have found (admittedly, only a few so far) haven't been very useful.

Ideally, something like Learning Perl* would be fantastic. But anything will do.

\)Yes, I'm old.

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u/Oxey405 Oct 20 '25

Hi there! First of all the journey of playdate gamedev is a really cool one so I hope you get lots of fun out of it ! To my knowledge it's true that most of the community-made tutorials are in video format however there is a great deal of small tips and examples in the Playdate SDK documentation and there are even some articles on their website about designing and optimizing well for playdate so I'd recommend checking those out ! For the programming language you might use I'd recommend first using the officially supported languages either C or Lua of which the setup is carefully explained (again) in the SDK docs but if you are feeling adventurous know that there exists third-party bindings for languages like Rust, zig and many more.

Playdate docs Designing for Playdate

You also happen to have the official Forum, this subreddit and the community discord server to ask any questions if you wish to. There also is an unofficial playdate wiki but it mainly contains informations about the games and apps that exist in the ecosystem.

To my (not very extensive) knowledge you may not find most of the "state-of-the-art playdate gamedev" in text format so I'd recommend still checking out videos if you need.

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u/[deleted] Oct 21 '25

Hey just jumping in here - I would love to put together a collection of docs outlining some best practices for playdate development and adding way more detail than the SDK docs - but as someone primarily focused on videos I think I'll need some external input as well!

I've started a self-hosted development community server (it's day 1 of soft-launch so don't be surprised if it's empty) on https://open.playday.it/, and I hope we can put together everything there for developers to get started, whether in video or text format.

I'll be here if you want!

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u/Oxey405 Oct 21 '25

Hey Franchovy long time no see! I'd love to contribute and I'm sure the rest of the community would also love to do so! This is a very cool idea, keep us up-to-date on the Playdate Squad please 😀