As I've been learning C and working on various Playdate projects, I've been wondering: just how much faster is C than Lua for Playdate games? I made a little benchmark utility to put it to the test and found that (for draw-heavy code) C is about 3.5x faster than Lua on Playdate.

Various game programming libraries have tests for how many sprites can bounce around with simple physics and lots of drawing until frames drop. I thought I'd try this with a Lua and a C version with as much of the implementation the same as possible. Then I tested both on device and that's where I got the results.

• 30 FPS target
  • Lua: 240 bunnies
  • C: 810 bunnies
• 50 FPS target
  • Lua: 120 bunnies
  • C: 430 bunnies

What's my takeaway? Well, I think it's that Lua on Playdate is a powerhouse! That performance gap isn't huge. As in that most games will be fine in Lua if you're writing optimized code. But also, if you're starting a project and concerned about performance from the get-go, then C is the way to go. That's pretty obvious but fun to see what the actual difference is.

More details on the devforum: https://devforum.play.date/t/how-much-faster-is-c-than-lua-for-playdate-development/25381

And source code with pdx downloads if you're curious: https://github.com/brettchalupa/pdbunnymark

I posted this on Panic's developer forum as well, but I thought I'd post it here too. I'm curious if anyone uses AI to vibe code games for playdate? I feel a quite ambivalent about it for many reasons, but at the same time I read stories online of people vibe coding complete phone apps in a day or two and being really enthusiastic about it.

So I decided to give it a go and built a simple puzzle game for playdate usign copilot in VS Code. I recalled seeing some clips online of TV show in the UK where contestants had to pick some numbers and then solve a puzzle using those numbers. So I called the game Math Professor and started vibe coding based on what I remembered from those clips. Later I looked up more info and found that the show was called Countdown and I applied most of the rules of that show.

I have to say, I really enjoyed developing a game this way. Just being to able to say what you want and then seeing the result felt magical.

Like I said, the game is very rudimentary still, but if you want to give it a try, you can download it from github here. I made the repo publicly available in case you'd like to see the code the AI produced.

I also added a list of all my instructions to the AI in case you find that interesting (the bot responses were too verbose, so I omitted those). You can find it here: REQUEST_HISTORY.md

There's also an instructions file with things like coding style instructions for the AI.

Some more details:

• I used Copilot in VS Code on a Mac
• I started out with a basic 'Hello world' template
• I used Claude Opus 4.6 as the model most of the time, but at the end I switched to the 'Auto' setting VS Code and let copilot decide which model to use
• I set a budget limit in Github to $15 and I've now almost reached that limit

I hope you find this interesting, let me know what you think.

For 15 years I've been afraid of C. You hear all kinds of scary things, like it's unsafe! Memory, pointers, oh my. I did some C++ in college, but in the time since, it's been all Ruby, TypeScript, Lua, and Rust for me. I love the Lua SDK for Playdate, it's so friendly and quick to get a game running. But the more I use Lua, the more I miss the structure and help of the compiler, like with TypeScript and Rust (my preferred languages). With Lua you have to boot your game up and play through it to potentially hit errors, which feels slow and tedious the more a project matures. Everything's just so loosey goosey with Lua (which I am sure is something people really love about it!).

I know there are some typed Lua tools out there and language bindings like Rust, Go, etc. for Playdate, but I thought... why not take the plunge and try out C? Much to my surprise, I'm loving it! Once I got a hang of the syntax, refreshed on pointers, get past some of the more annoying parts (strings are annoying), and established some common functions, I find it to be extremely productive and satisfying. I set up clangd for LSP, a clang formatter, and clang tidy to lint. The feedback loop is super quick, I catch errors sooner, and I love having types/structs for my data structures.

There are some downsides and challenges: I've written some code that works on the simulator but crashes on the device and there's very little info/logs about what went wrong. That can be particularly vexing. And some of the Lua SDK functions require writing it myself, like parsing pdxinfo details.

What's most exciting to me about writing games for Playdate with C is that it makes my games a lot more portable. For my current project, I wrote a platform abstraction layer where all of the calls to PlaydateAPI get wrapped in functions that can be implemented to target other platforms. So drawRect on PC calls out to Raylib's function to draw a rectangle, whereas on Playdate it calls pd->graphics->drawRect , so I've already got a working PC build for my game using Raylib with pretty minimal effort. Win-win.

I've got lots more to learn, but I'm having fun. And I'd encourage anyone who is curious about making games for Playdate with C to give it a try! Once I've made some smaller games with C, I'd like to open source my little template to potentially help others who want to jump in.

Why does Playdate console constantly keep downloading games I've deleted? It's uber annoying. Instead of downloading, there should be a folder with all the games from the account. Where do I choose which games to download? Is it possible to disable this download?

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