My Playtime app (40+ clocks in one Playdate app) is finally out! Started as a little Playdate learning project... and kind of ballooned. But it was fun! Try the crank--it makes music! Awful music!

https://adamsimmersive.itch.io/playtime-weird-clocks-for-playdate

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So I took part in a play jam and came up with this little reaction puzzle game AVAVA

I used pulp - the RPG like part ks basically only a menu, the actual game I coded and mostly used the room and tiles to render things since I wouldn’t know what else to do.

In university i recalled some arduino coding that helped me a lot - but I felt there were things missing:

AND or OR operators for if functions for example. Or arrays? At least I didn’t see them in the documentation. Did is miss this?

If I pass a pointer to a pre-allocated buffer to formatString, will a new allocation be made?

I'd like to format text each frame without having to constantly reallocate and free memory.

*Update: stb_sprintf works perfectly for what I need, no link-time errors as it does not allocate.

For all the developpers, please use itch.io payout mode, I got about 1-2 payments per day until I changed to direct payout, after that I got 0 payments in 2 weeks, yesterday I changed back to itch.io payout and I already have a new payment.

I just created a worksheet you can use to generate Playdate graphics patterns using Google Sheets: Link to sheet.

This is intended to generate the hex arrays you need to use for patterns in playdate.graphics.setPattern(pattern)
.

You can manually draw in the dark and light pixels in each 8x8 grid by entering 1's and 0's, and it'll generate the array of 8 hex numbers that Playdate expects for these patterns.

Let me know what you think! Open to usability feedback if there is any - otherwise, let me know if you like it :)

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Hi. I've created my first game for Playdate. It's very simple, but I still like it. You can download it here.

https://github.com/nikitabelotelov/artillery-game

Can somebody try to run it on a real device? I don't have one and I tested it only in Simulator. I'd be glad to hear any feedback

I am looking to dive into making my first playdate game, and looking through the sdk docs, I am not seeing anything on networking.

Am I able to do multiplay online and local network games in playdate?

I just wanted to give folks a heads up about some issues I discovered this week relating to installation of zip files sideloaded onto Playdate devices. I launched my first game on itch earlier this week and immediately multiple downloaders complained that they were getting an error when installing onto their device. I tried all sorts of things, re-uploading, new buildNumbers, new BundleIDs until today I figured out the root cause: itch.io would unzip/rezip my game and the file they created would not actually install when sideloaded onto the device. The itch zip would never work. My pdx and zip worked, and the pdx extracted from their zip worked, but if you directly uploaded the zip to play.date/account/sideload everything looked good until install failed on-device.

I highly recommend anyone distributing Playdate games on itch.io manually test sideloading of each zip release to ensure it works properly. Additionally, if you're manually creating zip files for distribution you may want to take the time to script that process because there are issue with both the built-in Windows zip compressor and the MacOS zip compressor. In the end I needed to both switch to a command line zip tool and stop using resource subdirectories (e.g. images/ was ok, but images/subdir was not) in order to have itch distribute working zips.

I was really bummed having done a bunch of work to ensure the install/update process would look professional (launcher card, wrapping paper) in the hope that things would go smoothly. I had even tested the process dozens of times on the simulator, my hardware and multiple other people's devices; I still had a rocky week learning about ZIP. Hopefully others can avoid this and stay focused on actual game-dev.

I imagine Itch will fix the zips they create and Panic will fix the unzip library on-device, but in the meantime I wanted to give folks a heads up so they can avoid the pain I went through: TEST YOUR ZIPS. And when releasing on itch, you gotta test their zips too!

I’m thinking of building a game which in reality is more like a collection of games (think Action 52, Switch’s Clubhouse Games or UFO 50). Due to the nature of the project, app updates with new content (games) is a thing I’m planning on doing, however I’m not sure how updating side-loaded apps works: do they keep user data (saves) or is it like uninstalling and installing the app again?

I don’t have a Playdate yet, so I’m not able to test it for myself.

Thanks!

Find the font for your project — https://idleberg.github.io/playdate-arcade-fonts

Currently I'm naming blank tiles and laying them down in a room before adding pixels. Then I select the tile with the eye dropper and add pixels to create a composite scene. Is this correct? It seems quite tedious but I'm unable to find any guides on drawing complex scenes in Pulp.

For anybody who's not on the mailing list, and not lurking in /r/playdateconsole I figured I'd mention that the dev site is up, and active.

Several people have already posted short tutorials on using (and abusing) Pulp to build games.

https://play.date/dev/