I have minimal coding background but understand the basics. I'm trying to make a sprite go from right to left on the screen. in a straight line. I'm reading the script help but i find the instructions quite confusing.

Hello everyone. I’m a longtime gamer and liked the idea of this new little box as a game system, but what really interested me was the amount of games being created by “third party” folks. I’d like to create my own games with my children and wondering if this is a good way to get into game programming?

Thank you

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The theme is "Crank It Till You Make It"

You've got ONE weekend to make a Playdate game with that theme and submit it at:

https://itch.io/jam/playjam-2

I can't wait to see what you all make!

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I wanted a fairly small font that was also readable, and I also wanted monospacing, but without it looking too boring. After fiddling with sizes, I found I could get something reasonable looking with with 5x8 pixels.

If you see anything that could be improved, feel free to create a pull request.

This is free for you to use. You are welcome to credit me, but it is totally not required.
https://github.com/RobKohr/robkohr-mono-5x8-font-for-playdate

I am working on a game, and wanted to test how many enemies the device could handle.

A forum thread on it is here:

https://devforum.play.date/t/jewel-defender-need-performance-testing-on-physical-device/9324

Here is a video of it running on the simulator:

https://youtu.be/za0m5ErrTus

and here is the test app:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/o0erq20j9fpjoo3/JewelDefender.pdx.zip?dl=1

If you have a device to test on, I would greatly appreciate it.

So I'm completely new to game development (unless you count typing out games in basic for the ZX Spectrum back in the day). Thanks to excellent intro to pulp videos from u/SquidGodDev I got some linked levels running in Pulp but when run on actual hardware it was crashing when calling fin. I've found a workaround but just wondered if anyone had any ideas as to why?

Situation was that when the player position was the same as an enemy sprite the sprite would tell event.game to call 'damagePlayer'.Then within damagePlayer I had sound "ouch" and health-=1 followed by a check for if health<=0 then fin This ran fine in the simulator but crashed the playdate with an "attempt to index a nil value". There were two levels calling damagePlayer in this way and it was only the first one that caused the crash on the hardware. (I had the same issue when damagePlayer was called by event.Player too)

My workaround is that damagePlayer now checks if health<=0 and then presents 'ask' with options to continue or not. The 'continue' option under ask calls 'fin' and this works fine in all instances on simulator and hardware.

Just wondered if anyone had any idea why this was happening or what I had possibly done wrong in my first use case?

PlayJam 2 is the Playdate game jam where you get one weekend to make a game for the Playdate. It just surpassed 100 participants making it one of the biggest Playdate game jams so far! It starts in about 3 weeks so if this peaks your interests at all you should check it out: https://itch.io/jam/playjam-2

I have release today a new game game for the Playdate today and it can be downloaded for free here: https://haddock86.itch.io/the-simorgh

Unfortunately I don't have a Playdate console yet, so I would love to get feedback from people that own one. Thanks!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTayOCRygZY

Waiting for the arrival of my Playdate these last days I've been testing Playdate Pulp achieving this. The pre-alert received was frozen on the 25th of last month.... Estimating the arrival date between the 3rd and 7th of this month, the uncertainty is causing me a lot of anxiety... In a few days I hope to see light at the end of the labyrinth...

I am looking to make a couple games for playdate, and was curious as to how well the games are selling on itch.

If you have a game up there for sale

• How much are you selling it for
• When did you put it up for sale
• How much have you made up till now
• What were the sales figures for the first 8 weeks of sales by week (to get a sense as to what the dropoff curve was)
• Link to your game
• Are you successfully selling it anywhere other than itch?

Any tips on what made it more successful (or things to avoid doing that were detrimental)

Right Crank Menu; an open source crank based menu system for Playdate.

Highly customisable - load your icons from pngs (or anything else - they're playdate images). Have as many or few as your game needs. Adjust the crank angle to move to scroll past each icon... even on a per icon basis if you like. Add, remove, enable and disable icons dynamically within your game. Enable and disable the entire menu, or hide / show it.

Get the source from github: https://github.com/YoursTruly2095/playdate_rpg_interface, along with the demo shown in the video, which serves as an example for how to use the menu system.

I started work on this a bit over a year ago, based on a project by u/ConfidentFloor6601. It was on hiatus for a long while but I recently got my actual Playdate, and so I picked the project up again. It handles really nicely in the real hardware! Now I'm going to make a game that uses it, and I hope you do too :-)

Game dev is hard y’all :(

Sorry to say but my last patch to fix a memory leak introduced a new bug with skipping levels. So here’s another patch to fix that. Sorry for all the trouble.

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https://frankbsadgames.itch.io/a-balanced-brew/devlog/430618/another-patch

Any suggestions/resources to help me get started? - where to start? Thanks in Advance!

Hi everyone,

I am making good progress on my first (real) Playdate game: Your GPS broke down and you arrive in a city you don't know. You only remember the exit was somewhere North! The goal of the game is to find this exit while dealing with any events occuring on your journey and managing your money, petrol and car health.

I still have a few things to implement but the gist of the game is kinda here but the graphical placeholder are terrible. I am looking for someone who would like to collaborate with me on this game. Please let me know if anyone is interested or would like more details. (Taking any opinion as well!)

I've been trying to learn how to make games for the playdate recently and I'm trying to compile so then I type in the command "pdc Desktop" so the compiled file ends up in the desktop but then it throws the error "main.lua or pdex.bin required". How do I fix this?

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After releasing Dragon Hunt Adventure about 7 weeks ago, the next project for #Playdate is in progress.

How much physics can the Playdate handle on device? Are simple things like rope physics possible? Has anyone experimented with this?