Playdate

I think the makers of the Playdate have always been pretty clear about what the console is about. [...] Which means there are some odd and interesting games on Playdate that probably wouldn't have existed otherwise. That's why I got one anyhow. ...Also it was $170 and came with 20 games when I got it (granted, the price has gone up since). [...] I get that could be a good amount of money to some people, but compared to other video games, I don't think it is.

They got a bunch of well known developers to build a collection of games, and deliver them to Playdate devices via wifi at a pace of 2 games per week (unless you choose to skip ahead). [...]

I just got The Moon Is Our Friend and I think it's a perfect Playdate game, at least for the kind of games I like to play on it (I don't care much for the more RPG/story-driven stuff). [...] I love the form factor of the device and I'm fine with a black and white concept, but the combination of screen size and the lack of a backlight does take some enjoyment out of it all that Mirror gave back.

Having made multiple (dare I say) fairly successful games on the Playdate, I can attest to how fantastic the developer experience has been and how easy it was for my non dev collaborators to get going. Pulp was a great in road for them to get started with game dev, and it's been a blast (despite how limiting Pulpscript is for a professional dev)

The Playdate is... [...] the gameboy or DS, so it's not particularly ergonomic. [...] It does not feel like good value for money. [...] I do hope they build a follow-up some day though - make it twice as big (at least), add a backlight, make turning it off more obvious, and give more clarity about the availability and cost of games.

The Playdate seems an ideal device for busy dads and mums who would pick it up to play a few games here and there and are into programming and maybe would like to teach their kids how to program. I've had a quick play with the tools and API Panic provides and they seem very, very good. [...] This seems to be the ideal target audience for a device like this, however at around £250 including delivery here in the UK it's wildly expensive and falls well outside the 'frivolous expense once in a while' range for most parents (I'd say it would be a stretch at £150). [...]

[...] There's also the Playdate console. [...] The console isn't cheap though, and it's easy to break (I dropped it on accident from about 2 feet up and its liquid crystal display cracked and leaked and had to be replaced, at almost the full cost of the console again), so they'd have to be careful with it. [...]

[...] The devkits I've developed for are literally 20-30$, both in 3.5 inch screen format, or smartwatch format, with a case, touchscreen, buttons, battery, realtime OS, RTC, wifi, tons of GPIO's etc. Only hardware things playdate has on top is marginally higher build quality, the swivel (that most games don't use) 10-20MB more RAM. Their decision to have a greyscale screen also saves them money, instead of a common full color one like those 30$ devkits have. So it is beyond obvious that Playdate's price does not even closely match their bill of materials. [...] I have one, and it works nicely as a linux box running any software one can get running on aarch64 linux. Mine is relatively fancy and with postage cost me 100$, but you can get a more "basic" one that is still way beyond Playdate on a hardware level, for about 40$. What playdate has is a walled garden. [...] You comparing to Nintendo's first-party joycon pricing, I'm not sure you understand how deep walled gardens can be.

[...] (I really like the crank in many games, but some games go out of their way to use it when they should have stuck to buttons.) Their decision to have a greyscale screen also saves them money, instead of a common full color one like those 30$ devkits have. ...but the PlayDate's screen doesn't look like a typical LCD. [...] (E-ink is even better, but the Playdate is maybe 60% of the way there.) I did some very quick Googling and it looks like this type of screen, at the PlayDate's size and resolution, costs about $30[1]. [...] You comparing to Nintendo's first-party joycon pricing, I'm not sure you understand how deep walled gardens can be. [...] I've used third party Switch controllers, and they don't feel as nice—I'm paying for quality. (Admittedly I don't love how the PlayDate buttons feel either, they're fine, not Nintendo quality!) I do agree that the Playdate is a game console, and when you buy a game console you're paying for the cohesive ecosystem. [...] I'm not entirely satisfied with my Playdate btw, because I don't love the game library. But it's cute and I really like the software (not the games specifically), I'm a sucker for UIs that are polished to an extreme level. [...]

I reversed Super Hexagon these last few weeks and ported it to the Playdate (the yellow console from Panic with a crank): The multiplier comes from being able to design arbitrary fast feedback loops - Claude wrote Python scripts to do decompilation matching for itself, and then use Frida traces from the original as a verification harness.

Very long-time lurker here; I made an account specifically to say what I am about to say: I am so sick of gameboy-style devices only ever having two buttons without a start, select or literally anything else. Playdate did the same thing and it makes games really super infuriating because nobody wants to perform a hadouken just to open a gosh-darn pause menu. I'm exaggerating of course but good lord please just give me a dedicated pause button.

Playdate (the came console) is amazing for this! I was really bored once and built a Claude Code remote control for Playdate. [...] \ - hold A to speak - move the crank slowly to navigate - crank super fast to send the prompt Eventually this became a universal remote control for the computers in my home (YAML file with bindings from Playdate UI → A11y events). [...]

[...] The Playdate has bespoke games designed for it, and many people say it's worth the price. [...] I use it to have fun, and (for me at least) a huge part of that is UI and ease-of-use.

I had some good fun writing non-gaming apps for the playdate console including a browser [1] and Kagi news mirror [2] and feel the device has great potential as an alternative to android/iOS duopoly [1]: [2]:

[...] I once put the Janet programming language on the Playdate game console as POC. [...]

My Playdate survival game, Plight of the Wizard[0], which uses the crank for aiming spells. I've had a ton of fun doing performance improvements, and now I'm implementing an upgrade system. [0]:

I've been enjoying seeing how far people have been pushing the Playdate's hardware.

I got a tariff refund for my Playdate and that was a lovely surprise

[...] Them not being able to have playdates being some generational trauma is nonsense. [...]

Playdate feels like a Louis Vuitton bag in that you buy it not because you need a bag but because you want a fancy luxury good that feels good for you to own. [...] When I got my kid a Scratch + JS game dev handheld I found a dozen options with varying pros and cons. But the petty, small part of me has this itch where I’m unnecessarily concerned that Playdate might actually believe it’s not just a Louis Vuitton bag and that it actually is a sensibly practical purchase. [...]

I really wanted to like the Playdate but it's such an unbelievably overpriced and underspecced toy. But the crank, which really looked like a gimmick, is oddly quite nice to have and I wish my kids' Retro Arcade had one.

My playdate has been collecting dust since I got it and the initial few games I tried didn't stick. Any suggestions on good games for it?

One more thing, I tried to get a tiled "dungeon" floor for a PlayDate program proof of concept and I was not prepared for true 1 bit graphics. I'll further modify the (nice) sprite sheets I bought, but my first attempt at doing it was so dark - Oil Slick, the game, accidentally, natch

WM psychosis time: My current "WM workflow"/window management keyboard shortcuts is: neovim → tmux → Ghostty → Rectangle → OS so moving to the left window/pane is (depending on the "nesting level"): ctrl+h, ctrl+a + {number}, cmd + [, option-ctrl-left, ?? [...] Unfortunately, at this stage, my overthinking/poor ux induced psychosis reached the point where I control Claude using voice and a Playdate console with a crank and I'm day dreaming about just looking at the pane I need and making a click sound with my mouth to select it (like Neddy in Adventure time).