Playdate developers explain why they're all-in on the niche gaming handheld.
Panic’s Playdate handheld is unlike any other video game system. It has ample storage and supports Bluetooth, but also has a 400 x 240, 1-bit monochrome display and a crank on the side of the system. New platforms are always a risk to invest in, especially when they are as weird and gimmicky as Playdate.
“It was such a unique and cute-looking thing that we all became quite enamored by it!” he said. “The crank, super-crisp screen, and size make it the sort of device that you want to just pick up and play with all the time. So we wanted to make a simple game that you could pick up and play a few minutes at a time.”
Goddard would ultimately serve as lead programmer on this game, titled Whitewater Wipeout. It’s a simple, arcade-style surfing game where players perform tricks with the crank as they dodge a shark and try to get a high score. Players will get it as part of season 1 of Playdate’s game releases, which Panic recruited other notable developers for.
While the game initially featured humans, the idea came into its own when Serenity Forge decided to change the characters to penguins that Zhang says are a better fit for the “quirky, fun nature of the Playdate.” This game would become Flipper Lifter, a Playdate season 1 title that Zhang produced. He also provided the voice of the penguins.
Once RNG Party Games games got access to development tools, it prototyped lots of ideas but scrapped many of them. Eventually, RNG Party Games returned to an idea it’d had for a while: A real-time idle game where players tend to a garden. This concept became Bloom, a narrative-driven game that plays out in real time where players manage a flower shop, garden, and text their family. Bloom is one of the most ambitious launch games for the Playdate as it asks players to return to it day after day.
“It can be hard keeping the frame rate fast enough for the action to be smooth, especially when you have lots of sprites appearing on screen, so sometimes you have to think outside of the box when it comes to how to do things,” Goddard explained. “For instance, because the surfboard is quite large and can be rotated to any angle, we actually prerender all the orientations to separate images when the game boots up. That frees up tons of CPU to do other things like physics or drawing sprites.
“Bloom’s best input device is time,” White adds. The three-person team also explained that playtesting was tough because they only had one device to share. Playing it on the system also helped them realize they needed to enlarge and make everything in Bloom readable on the system’s tiny screen. In total, White estimates Bloom took around seven months to create.
“We’ve already finished a new game — this time using a snowboard instead of a surfboard,” Goddard says. “I’d love to continue making games for the Playdate as it’s such a fun device to develop for.”
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