After 3 years, Playdate is still the best secret ever in games

“Panic gave the platform a fun and friendly personality from the beginning, and strengthened the openness that is not owned by other platforms, allowing anyone to provide cheap games and easily with a variety of different tools,” says Nicolas Kokachro, a veteran developer and software engineer. After working on Red Dead Redemption 2He created his studio Sugar In 2022, “to explore options for making private play: smaller in the range but still polished, and is focused on interesting mechanics in hope.”

Besides the wife Kimberly, Cocchiaro develops The groove agentsThe upcoming rhythm game “which depends on the story” is scheduled to be exclusive. “For us, openness represented an opportunity to dive into it, learn the best way to collect the game together, and put our art in the world,” he says. “The relative youth of the platform and the SDK, as well as its intense experimental nature, put some road barriers on our way. But I like to think that through our experience and cooperation with the developer community, we helped us make development tools and the strongest platform.”

With permission from Panic Inc.

Both the unique shape factor and the restrictions of Playdate devices are part of the call for some developers.

Ludovic Bas, founder of Indie Studio says Lugludum. “Since I surrendered to Scope Creep in the past, I thought Playdate could put me on the right track.

It is appropriate, the first BAS ‘game for Playdate, 2024’s ScrollIt was very experimental. It is a series of Microgames games that take advantage of the memories of old games, and it is also a puzzle box, similar to players to find out any features of Playdate devices, including the acceleration scale and microphone, to use it to master each one. BAS calls it “not really marketable, which is a specialized game on a specialized platform”, but it is also something that can only be found in Playdate. His latest game, CRANKSTONEThis experimental series continues, as the wild West shooter advanced Warroer-Style minigames.

Community

Another factor has kept playing strong over the past three years is a dedicated society. This is partially by design – the Panic Weekly Games was made to make the water of the water where the players discussed titles every week. It was not completely unprecedented, as the supply problems mean that the first adopters did not necessarily get their keyboards at the same time, and jumping now means losing what I cannot imagine except that it shares Blippo+ Until it was.

A prosperous fan scene has appeared though, one of them is vibrant enough to justify at least two dedicated printed adornments, Uncrank’d and Kranko!Annual societal awards, with a regular subject Game jam. The latter is especially important for developers, not only as a means of refining their talents and displaying them, but because the base of fans to play is keen to put money in the pockets of creators.