Useful Links for Playdate Development

Amazing people around the world are putting together video tutorials, code libraries, and other helpful resources for Playdate developers. Here’s our roundup of some we’ve seen. Please note that this information doesn’t come from Panic, and it’s not an officially supported part of the Playdate SDK.

• The Complete Beginners Guide to Playdate Game Development by SquidGod. Complete tutorial on making games for Playdate using Lua and the Playdate SDK. Covers environment setup, code, and helpful resources.

• Getting Started with the Playdate SDK: Setup and Basics by SquidGod. 12-minute video on setting up the Playdate SDK for Windows and putting together a simple game.

• Everything About Playdate SDK Collisions in 7 Minutes by SquidGod. 7-minute video on collisions.

• Object Oriented Programming for the Playdate SDK by SquidGod. 13-minute video on object oriented programming for Playdate.

• Making a Roguelike for the Playdate by SquidGod. 3-minute video starting a development log for this game project.

• The Beginner’s Guide to Lua for Game Development by SquidGod. A book that will take you from a complete beginner to knowing the basics of coding in Lua.

• SquidGod’s YouTube channel has more Playdate tutorials!

• Compiling Lua projects on Windows by Tim Hei.

• Playdate game development in C by Alberto Benavent Ramón. 87-page PDF of a Bachelor’s Thesis in Multimedia Engineering.

Libraries

• Timeline for Playdate by Dustin Mierau. A Lua library designed to make it easier to compose animations and events in your game code over time. See some of Dustin’s remarkable animations at work in Playmaker.

• Noble Engine by Mark LaCroix. A li’l game engine for Playdate.

• AnimatedSprite by Whitebrim. Sprite class extension that covers animations, finite state machine, and JSON loading.

• Taxman Engine by Jussi Enroos. 2D Game Engine for Playdate and other platforms.

• Panels by Cadin Batrack. Build interactive comics for the Playdate console.

• A list of helpful libraries and code by Dev Forum members. A thread of helpful libraries and small bits of code, started and maintained by our Dev Forum members.

Coding Tools

• Playdate Debug for VS Code by midouest. Unofficial Playdate debug extension for Visual Studio Code on macOS, Windows and Ubuntu.

• VS Code Playdate Template (Windows & Linux) by Whitebrim. A template for autocompletion and running your code in the Playdate Simulator on Windows and Linux.

• Playdate VS Code Template (Mac) by Cadin Batrack. VS Code template with tasks for building and running in Playdate simulator on macOS.

• Playdate Types by Benjamin Dumke-von der Ehe. Type annotations for the Playdate Lua SDK.

• LuaCATS by Peter Tripp. LuaCATS is a way to provide machine-readable Lua type annotations and comments, enabling inline autocompletion and linting suggestions.

Graphics & Fonts

• Caps by Panic. Panic’s official bitmap-font editor for Playdate fonts. Draw your own typographic characters, edit existing fonts, kern and preview them—all right here.

• Playdate Arcade Fonts by Jan T. Sott. A growing collection of bitmap fonts based on classic arcade games.

• Playdate Art: Scale by Donald Hays. Thoughts and observations on Playdate art, with a focus on choosing the size to make your art tiles and sprites.

• Tophat by Kaasiand. A powerful tool to create bitmap fonts for use with the Playdate SDK.

• PDFontTool by Takuya. Command line tool for Windows that converts Windows-supported fonts such as TrueType Font, OpenType Font, etc. into fonts for Playdate.

Languages

• Byte-sized Swift: Building Tiny Games for the Playdate by the Swift Team. The Swift team’s new embedded language support means you can target platforms like Playdate via Swift.

• PlaydateKit by Finn Voorhees. Swift bindings for the Playdate C SDK.

• Playdate-C++ by Metaphaseaudio. C++ on playdate.

• Playdate C++ Extensions by Metaphaseaudio. Classes and functions to assist with development for the Playdate in C++.

• Rust for Playdate by Rob Tsuk and Alexander Koz. “A barely functional, wildly incomplete and basically undocumented Rust crate whose aim is to let you write Games for the Playdate handheld gaming system in Rust.”

• Nim Playdate by Samuele Zolfanelli. Nim bindings with extra features for the Playdate SDK.

Pulp

• PulpScript: A Beginner’s Guide by SquidGod. 13-minute video tutorial on the basics of PulpScript, from how PulpScript interacts with the rest of Pulp to programming basics.

• Make an Adventure Game for the Playdate using Pulp by SquidGod. 15-minute video tutorial on making a simple adventure game with health, hazards, locked doors, and more.

• Making a Simple Enemy AI and Attack System by SquidGod. 6-minute video tutorial.

• Making Pong in Pulp by Andrew Loebach.

• Text input with an onscreen keyboard by Talon Jay.

• Aseprite script to export multi-tile animations to Pulp by Kleist.

• How-to: Drawing frames from a single tile by Ledbetter.

• How-to: ice and conveyor belt tiles for sliding puzzles by orkn.

• How-to tag on the Playdate Dev Forum

Devlogs

• Atlantic ‘41 by Stephan Rewind. A tremendously detailed World War 2 U-boat simulation.

• Diora by Zachary Snyder. Devlog of an isometric 3D game.

• Mars After Midnight development log by Lucas Pope. Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn’s creator’s posts about the development of his Playdate game.

• Daily Driver development log by Matt Sephton. Deep dives on a racing game.

• Pullfrog development log by Amano Games. Tetris meets frog.

Playdate Resources Elsewhere

• Playdate Stuff by Christina Warren. Cool Things for Panic’s Playdate.

• Awesome Playdate by Ben Menesini. A list of awesome resources for Playdate game development and the Playdate SDK.

• SDK Resources by Playdate Community Wiki. A list of resources that are available for free to help you with developing games on Playdate.