I made this some time ago but never blogged about it. Unfortunately, I lost some of the source code, but that would be easy to rebuild.

I decided to check what were the development options for the Playdate handheld console by Panic after receiving an email from them (I’m on the mailing list for the device). The offering is just too damn polished. Check out Develop for Playdate page. Like everything Panic does, it is damn well done.

You can use the SDK to develop using C or Lua or a combination of both. They also offer an web IDE called Pulp that is similar to a pico-8 development workflow with tools for crafting fonts, screens, sprites, audio, and scripting.

I went ahead and downloaded the SDK. I already had a license for Nova — which is the fancy development editor they make — and they ship lots of integrations for that editor with the SDK. Everything works out of the box.

This is an example source loaded in Nova (using the Playdate theme and the extension). I’m using the editor task system to run the sample in the included emulator. It just works…

I might be coding a gamebook engine for the Playdate… that was not in my strategy post, but the muse calls me and it is rude not to answer her call.

And this is what my gamebook editor looks like: