I’m making a Playdate game

I’ve been working on a Playdate for the past year and a half and I figured it’s about time I talk at least a little about it.

I’ve started making this game at the end of 2024, when I received the little console as a much-appreciated gift. It’s a lot of fun to develop for such a tiny platform!

The SDK feels minimal in a good way, in that it lets you focus on developing the game without extra steps or complications. The limited power of the console forces you not to overscope and it challenges you both on a creative and a technical level. Best of all, you can develop the entire game in C without extra bells and whistles.

In other words, Playdate is great!

The game

The game (name to be disclosed in a future post) may be categorized as an action shooter with stealth elements. You control Holly, an ultra-skilled special agent at the service of an unspecified government’s military. She’s also a goat.

Here’s a brief video of how the game looks and plays (some of the art is still temporary):

Your mission is to recapture a top-secret military base from the hands of a terrorist group known as the Cyber Lizards. The game loop is as simple as “kill enemies, reach the exit, repeat”, but the fun comes from the many ways you end up approaching every level, depending on the set of weapons and armor that you get at the start.

You can find and pickup weapons inside some levels too.

There are three different game modes:

• “Arcade mode” (which I consider the main one): go through as many levels as you can with a randomized set of weapons/armor each time; get points by killing enemies and survive;
• “Daily run”: like Arcade mode but you get an attempt per day and a fixed seed.
• “Story mode”: a fixed series of levels with a fixed set of weapons, where the first few levels also double as a tutorial for the game. In this mode you get nice dialogues too!

Two words in retrospect

Initially, my idea was to create a very simple game that I could finish in a few months just to get my feet wet with the console. Needless to say, I didn’t manage to stick to that commitment and the game grew fairly large compared to my initial plans. Before I could help it I found myself with three different game modes and a custom level editor. I guess that’s just what happens with my hobby projects.

I might write a little post about the editor as well in the future, but for now I just wanted to introduce the actual game. I’ll give more details about this whole project in the next few months, but for now I’m mostly focusing on getting it done. I’m working on this as a side project, so unfortunately time is limited. But I’m getting there!

Status and next steps

The game systems are basically all in place and the game is already fully-playable, both story and arcade. I will probably add a few more story levels, but the bulk of the work is done on that front. The main missing things right now are some of the visuals and most of the audio.

I’ve been working on this game in my spare time almost entirely by myself for the past 2 years and a half, but I have recently started recruiting a few people to help me with audio and art. I want this game to be more than just a hobby project and that includes giving it a proper, professionally-made original soundtrack as well as really nice sounds and illustrations. Commissioning other professionals for a project of my making is a first for me and, even though we’re still at the beginning, what they gave me already makes me really excited to see how much better the game will sound with their help!

If I manage to get my game onto the official Catalog, I’m planning to integrate the Playdate Scoreboards system, so you can compete with other players for fun and profit. This will make things much more interesting, especially for Daily runs!

Release date

I have no established release date yet, but I am targeting end of 2026 or first half of 2027. More news will come as progress is made. Stay tuned!