Comment by msephton

9 months ago

I use Lua & Love2D to make games with a similar ethos. Being able to set my own constraints is fun, and that's what game dev is about for me. As soon as something stops being fun, I know I'm doing it wrong and there must be a better way.

My game YOYOZO is a tiny 39KB but made it to Ars Technica's "Best Games of 2023" list alongside heavyweights like Super Mario Wonder and Tears of the Kingdom! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38372936

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msephton

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hbn  9 months ago

Hey I recognize that game, great work!

I've had my Playdate for a couple years but it was only this past weekend I finally got inspired to start playing around with the SDK like I've been telling myself I would since I bought the thing.

I had never used Lua prior to now so that's also part of the learning experience. I'd really like some strong typing and some other language safety features, but it's good for what it needs to do. So far all I've made is a little tech demo of text that rotates around in fake 3D space in relation to the crank, like the iOS options picker. Clip here:

https://bsky.app/profile/haydenblai.se/post/3lpgnya4cqk2a

The other thing I learned from this project is I forgot more trigonometry skills than I thought in my years of CRUD/webapp development.

One of the best things about developing for Playdate is how freeing it is to have a fixed canvas that you're drawing to. I'm so used to having to make all my UIs responsive, I love being able to just position something at a pixel value and know it'll work on everyone's device.