Hello Playdate!
It took a long time. Now it’s here!
When I tried to pre-order the Playdate on July 29, 2021, everything went wrong. Immediately, however, an old friend of mine who got lucky offered to lend me his prospective Playdate for the winter term, and then Panic’s support desk saved the day and “bummed me into a 2021 bucket, given the issues.” Both of which brightened my day.
My original plan was to offer students at the Cologne Game Lab an exciting option for self-initiated projects that I could mentor (fifth term-students, winter term-only), using the Lua/C-based Playdate SDK—to create something clever and innovative, particularly by making full use of the crank mechanic and all of Playdate’s playful/creative constraints in general.
Alas, the pandemic, other global events, and manufacturing hiccups delayed production and shipping, and my Playdate arrived just a few weeks ago on September 5, 2022! And while I do some modest mentoring for self-initiated projects this term, it was too late to bring that tasty option to the table.
So I have a full year ahead of me to play around with it, acquaint myself with the SDK, and sketch concepts until something looks promising and sticks. (And cranks.)
Also, it’s the only device I own I can play with outside in the sun. So exciting!
Unboxing the Playdate
(click to embiggen)
All images by J. Martin (10/2022) are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
If you have something valuable to add or some interesting point to discuss, I’ll be looking forward to meeting you at Mastodon!