Playdate: a love letter to constraints
I love everything about Playdate. It’s a new handheld gaming device and a love letter to constraints. You might be scratching your head if you only looked at the specs. Does this sound like a new gaming device for 2023?
400 × 240 1-bit (black or white only, no greyscale) screen with no backlight
16 MB RAM
168 MHz processor
And yet, the games are a blast to play. As the Harvard Business Review puts it, Constraints are good for innovation. This device is a collaboration between two design-oriented companies, Panic (excellent at software ) and Teenage Engineering (outstanding at hardware), and that shows. It’s simultaneously a love letter to the days of the original game Gameboy but is also entirely modern. Everything about this device seems deliberate and full of joy. Paradoxically, while the hardware and screen seem simple, this device also has wifi, an accelerometer, and a physical crank wheel used in most games.
What’s equally exciting to me is how developer-focused this platform is. It has already built a vibrant developer ecosystem of games made by folks who love this device. Anyone, from beginners to advanced programmers, is encouraged to experiment, tinker, and create. There is an official SDK for Lua and C, but they’ve also provided a no-coding-required web-based tool called Pulp to build games on the platform.
The device is heavily constrained, which makes it fascinating. It pushes developers to reimagine their relationship with the hardware. The constraints force every design decision to take full advantage of what the console has to offer, and as a result, the games on the platform are delightful.
It’s even inspired me to build something for this device. I’ve been looking for an excuse to start a project in Zig, a relatively new systems programming language. Much to my delight, someone has already built a template for writing games for Playdate in Zig, which integrates into the native C SDK.
What Panic and Teenage Engineering have done here is something special. I’m excited to see where this goes for the community and how it influences my journey in building weird and interesting things.
Notable links this week
A post on memory-efficient enums in Zig that caught my attention
An important piece on Wired on the dangers of ubiquitous surveillance
I recently discovered Bronksi Beat. Though I’d indirectly known their sound at times in my life, I’d never identified the artist.
Skateboard YouTube has gotten interesting, and one of my new favorites is the Dern Bros series Spot History, where they visit famous skate spots and give a historical account of what went down in those places.
Signal announced their plans for Post-Quantum Readiness. This is something I love thinking about.
A blog post from Kagi, a search engine that isn’t ad-supported, blew up on HackerNews yesterday. I plan to check it out and see what all the fuss is about.