I'm writing a book on how to make games for Playdate

When my friend shared his Playdate with me, I immediately wondered, how can I make games for this thing? Turns out that it’s the easiest console of all time to make games for. Panic, the creators of Playdate, make the software development kit (SDK) freely available. And anyone can just copy games onto their console or send them to their console via the Playdate website. You can code games in Lua or C for the console, and I opted for Lua.

As I was digging into making games for Playdate, I was longing for written examples on how to use the various APIs on the device. There are lots of awesome YouTube videos out there, but not a whole lot of written material. So as I kept learning, I started writing down what I learned.

The outcome is a book called Make Games for Playdate with Lua. I’ve been writing it for the past three months and decided to release it early to get feedback as I go along. The reception so far has been really positive, and I’m excited to continue to write the book and create learning resources for the handheld.

The book is aimed at beginners, so if you’ve never written a line of code before, you’ll learn all of the important concepts. If you have coded before, you’ll be able to pick up on the intricacies of the Playdate SDK.

There’s a free sample of the first three chapters available. And since the book isn’t done yet, the Early Access price is lower than it will be when it’s finished. I try to release an update every month. The book is about 60% complete right now.

I have lots of ideas for supplemental materials to the book too. Video versions of the chapters. More advanced open source games. Recipes on how to implement very specific functionality. An example of this is PDSnake, a free and open source polished version of a game from the book: https://brettchalupa.itch.io/pdsnake

Thanks for checking it out, and I hope you enjoy! I’d love any feedback, suggestions, or requests.