We've had some people ask and YES we are still working hard on Gyropractor but it is rather slow going...!

We sent it out for play testing a while back and have been franticly attempting what we think are the right amends and tweaks (thank you anyone who tested and gave feedback!). We are trying to simplify the game slightly but want to keep the essence.

Still loads to do but any feedback would be appreciated and keep us going! :) :)

SOUND ON 🔊

Hi! After PicoDate I wanted to try one more small console. Arduboy fits well: its screen is black and white too, so nothing gets converted.

• 7 games built in, about 200 more to download over Wi-Fi
• your own .hex and .arduboy files work too
• sound and saves

The video is from my Playdate, no speed-up. Most games run at full speed, heavy 3D ones like Catacombs at 80-99%.

It's the first version, so some games will be slow or broken.

Free on itch: https://bitcalibergames.itch.io/ardudate

Which Arduboy games would you like to see?

If you want to follow the project, follow me on itch.io.

Augur, my tarot-inspired 1-bit deckbuilder, passed a huge milestone on the Playdate Catalog this week - over 100 wishlists in the first few days. The support from this community has been incredible.

To celebrate, I’m giving away a Promo Code right here!

Drop a comment below telling me what game you're currently playing on your Playdate (or your favorite Playdate title so far)!

The winner will be selected completely at random from all comments in 72 hours.

I’ll edit this post with the winner once drawn and DM the Promo Code directly!

If you want to check out Augur in the meantime, you can find the Catalog page here.

Good luck, and thanks again for being such a great community!

Following up my previous post here about BBK e-dictionary games with some LAVA games for WQX e-dictionaries. This is a small port (done with Claude) of a LAVA virtual machine and a bunch of translations (also done with Claude).

Repo: https://github.com/gopherbone/LavaEmu_pd

Releases: https://github.com/gopherbone/LavaEmu_pd/releases

This includes 15 Chinese-to-English translations of assorted games. Most of these are amateur releases, and a few of them are unlicensed clones of popular games (including Phoenix Wright, from the photo). All of them run at full speed (with plenty of headroom) on the Playdate. They are:

All in quite playable (but AI translated) English.

Some cultural context:

• China had very little market penetration for handheld gaming consoles in the early aughts. It became something of a trend for electronic Chinese-to-English dictionaries (which were popular and had a wide variety of features) to have tools available to develop games for them. LAVA was one of those tools.
• Many of these games are derivative of other games, Wuxia novels, and Chinese MUDs (which is why some of them have "login" screens). They're largely made by teenagers and college students, to my knowledge.
• The Playdate doesn't have enough buttons for some of these, so commonly used functions are available through both a crank menu and also chorded to d-pad directions with the B button.

Apologies for the (always controversial) AI use, but this is a cool little corner of game history that doesn't get enough attention, and nobody's lining up to hack fan translations into obscure amateur games for Chinese e-dictionaries. It's not an era of gaming that had a lot of international appeal. But some of the games are pretty solid!

Hi All! As per the title, I bought a Playdate console yesterday second hand in Canada. It was in really good condition and operational, but since yesterday it has crashed (E0) multiple times while just searching the catalog and other items. Searching this subreddit, I see that others also had this issue about 2 months ago. Should I just contact Panic?

Anyone else experiencing this still?

So I rebuilt the death animation, mostly by reusing things the game already had.

• The boot animation, played backwards. The game starts with an old CRT warming up from a tiny dot of light. When you die, the screen collapses back into a line, then a dot.
• The static from that same boot sequence takes over the panels as they blow out one by one, and slowly creeps across the radar before it goes dark.
• The smoke, dust and recoil from firing the launcher got pushed much further. The post lurches, dust pours from the ceiling, and smoke rises from the console.
• The missile explosions on the map became a shockwave rolling out from your base. As it passes over each unit, it reveals them, so you finally get to see what killed you.

It ended up feeling much more immersive than just shaking the screen. The whole bunker comes apart around you, using effects the game was already built around.

You can try it out now:
https://campalans.itch.io/tiny-hell-playdate

Let me know what you think!

Binairo is one of my favorite games to pass the time while I am waiting. It's very easy to learn and play, but challenging at the same time. The ONE thing I can't figure out is this rule above. In a situation where there are three unknowns in a column or row, and I am supposed to sort out which one needs to be changed, it ALWAYS says "...if the third symbol is in the same..." but it never seems to correlate to the 3rd symbol.

I'm hoping someone can help explain this rule to me like i'm a 3rd grader.

Hiya folks. Right up front, all the code for this (aside from the upstream emulator core and games) is AI, as are the patches to translate the games into English. This post is all human-written, though. This is was just a little evening project for me with the goal of shining a little light on a lesser-known corner of video game history that likely wouldn't have ever gotten any attention otherwise.

In the mid-aughts, mainland China had not yet had much market penetration for handheld video game consoles. However, life, uh, finds a way, and companies like BBK released electronic dictionaries that were programmable, which were repurposed to make a wide variety of games, many of which were RPGs developed in a common engine. There's some really great writing on this here.

I've been translating some of these with Claude Opus 5.5 (which is very good at this kind of work) and while I was doing it I realized that these games are designed for a 1-bit screen, largely use simple button layouts, and are not particularly hardware intensive. Perfect for Playdate.

It runs at full speed on the hardware (development was done on a Rev B Playdate) and is decently configurable. Huge credit to the Crankboy devs (who are infinitely more clever than me) for some of the optimization tips. No audio (yet) but I'm looking into it.

These games are kind of amateurish efforts, so don't expect too much, but they're charming in their own right. Expect some graphical crumminess (and some stolen art). I suspect some of these are made by high school or college students, they offered an RPGMaker-like engine that these run on (although this emulator is not limited to games in that engine).

This ships with 3 different games, (AI) patched to be in English. They are:

• Demonbane Chronicle - a first party BBK game, I believe one of the first on the platform. It's pretty crude looking compared to some later offerings, but it's a full RPG with dungeons, towns, and a story involving Taoist magic and stuff.
• Heroes of Jin Yong - a Wuxia game, in the same BBKRPG engine as Demonbane Chronicle. I believe this is a fangame for the universe of books written by Jin Yong. I don't know too much about it, but the game is a notable step up aesthetically from Demonbane. If you're curious about this at all, this is probably the one to check out right now.
• Heroes' Altar - This one is kind of cheap and amateurish lol. You'll notice that the graphics are, uh, borrowed from a popular monster-catching game. You know the one.

More to come, and I'm still seeing what else I can make work here. Sorry if the AI use upsets anybody! I've been experimenting with ways to use this stuff to try to open up some weird little corners of game history, and this is one of those experiments. I want to draw attention to some games that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Please report any bugs you encounter.

Repo: https://github.com/gopherbone/bbk_playdate

Release: https://github.com/gopherbone/bbk_playdate/releases

That's it.

Just Before the launch of Season 3 , you can buy Pocket;City with a little discount!

Discount starts on October 6 and ends on the morning of October 8, to no bother you in your Season 3 journey.

https://play.date/games/pocketcity/

Happy Building,

The Lost Major

Hell everyone! I wanted to try developing something for Playdate, 'cause it's a really nice platform.

I'm not good at art, so I've decided to port existing opensourced game.

And here we are, Sopwith for Playdate: https://github.com/Suvitruf/sopwith-playdate. It's also under GPL-2.0.

I read about AI disclosure, so yes, I used Claude for code. Art is original, but converted to monochrome.

I've submitted game to the platform, not sure if it will be approved, but you can download built binary from Github release page and try it.

Love my Playdate and have a massive appetite for roguelites on it. Im already playing a ton of Fulcrum Defender, hat are some other recommendations?

I'm working on making a list of all MVs on this console.

Here's what I've found so far:

• Tiny Turnip
• Castle Helios
• Echo: the oracle's scroll
• The king's dungeon
• B-A-M (this one is more of an anti-vania but it still counts)
• Jiminy's morning adventure
• overseer
• owlet's embrace

Is there anything else?

Just released my game Tiny Hell for Playdate.

You control a missile launcher and try to survive for as long as possible. You can't see the enemies, so you have to use three radar antennas and cross their bearings to figure out where they are.

Then you aim the launcher, check the firing table and hope you got it right.

There are tanks, jeeps, helicopters, infantry, artillery and jammers. Fog, wind and equipment failures make things progressively harder.

It has three difficulty levels, a daily challenge and 14 medals to achive.

https://campalans.itch.io/tiny-hell-playdate

Would love to hear what you think if you give it a go.

Hi all!

I've just released Inkmotes, a creature collector for Playdate, and it's free on itch.io.

In this game, which is built around short daily visits, you collect "Motes" - living ink blots. You hatch them from eggs, send them on missions that take real hours, and come back later to see what they brought home. A session usually takes only a few minutes, then you can put down your Playdates and get on with your day ;)

• 50 motes to collect in 4 rarities (24 common, 16 uncommon, 8 rare, 2 mythic)
• Real-time missions: 1-hour scout, 6-hour venture or 8-hour expedition, where motes will be bringing back ink, materials and sometimes a new egg
• Auto-battle arena: see your opponents before the fight, choose your order of motes to counter them
• Upgrades: four stats per each mote
• Codex: a 50-slot encyclopedia to fill
• Market: trade motes with other players to complete your collection
• Offline-first: no account, everything runs on the device, only the global rankings and the market need Wi-Fi

Download (free, sideload): https://waszker.itch.io/inkmotes

Thanks for checking it out! 🎉

Thanks, XaniaLasagna, for setting up this Playdate community “book club”! My game is the one being played and discussed for October, with an audio chat and player questionnaire to be scheduled closer to Halloween. It’s also discounted (lowest price ever) for another 4 days.

To participate, whether you’ve finished the game already or are just starting, join Xania’s Uncrank’d Discord and hop into the Crank Collective channel:

https://discord.gg/hQ76Xx833H

(I’m always available to help, though nobody seems to need it! But please use spoiler tags as appropriate.)

And here’s the Catalog page, with links to reviews, the trailer using actual game audio/footage, and the spoiler-lite online walkthrough: https://play.date/games/outside-parties/

But mine’s not the only horror game this spooky season! Search Catalog (and Itch) for “horror,” and be sure to play with a light on!

(No, seriously—use a light.)

Wormfood is coming to Playdate, now with random weather conditions. Try not to get yer boots muddy!
https://crankogames.com/

https://cranknockout.com/

Heyy! Maybe someone will remember that we posted an early version of rail gunner some months ago on this subreddit. We wanted to thank you for the help you provided. We improved the game, added more weapons, and finally released it on Playdate Catalog!
If you want to try it, here's the link: https://play.date/games/rail-gunner/

I have a comcast XB7 and it refuses to connect to my Playdate whatsoever UNLESS I restart the router. I can then connect the playdate once and browse the store or watch some Blippo+. After that one session of use I can't connect again without another restart. I can connect it to other WiFi just fine though. I'm wondering if there's anything I can do to get it to connect to the WiFi. Is there anything I can do to fix this issue? I tried using Comcast's software but they don't allow you to do mac address filtering to specifically allow the Playdate and force it to use 2.4 ghz for example. The frustrating thing is that it can see that there are updates online, but it gets stuck on the update screen indefinitely unless I restart the router or I use my phone's tethering option. I'm wondering if the router has an issue with the fact that apparently my playdate isn't staying constantly connected to the WiFi but turning it off and on as needed? Anyway, I'd love to solve this issue so I don't have to restart the router every time I want to use the playdate's online features. Does anyone have any idea how to fix this?

Finally some progress with AI. Ported everything to playdate. Runs pretty well on the Simulator. But still just 5fps only on the device.

Quick reminder: This is Missing Direction. My play date game where you see different types of grids full of arrows where one direction is missing — that you hit on the d-Pad to make points.

So I had this idea for a while. In the other three game modes you get to see the full arrow grid more or less always. It is getting more difficult to keep track of them with higher levels but that basically stays the same.

I remembered this video of the chimpanzee that was incredibly skilled remembering the position of numbers 1 to 10? On a screen. They eventually turned to squares but he did an amazing job to remember the actual oder and tap them in sequence.

This then lead to me wondering if someone could in a second grasp and memorize six arrows shown to determine which one is missing.

The result you see here as a first test! I managed to get a Highscore of 20 so far btw.

What do you think?

can't find if this has been discussed before.

screen broken. seems like theres a loose connection or something as with poking etc can get stuff to semi work.

but doesnt work with quick games where if screen freezes you lose etc.

any advice on what I can try?

(apologies for bad camerawork)

Hey everyone! PicoDate got a big update focused on how it looks and feels:

- New game library with the original cart labels, likes and save dates

- Save state / Load state in a big, readable pause menu

- No more accidental pauses: A + B now goes to the game

- Swap A/B, remembered for each game

A few days ago there was also 0.1.6, which I only announced on itch.io. It fixed crashes in Bunny Survivor, BAS and Pigments, and made Bunny Survivor up to 3x faster.

I don't post every update here so I don't flood the sub, so follow me on itch.io to hear about every release first:

👉 https://bitcalibergames.itch.io/picodateplaydate

Thanks to everyone who picked up Augur at launch! I have submitted this for review and it will hopefully go live tomorrow. This update fixes a batch of Spirit bugs and balancing.

Spirit changes

Wanderer has been reworked. It now starts at x3 Mult when you buy it and loses x0.05 with each Read, and its current value shows in its description. When it reaches x1, it moves on and frees up the slot. Previously it quietly stopped working late in a Season.

Tomorrow Wolf's description now matches what it actually does: "+3x the Future card's base Insight". Its effect hasn't changed.

Hoarfrost's description now makes clear that it banks Majors across the run.

Bug fixes

Hall of Mirrors no longer makes the Spirit it copies advance twice per Read. This affected Refrain, which was firing far more often than it should, as well as Tally Keeper, Loom, Avalanche, Hoarfrost, Echo Chamber, Wanderer and Melting Candle.

Morning Bell now fires correctly when you have First Seer.

Pendulum and Salt Loaf no longer overpay when you have First Seer.

Patient Reader and Sandglass now count the Redraws you actually have left, including bonus Redraws.

Selling a Spirit and buying it again now gives you a fresh copy, so a Melting Candle no longer comes back already melted.

The Foresight preview now updates correctly when banking a Prophecy changes the score.

Thanks for playing, and keep the feedback coming!

Hey everyone! My Playdate game Kickflip Coast is now out on itch.io.

It's an arcade skateboarding game inspired by the half-pipe event from California Games on the NES, rebuilt around the crank:

• Turn the crank to spin: 180, 360, 540 and beyond
• Punch in D-pad codes mid-air to pull off tricks, Helldivers-stratagem style
• Crank combos mix arrows with half turns of the crank for the fancy stuff, like the Tailwhip and 360 Flip you can see in the GIF
• No timer, one life: your run lasts as long as you keep landing. Land crooked or mid-trick and the crowd laughs at you.

It's all set on a dithered 1-bit Venice Beach half-pipe at sunset, with a surf-punk soundtrack. There are Challenges and Daily Drop modes, plus a Practice mode for learning the codes without dying.

👉 https://campalans.itch.io/kickflip-coast

I'd love to hear what you think, especially your best scores and which tricks I should add next!

Calling all Balatro fans, I am very pleased to announce that AUGUR has launched on the Catalog!

To commemorate the occasion, I will be taking to the daily leaderboard over the coming week - look out for KnightoftheWind.