[omoikane]

Playdate development has been a great experience. The limited colors and RAM helps me reduce my project scope such that I would actually finish them, and the limited CPU makes optimization exercises more rewarding. And it's not just all constraints either -- the sound/synth system is quite nice, and the crank is fun input method that takes some hands-on experience to fully appreciate.

The only downside is that there are still relatively few people with Playdates, and that puts an upperbound on how many people get to play your games.

[Doxin]

you can run playdate games on the desktop using the emulator included in the free SDK. It won't be as fun as running it on an actual device, but nothing stopping people from actually messing with making playdate games without a playdate.

[nosrepa]

I'd imagine they know as they developed games for it. Their point was the audience size due to it being niche, not that it's hard to test.

[Doxin]

ah I guess I sort of elided actually... saying the point I was trying to make. If it's just about showing games off to your friends (which with a course like this is pretty likely) you can point them to the emulator.

yeah if you're aiming to make a proper professional game with aims of making profit... the playdate probably isn't the way to go. But then I recon that's part of what makes it an awesome platform. It hasn't been captured by capitalism yet.