Hyper Meteor

gamedeveloper.com:

When the Playdate was announced, I was immediately charmed by the cute yellow handheld, intrigued by the unique black and white display, and excited about the crank opening up all sorts of creative possibilities.

But there was something technically exciting about Playdate as well. Modern platforms are easier than every to develop for, but they all have the same boring CPU/GPU architecture. Not since the days of Nintendo’s Gameboy and DS has a console asked us to design our games and structure our code around the specific quirks and constraints of their hardware. The idea of writing code for the Playdate was just as exciting to me as the creative aspects.

Vertex Pop created Hyper Meteor for Playdate, as part of its first season of games. Hyper Meteor is an arcade shoot-em-up where you attack waves of meteors and hostile forces by ramming your ship into them. Technically, we wanted to have our cake and eat it too: a silky smooth framerate throughout was critical, but so was throwing lots of enemies on screen at once.

This article serves as both a guide to developing for Playdate, as well as a technical postmortem detailing how we achieved our goals for Hyper Meteor.

Here are the notable hardware specs for the Playdate:

When we started development, I didn’t have a good sense of how powerful the device was. On paper 180 MHz sounded pretty slow, and when was the last time you measured RAM in megabytes? It was hard to understand what the numbers meant tangibly, especially without existing games to reference, so we designed and scoped conservatively.

However, we quickly found that the Playdate was far more powerful than it seemed. With a bit of adjustment to our development process, we were able to achieve our creative goals with