Inside the development of Playdate titles Recommendation Dog!! and Reel Steal

gamedeveloper.com:

Last month, Playdate maker Panic updated the sunny handheld with a curated digital storefront called Catalog that launched alongside two new (free) games for Season One: Recommendation Dog!! (RecDog) and Reel Steal.

Both of those projects were made by teams of up-and-coming developers from marginalized communities, assisted by narrative development company Sweet Baby Inc.–which you might recognize as the studio behind Lost Your Marbles, another Playdate project that was featured in the Season One launch lineup.

In a chat with Game Developer earlier this year, Sweet Baby co-founder David Bédard said both games came about because the team wanted to share what they learned working on Lost Your Marbles to help other budding devs hit the ground running.

"We had a really wonderful experience working with Panic on Lost Your Marbles. They put a lot of trust in us, who at the time were a new studio who hadn’t shipped a game, and we ended up with a game we were really proud of thanks to that opportunity. Not only that, but we learned a ton and perfected a pretty good production process for a Playdate-sized game. We used the budget efficiently, and we made the game over the course of five to six months," said Bédard, explaining how the team's debut Playdate project took shape.

"On top of that, through our outreach work at Sweet Baby, we meet a lot of up-and-coming marginalized developers looking to break into the industry. So when Panic approached us to ask if we had any ideas how they could leverage Playdate to help marginalized communities, it made perfect sense to use our production learnings and apply them to a couple of projects where newcomers to the industry could learn on the job, flanked by established mentors."

That pitch