Pick Pack Pup

gamedeveloper.com:

Pick Pack Pup is a ludicrously charming match-3 puzzler with a twist (or two) that will surely become a fan-favorite of Playdate owners. Its path from prototype to Playdate, however, was an unconventional one.

During a lengthy chat with Game Developer earlier this year, co-creator Nicolas Magnier tells me how he became fascinated by the concept of Playdate after reading about the console in Edge a few years ago.

For the veteran dev, who's currently working as a senior game designer at Ubisoft Mainz, the prospect of a device full of constraints was a huge selling point. It reminded him of old-school Nintendo hardware, and he was particularly eager to try and squeeze every last drop of creative potential from the Playdate's 400 × 240 black-and-white display.

Making contact with Panic with a view to developing for the console, though, proved challenging.

As you can imagine, the high-profile reveal sent devs scrambling to join what, at the time, must have felt like the most exclusive club in the games industry. So, with Panic still in closed development and slowly drowning in a sea of emails, Magnier did the only thing his could -- he built his own Playdate and got to work.

In a bid to mimic the Playdate's unique tech specs and start prototyping, Magnier cobbled together a DIY device (pictured below) using an NES controller, makeshift crank, a video convertor that allowed a tiny display to support greyscale outputs, and a computer that would deliver similar performance.

At this point, Magnier took a leap of faith. He showed his contraption to an engineer at Panic and asked for SDK access. Naturally, the company did the only thing it could for a person who'd built their own makeshift device years ahead of launch. It said yes.