Punkraft - The Start
Ever since I found out about the Playdate, I fell in love with the little thing. The idea, the form factor, the design, the crank, the flaws. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s different. It’s a new console, created by an independent private company (Panic), trying something different. For sure there’s the nostalgia factor, for sure it might still be in its early adopter stage, and for sure it’s a bit more expensive than it should be. But I appreciate trying something new. One of the key features of the Playdate is its unique crank input: a crank can be flipped on the side and used as an input for the games. It’s not a requirement, but it’s one of the things that makes it different.
The more I started looking into it, the more interesting it got. You get a bunch of free games when you get the console, anyone can make their own games and publish them on the console’s official Catalog or itch.io. The games made and published for the Playdate are entirely owned by the creator, with Panic taking 25% share of sales through Catalog and nothing else. Games can be sideloaded by connecting the Playdate to your computer and drag-drop them into your console. The SDK is free to use, it comes with an official emulator for playing and testing, it uses Lua or C, and it also has an online no-code editor called Pulp, which is also free. A lot of fun quirks and features, and Doug DeMuro would say. I’m not here to sell the console though.
After having a few game ideas (including another Auto Turismo game about hill-climbing, using the crank as the gas pedal), the one design I’ll be exploring first is a sewing game, where the crank is used as different sewing tools and the player goes through repairing and creating their own pieces for their collection. The idea came from a couple of different places. First, given my research project is about understanding and using punk ethics in game-making, one thought that has been constantly on my mind is how to bring the political side of punk into games. That’s something I continuously think about and am slowly finding ways of creating games with stronger political positioning, regardless of what that means exactly right now. The way I see this in a sewing game is to incentivize players to learn the basics of sewing so they can repair or start making their own clothes. Setting aside all the data I’ll need to solidify this game’s political positioning for now (proper discussion on fast fashion waste, sustainability etc as examples), the translation of the sewing machine mechanism to the crank on the Playdate seemed like a direct connection. Also, what’s more punk than putting patches on jackets and sewing shut some holes in your pants by yourself? (A lot of things are more punk than this. But this is a great start!)
Also seeing my partner starting her business of upcycling fabric into bags and garments also put me back closer to sewing. It could be a great way to learn from her some ways of creating patterns for different garments and use those patterns for the game. Creating a realistic way of approaching learning how to sew your own clothes, from cutting pants into shorts to making a T-Shirt and the steps between, is a way to showcase that sewing is accessible and these skills can be developed in really useful ways. You’ll never want to buy underwear ever again!
With some basic Lua tutorials open, I went on to create this very basic first idea on the look of the game and how I can start approaching it. What I have so far is just a sprite the player can move around and guidelines to cut a T-Shirt and a patch, to give them something to follow.
In terms of references, Cooking Mama is a game I’m thinking a lot about in overall vibes. It’s accurate enough for the mini-games to translate into real-life approach and technique, it’s comprehensible in its approach to cooking (which can be daunting, much like sewing), and it’s adorable but with personality (which is always a plus). So far, this is what I’ve quickly put together related to this game.
Not sure about the name yet, but it’s a start.
The next step is to understand exactly how to design it. I’m leaning towards making the sewing as a drawing mechanic, and save the player’s drawing as the garment. Garments are collected into a wardrobe, where the player can pose the game’s mascot with their creations and share a screenshot online. The wardrobe will also serve as visual feedback for the player’s progress, as it gets fuller and fuller. So the gameplay loop would be: garments arranged in progressive levels (repairs, to small mends, to small pieces and so on), and after completing them, they’re added to the player’s wardrobe. The Playdate is limited in memory, so all this is dependent on feasibility in the system. Lua, so far, feels very straightforward and a lot easier than C#, common in other engines.
About the Playdate SDK and simulator
As mentioned above, Panic provides an SDK and a simulator for the Playdate. Better yet, a simulator inside the SDK. That’s because there is no editor for the Playdate, everything is done directly in your preferred IDE and you test your game by running it directly in the simulator. It sounds more of a nuisance than it actually is, it’s refreshing to develop a game without the editor. At least with my experience so far, I can create a different bond with what I’m creating and it is such a great learning curve. I followed this tutorial to setup my IDE (I’m curious to try others as I get more comfortable with this), but to run games on the simulator, you just have to (after unzipping the folder) drag and drop the .pdx file to the simulator for the game to start. You can do that with any game, by the way, so you don’t even need a Playdate console to play Playdate games. Enough with the preaching (for now).
-fiaca
10/25/2024