Since Tally Pal PD (working title) will not have graphics per se, only text, I need to dive into the Playdate’s font system. Playdate uses bitmap fonts, which makes sense for a monochrome system, but they can’t be scaled smoothly like a regular vector font. Large number characters are need for the count display, so a custom font will be required.

Happily, Panic has created an online font editor, Playdate Caps: https://play.date/caps/

The Playdate’s screen is 400 pixels wide, and there is no need for a screen safe margin at the edges, so for a 4-digit number, 100 x 100 pixels on a monospace (every character the same width) font would make a perfect horizontal fit. At first I just hand-drew a quick and dirty giant font to test the process, and it was surprisingly easy to export, load and see on the screen in a matter of minutes.

The goal is a flat, hi-res look, so hand drawing or scaling up an existing font are out, and I wouldn’t be able to achieve that look in Caps without a lot of tedious clicking. So instead I just put marks to indicate the edge and center of each glyph and exported it as separate font and bitmap files. Only the digits 0-9 will be used, which makes things easier as well, as odd as it seems to create a font with no letters.

I opened up the bitmap in one copy of Paint and opened a blank image in another, set the second one to monochrome and typed out the characters 0-9. Then it was simply a matter of copying them over and using the alignment marks in the bitmap to place them. After a little extra cleanup on artifacts and removing the marks, voila I had a giant bitmap font.

Final step is to re-import the font to Caps and invert black and white, then export it once more as an all-in-one font the Playdate can parse. Now I have white characters on a black background, just like the little tumblers in my mechanical counter.

Development remains slow after trying to fit time for it into a surprisingly busy schedule. Happily the only deadlines I have are the one I impose upon myself. A weekly update seems a reasonable pace, and here is the next one.

The crank was the primary draw to the Playdate for me. Rotational controls are rare on consoles. The Atari 2600 had probably the most widely-known paddle controller, and the latest official paddle controller I’m aware of is the one for Nintendo DS that Taito produced, and that was only released in Japan. Thumbsticks can approximate rotational control, but they’re not ideal for it.

So here on the Playdate we have, not a paddle, knob or dial, but a crank, and to my knowledge the first time I’ve seen a crank used as a video game control. My first thought upon seeing it was that it might be used to charge the Playdate’s battery, like it’s a wilderness survival console. This is unfortunately not the case, but it is still a unique control that opens up some fun interaction possibilities.

On a standard mechanical tally counter, twisting the knob on the side advances all four tumblers. This can be used to to quickly reset the count to 0, or technically it can also be used to assist with setting the count to a specific amount, but the user would still need to use the plunger to fine tune the number by 1’s.

With the Playdate’s crank I can provide a way to rapidly change numbers with ease and also at a finer level than 1,111 at a time.

Unlike a dial, a crank is easy to turn by accident when it is open, and in order to stow it, one must rotate it into the correct position, so I can’t simply have the crank alone drive setting the count. In order to have the user only change the count deliberately when using the crank, they must hold the A button while cranking in order to engage it.

My first attempt used playdate.getCrankTicks(ticksPerRevolution), initially with a value of 10, which advanced the counter by 10 for every complete rotation. This worked well enough but required a lot of tedious cranking to set the count to higher numbers. However, setting getCrankTicks() to a much higher amount turned out to pass multiple ticks in a single frame if I spun the crank fast enough. Fortunately the ticks queue up so the number comes out correct in the end, but after spinning the crank very quickly, the count would continue to catch up after stopping. I want the crank to feel as though it is driving the count mechanically, so having it continue to count when not physically rotating the crank doesn’t do the trick.

Fortunately, the SDK provides a number of ways to determine what the player is doing with the crank, so next I plan to try using playdate.getCrankChange(), which simply returns how much the crank has changed since the last time it was called, and calculating the angle-to-number value manually instead of relying on the crank passing fixed positions. This should feel more like the crank is driving a gear that can be engaged at any arbitrary point.

After having unfortunately been the target of my first workforce reduction in many years, I feel compelled to update my blog once more. Here it is, an update!

I’m working on a project for the PlayDate console.

Maybe it’s a bit of an extreme change, going from full-body motion tracked virtual reality environments to a tiny monochrome handheld (the entire console is smaller than the cartridges for some I’ve owned), but I really enjoy working within unusual restrictions, as well as unusual input methods, and build/deploy times of about 5 seconds is a breath of fresh air from needing to literally suit up to test changes. The first games I ever developed were in black and white, so it seems fitting to return.

My first project, to learn about Playdate development and more advanced Lua scripting, is very similar to the one I used to familiarize myself with iOS development, Swift, and Xcode respectively: Tally Pal! (2?) The Playdate’s crank control corresponds nicely to the dial on mechanical tally counters, so it seemed a fitting choice. Also, it’s not especially complicated. Although, if the previous version is any indication, I’m sure I’ll find ways to make it extra.

So far I have set up my development environment and a version of source control more sophisticated than my past “save a copy on a USB stick when it reaches a stable version” method.

Of course, because I have a suspicion that studios won’t be clamoring for developers familiar with a boutique console, I’m also trying a few experiments in Unity VR. Unreal has been my engine for the past few years, so it’ll be good to refamiliarize myself.

No promises on an update schedule. I have no illusions of a dedicated readership that has been patiently awaiting new posts and this blog is mostly a method to organize my own thoughts, but if there are any updates, this is where they will be found.