SDK Resources

This page lists resources that are available for free to help you with developing games on Playdate - everything from free assets, libraries to extend Playdate's capabilities, or tutorials to help you get up to speed.

Tutorials

IDE Integrations

Nova editor extension
Visual Studio Simulator build integration
Visual Studio Debugging
VS code - Windows LUA development template This template will help you with autocompletion and running your code in simulator.
Playdate VS Code Template (Mac) Build and run projects in the Playdate simulator (on Mac) with a key shortcut.
VS Code (Mac OS only) launch extension
Visual Studio Code extension (Unofficial) Build and debug Playdate games
Visual Studio Code cookiecutter template

Libraries

Lua

AnimatedSprite: Extends Playdate's sprite capabilities.
Playdate Aseprite Palettes: An Aseprite extension giving you palettes representing Playdate's 1-bit colour palette.
GFXP Lib GFXP is a small library with a collection of patterns for Playdate.
Panels Build scrolling interactive comics for the Playdate console.
Noble Engine The Playdate SDK is probably the most user-friendly console SDK ever made, but if you're familiar with state/scene-based game engine frameworks like Unity, Flixel, Citrus, or others, you may be looking for a library that can get your game "on its feet,” extend existing APIs, offer new features, or provide more intuative ways to leverage the SDK in your game.
Cotton If you are a relatively new developer coming from Pulp, this framework will make the jump a little easier. With most of the function of Pulp + a LDtk preconfigured, making your games will be easy!
Roomy-Playdate A scene management library based on the popular Love library
pdParticles A simple, free particles library for Playdate
glitterbomb Based on the Unity particle system, an easy-to-use library for creating particle emitters. Supports animated particles and physics-based movement.
playbit: Build cross-platform Playdate games with Lua, create build scripts, and utilize preprocessor macros!

C

none yet

Swift

none yet

Fonts

June: June is a multilingual, high-resolution bitmap font with some playful curves and distinctive letterforms, inspired by portable game fonts of the 00's.
BitFontMaker2: Collection of pixel fonts and a web-based font maker.
Tophat: Tophat is a powerful bitmap font creation tool. It lets you import TTF/OTF fonts, gives you fine control over Unicode coverage, and makes kerning more convenient than ever with kerning previews directly visible on the main screen. Tophat even lets you copy, paste, or otherwise manipulate multiple selected glyphs at once!

Tools

Dithering Oven: Great 1 Bit Image Dithering tool
PlayDither: 1-bit dithering specifically for playdate
Playdate video encoder: Converts videos to .pdv files
Wav to PDA Converter: Converts .wav files to .pda files
Jsfxr: Jsfxr is an online 8 bit sound maker and sfx generator. All you need to make retro sound effects with jsfxr is a web browser
GFXP Pattern Editor v2: A simple browser tool for creating new patterns and a large library of ready-made ones. Now with the ability to create your own library.
LDtk importer: A tool to import tilemaps made in LDtk

Other Lists

Art_Resources - a list of art resources.
Awesome Playdate: A list of awesome resources for game development on Panic's Playdate console.