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

• Programming Playdate YouTube video
• Getting Started with the Playdate SDK (Windows-based)
• Everything About Playdate SDK Collisions in 7 Minutes
• Compiling Lua projects on Windows

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

• 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.

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.

Tools

• Dithering Oven: Great 1 Bit Image Dithering tool
• 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

• Awesome Playdate: A list of awesome resources for game development on Panic's Playdate console.