The 2023 Playdate Community Awards

Community Awards 2022
Date:	Early 2023
Time:	TBD
Hosts:	Guv_Bubbs GantProdux
VOD:	-

The 2023 Playdate Community Awards is a game of the year show run by the Playdate Squad Discord server.

The show is a swanky affair with the hosts Guv_Bubbs & GantProdux dressing up for the show.

Awards

This year we have 20 awards to hand out to developers
All games released between November 1 2022 & November 30 2023 are eligible. (No Season 1 games)

Categories

Presentation Awards

• Best Soundtrack
• Best Sound Design
• Artistic Visual Achievement Award in a Pulp Game
• Artistic Visual Achievement Award in an SDK Game
• Best Launch Experience
• Best Playdate Game Trailer, presented by Tiny Yellow Machine

Genre Awards

• Best Puzzle Game
• Best Action Game
• Best Adventure Game
• Best Arcade Game
• Best Sim/Strategy Game
• Best Narrative Game
• Best App or Nicknack

General

• Most Anticipated Game
• Accomplishment in Accessibility
• The CRANKY Award (AKA outstanding use of crank)
• Outstanding Technical Achievement in a Pulp Game
• Outstanding Technical Achievement in an SDK Game
• Outstanding Pulp Game of the Year
• 2023 Playdate Game of the Year

Award Badges

Winner Badge	Nominee Badge	Cranky Badge	Game of the Year Badge	Community Hero Badge

Applied to your Playdate Squad Discord Account and to place proudly on your winning game’s store or page thumbnail. There will be 4 nominees total in each category. One nominee will be the winner.
Art by the wonderful Alastair Low of Lowtek Games. Updated by Rae.

Itch.io Badge Placement Mockup

Community Heroes

We recognized 5 sets of community heroes this year.

1. 6ATO, Talon & Gant for making amazingly good Playdate related content REALLY early on in the year.
2. Eric Lewis for being a Playdate genius! Some of the things he made this year. Pseudo-3D first person shooter demo in Lua!, Tamagotchi P1 emulator, An Itch.io sync manager, A library to make it easy to port arduboy games to the Playdate and much more!
3. UnbelievableFlavour for creating a LOT of pages for the wiki and making tools like Pulp+ & Cotton
4. Neven Mrgan for supporting the Playdate Squad discord server when we needed him most!
5. SquidGodDev for all of the amazing high quality content he's made this year.

On top of these 5, I also want to share all of the comments from the community.

The Process

1. Community nominates games for awards via the Community Nomination Form
2. During this time Judges can optionally choose to add extra games into the into the Judging conversation.
   This is for games that may be missed or not be represented in a community popular vote.
3. The top 6 community results + all judge results will give us the internal nominee list to be voted on by the judges.
4. The internal nominee list and Judge Awards Form is sent to the judges
5. At this time Judges are free to squabble, debate, and pull each others hair to make a case for who they think should win.
   Then they vote.
6. In the case of tiebreaks (Winners or runner up), then judges will need to hash it out until they can decide on one winner and three unranked nominees.
   The results are handed over to the hosts.

The Judges

Don, Nick, and Ryan of Hello Playdate Podcast - Three friends that share their love of the Playdate game system on a weekly podcast. What we love about these three, is that their opinions of each Playdate game differ greatly, making each one of them unique in their views. They will be a great addition to a judging panel and have extensively played many released games while being very active community members as well.

AttackSlug of Destination Playdate - AttackSlug is a machine and has reviewed over 70 Playdate games while consistently uploading review videos of them to his YouTube channel since the beginning. He will be a stellar addition in selecting quality games that have been released.

Drew-lo and Orkn - Two unpublished developers that are active in the developer forum and in the community while they work on their games. We wanted to choose unpublished devs, as they won’t be biased towards their very own released games but can bring a technical eye to judging.
Drew has worked on many SDK codebases during his development of Mobware Minigames.
Orkn is a creative mind in the Pulp community having published many prototypes that broaden what you think can be achieved in the tool.

Christa Mrgan and Arisa Sudangnoi - Our two Panic superstars! We are so thankful to be adding two members of Panic to the judging panel. Not only are they both active in the community, they are also exposed to many of the developers and games in the Playdate Universe.

Additional Lore

Playdate Ad

In a video uploaded by Tiny Yellow Machine titled Playdate Community Awards - Extra Cabel Cameo Clip: Undiscovered Playdate Lore (Cut for Time) on the 12th of December 2022 after the awards it was revealed that there was an AD for the Playdate which had yet to be sighted. The ad was found in the comic Santos Sisters! (Issue 2) on Page 9 as shown in this YouTube Video by Art of Comics. The Ad reads as follows:

It's gaming with a twist! It's playdate©

Are we for real? You bet. This is the world's first handheld gaming system with a crank controller, a whole new way to play. Playdate© also has a crisp black an white screen, and comes with loads of free games. The catch? There is no catch! We made Playdate© just for fun! Visit http://play.date to learn more.

Screenshots of the games Crankin's Time Travel Adventure, Zipper, Hyper Meteor and Pick Pack Pup were shown alongside an illustration of 3 children enjoying the little handheld with a crank.

FAQ

Why doesn't the community vote on everything?

At first, we asked ourselves “Why can’t the community just vote on all the awards?” Well, after we thought about this, we realized that this would put some games and creators at a severe disadvantage and turn the awards show into more of a popularity/visibility contest if the community was able to decide everything. The community will still have a huge part in deciding the nominees, but we’ve created a diverse set of judges that will also offset any chance of games or creators winning due to their ability to market their game or obtain more visibility. Some developers simply do not have the resources other companies and games have, so it is possible that their game may not receive a popular vote. With our judging committee active, they will be able to bring these games and creators to the forefront that may be more deserving of the award than a game that could win due to high visibility or a popular vote.

Why didn't you do the process another way?

We feel the process above was the best way forward based on the time we and the judges have.
We are open to feedback next year.

How did you decide on the award categories?

The awards were iterated on over a two week period with input from members in the Playdate Squad Discord server.
For the most part, our Genre Categories have been modeled off of The Game Awards, but were tweaked to fit the current Playdate catalog.