the burden of choice

I’ve been programming for the Playdate lately. The marketing pitch is intoxicating:

But above anything else, I was most intrigued by the constraints that come with developing for such a limited device.

The PlayDate display only supports two colors - black and white - crammed into 400x200 pixels. You only get 1 core to work with, and processing power roughly comparable to a Nintendo DS. There’s no hardware support for rendering and a maximum framerate of 50 FPS.

In other words, there’s only so much game you can fit on the device.

why would you want to make a game with so many constraints?

I would bet that for most developers, making games for the Playdate would be a frustrating experience. With modern game engines, there’s almost no restrictions to what is possible. And that’s precisely the problem.

Artistic mediums inherently have limitations. Painters are constrained to their canvas. Musicians are limited to the notes on the scale.

Games are much less restricted. Our medium is not just the visuals that appear on the screen or the audio that is rendered to the speakers. We work in entire simulations, systems that take complex input and produce complex outputs.

We face a vast possibility space of potential designs when starting a new game project. There’s technical, artistic, and systemic considerations. If you’re not careful, you will easily conjure up a game design that would take years to make for even a large team of developers.

Another problem that arises is the “better idea” problem. You start working on a game, and some external event prompts you to reconsider. Perhaps a new indie game gets released and does really well. “Is our idea really worth pursuing? Should we make a game like that one?”, you think. With so many possibilities, it’s harder to have conviction in the direction you end up choosing.

Being constrained to such a tiny device reduces the possibility space dramatically. Suddenly there are far fewer viable options that would even be feasible to consider. And perhaps counterintuitively, this makes it easier to make a decision. If you needed to make an important choice in your life, that had long term implications, would you prefer to have 10,000 options or 3 options?

there is a strange “freedom” when working with limited hardware

On the Playdate, games are small. They have to be. The average download size for a game is around 20 MB. The games are usually short-form experiences meant to be played in brief 5 to 10 minute sessions.

As a developer, this means that I don’t feel the internal pressure to make the next epic indie magnum opus. I can focus on making a fun, tight core game loop and optimizing for the small screen and minimal CPU cycles.

Maybe in the future, once I’ve built up a few finished games, I will feel more confident to work on long-form games. But for dipping my feet into creating and publishing my first indie games, the Playdate is the perfect starting point.

#programming