[HN Gopher] Byte-Sized Swift: Building Tiny Games for the Playdate
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Byte-Sized Swift: Building Tiny Games for the Playdate
Author : rauhul
Score : 101 points
Date : 2024-03-12 17:18 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.swift.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.swift.org)
| rauhul wrote:
| Associated discussion on the swift forum:
| https://forums.swift.org/t/byte-sized-swift-building-tiny-ga...
| ladberg wrote:
| Feeling pretty craft-y recently, huh?
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| Nice job!
|
| Not being much of a swifty, I didn't know anything about that API
| Notes thing. I like it a lot!
| Neff wrote:
| This is great to see more resources being made for the Playdate.
| It is such a fun little console and the games made for it are
| such a breath of fresh air
|
| I hope Panic is able to either retrofit or make a v2 with a
| backlight. I realized how low the contrast on the screen was
| after my cataract surgery and seeing details in some of the games
| becomes near impossible in less-than-ideal conditions.
| msephton wrote:
| The Sharp Memory LCD screen is opaque, unlike most other LCDs,
| so can't work with a backlight. It could work with a front/edge
| light but the results are not what you'd hope for.
| favorited wrote:
| I recently watched a neat conference presentation[0] about
| generating Game Boy Advance binaries using LLVM - I wonder how
| difficult it would be to use that ARM7TDMI toolchain with
| Embedded Swift.
|
| [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-Woh_Uzw5g
| rgovostes wrote:
| Recently: Embedded Swift on the Raspberry Pi Pico
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39611111
| hbn wrote:
| Tangentially related, but Lucas Pope's new game, Mars After
| Midnight, just released for $6 on Playdate. Played it for a bit
| during my lunch break and it's really cool and creative.
|
| I had read a few of his devlog posts[1] from a while back and
| it's really cool to get an insight into his process. A while back
| I had also gotten into reading his updates on the process as he
| built his last game, Return of the Obra Dinn[2]. Only got 10
| pages or so into the thread but again, his talent and attention
| to detail are incredible.
|
| [1] https://dukope.itch.io/mars-after-
| midnight/devlog/261758/mar...
|
| [2] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.0
| ericlewis wrote:
| Ah cool. I messed around with this a while ago:
| https://github.com/ericlewis/swift-playdate
| glhaynes wrote:
| A Vision for Embedded Swift (https://github.com/apple/swift-
| evolution/blob/main/visions/e...) has the details on this new
| build mode and is quite interesting. Effectively,
| there will be two bottom layers of Swift, and the lower one,
| "non-allocating" Embedded Swift, will necessarily be a more
| restricted compilation mode (e.g. classes will be disallowed as
| they fundamentally require heap allocations) and likely to be
| used only in very specialized use cases. "Allocating" Embedded
| Swift should allow classes and other language facilities that
| rely on the heap (e.g. indirect enums).
|
| Also, this seems to maybe hint at (most of?) the Swift runtime
| eventually being reimplemented in non-allocating Embedded Swift
| rather than the C++ (?) that it uses now: The
| Swift runtime APIs will be provided as an implementation that's
| optimized for small codesize and will be available as a static
| library in the toolchain for common CPU architectures.
| Interestingly, it's possible to write that implementation in
| "non-allocating" Baremetal Swift.
| ks2048 wrote:
| I haven't seen playdate before. Looks cool and I appreciate
| people doing things like this, but $200 seems like a lot! Compare
| to android phones for half the price that also function as
| phones. I realize things without mass production will be more
| expensive, but I wonder what part(s) the device are the biggest
| contributor to the price?
|
| (Also, more to the point of the article - kudos to Swift team. A
| nice language I hope becomes more widespread)
| linsomniac wrote:
| I was kind of interested in the Playdate but couldn't bring
| myself to buy one. Last summer I stayed at my brother-in-laws
| place for a week and did some DIY work around his house, and
| while I was there played with his Playdate. Really enjoyed it,
| but still couldn't bring myself to "pull the trigger" on buying
| one. I'm really busy with work and life these days and don't
| often find I have time to game.
|
| 3 months later a package arrived from Playdate; as a thank you
| for the DIY work my BIL bought me one.
|
| It's a very well designed and executed device, the crank handle
| is well used in many games, and it's nice to have a device that
| just does one thing and does it well. It can be a little tricky
| to play depending on ambient light.
| msephton wrote:
| Props to your BIL! You're lucky to have family like that.
| msephton wrote:
| I think the biggest contributors to cost are the Sharp Memory
| LCD screen, custom built crank, and the fact that you get 24
| games included with the device. Regardless, it's absolutely
| worth it without a shadow of a doubt. There's nothing else like
| it.
|
| Plus, it's the only way to play exclusive games of which there
| are many. My game YOYOZO was listed in Ars Technica's "Best
| Games of 2023" alongside several games by Nintendo.
| airstrike wrote:
| Pretty cool. Swift is such a great little (little?) language, I'm
| always thrilled to see more of it outside of Apple stuff (which
| is not to say I don't also love it on Apple stuff)
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