The Story of Playdate

25th of October 2011 10 years ago hi Jesper we're a small software company that makes Mac iOS apps for our 15th anniversary I've been tinkering with an ID. Find our 150 best customers and manufacture something incredibly special and send to them. Welcome to the Panic Podcast, a podcast about Portland's panic, but maybe not exactly. I'm Krista Mergen.

Join me as I follow the quirky subplots and surprising characters that round out Portland's most lovable indie software and game publishing and now game console making company. Today... how an offhand idea to mark the 15th anniversary of a software company launched a decade-long saga of twists, turns, and mini-boss battles that led to the creation of a handheld gaming console as surprising and unique as its creators.

Pre-order day is finally here, but it's dangerous to go alone. Take this adorable yellow box and let's get crankin' on the story of Playdate. Our story begins around 2011, though it's hard to say exactly. It's been going on for so long that I'm actually having trouble remembering how it all started. That was Panic co-founder Stephen Frank. And while it's maybe a little fuzzy now, somehow he and Panic's other co-founder, Cable Sasser,

got to talking about the company's 15th anniversary, which was coming up the following year. Panic had been making software applications for the Mac since 1997, and they wanted to create something to mark the occasion. Not software, but something tangible. We wanted to do something.

That felt kind of like a keepsake-y kind of thing, or just like a special thing that came out of nowhere. And the goal was to do something that we haven't done before. Not that we're experts at... you know what we do now there's always room to grow but it's just to try to tackle something completely unknown and see what we can learn from it and so that is why we ended up deciding to do

hardware of all things for a software company. That's Panic co-founder Cable Sasser. And he and Steven quickly realized that if they were going to make some kind of hardware device, it probably wouldn't be finished in time for their 15th anniversary. So they set their sights on Panic's 20th anniversary instead.

20 years is a long time of doing the same thing. We enjoy what we do, obviously, or else we wouldn't still be doing it 20 years later. But part of the reason I think why... panic is panic and one of the reasons why we never so far haven't sold the company or taken investments or stuff like that is because we really appreciate the freedom of being able to do weird things

adventures and strange side projects and just having total creative freedom without having to be beholden to anyone or make a lot of sense or you know justify everything We can do whatever we want to do. And I feel like as panic has lasted longer and longer, I have begun to appreciate that that's really unique and rare, especially talking to other people at different companies.

That is a strange and special thing. So what better way to mark two decades of zany tangents and panic rabbit holes than by setting out to create some kind of novelty hardware keepsake? and then releasing it ten years later as a quirky handheld gaming console with a robust SDK, a speaker dock, and two dozen surprise games from a variety of indie developers. But let's back up.

The earliest ideas for this commemorative hardware project actually had nothing to do with games. We talked about a lot of things in the beginning. I think one of my first ideas was a clock. So just a cool clock. and had all sorts of bonkers ideas like, God, had an idea for something that could maybe be made out of porcelain and the case itself could ring or chime. All sorts of unique ideas on clocks.

So yeah, we could have just made a cool clock. Happy anniversary. But, you know, panic being panic and cable being cable. As I was researching displays, I came across this sharp memory LCD display. Actually, I'm not sure. whether the display informed the idea of the device or vice versa. As best as I can remember, it was cable finding the screen, which is...

called a memory LCD screen. It has kind of the reflectivity of e-ink, but it's not e-ink, it's like an LCD. It's not quite like e-ink. An e-ink screen, you have this big refresh rate thing that happens every time you update it. But it still kind of has this feeling of old LCD games, like a Game & Watch. A Game & Watch, for you vibrant young people who may be unaware, was a handheld game console made and sold by Nintendo in the 1980s.

that came with a single game and also acted as an LCD clock. You could buy different Game & Watch devices with different games on them, but no matter which ones you had, your brother was always playing the good one on the family road trip. Those... were segmented LCD displays so you would define the art in advance and turn on and off different pieces of the art but the resolution of this screen was so fine that it seemed like it could look like one of those and the

very very original idea was what if we made a device that played a game and watch game but then but then somebody had what was maybe a bad idea where we thought

Okay, well, what if something surprising happened? That's Greg Miletic, project manager of Playdate. What if after you got this game... a week later it could switch one day you're playing ball and then all of a sudden you know a week later the screen could switch and look like something else and it'd be cool if that was a surprise for people where they thought they were getting just a standard segmented led

Game and watch game and then a week later it turns into something else The idea just morphed and grew over time. It was like we all kind of like games We want to make something hardware We wanted to feel special. We wanted to be not like anything else. We wanted to really confuse people, but also really make people happy. All of these things sort of came together.

And so the idea for a 15th anniversary keepsake clock had evolved into a 20th anniversary Game & Watch style console that would, every so often, surprise and delight its owner with a brand new game. The hard part now is how to go about building this thing. Where to even start?

There was a sort of a pivotal moment earlier in the project where we went to a company that does like industrial design and specifically for kind of one-off things like this. And they are like a big local industrial design firm. Like they, you know, design all these. huge things and store interiors and physical products and the whole nine yards and um that meeting was really interesting they sort of blew us off as like you have no idea what you're talking about you're never going to make a thing

That's Nevin Mergen, designer at Panic, who was also at that meeting. We showed up and even the lead guy at that company was there, which is really kind of him. I think he thought we were going to be talking about smartwatches, which is why he showed up.

With him and an electrical engineer that they brought in that they consult with and a couple of other people. And we sort of explained this idea of a gaming device and it changes and it does all this stuff. And they pretty much spent the entire meeting.

telling us not to do it that it would be prohibitively expensive you know we'd be five million dollars in before we even had a prototype and the resources required would be massive we need a huge team and somebody in the meeting asked like why would anyone even want this and it was like extremely demoralizing and it was one of the only times where i felt like this weird steve jobs part of my brain want to just like

get up and leave in the middle of the meeting which i've never done in my entire life of course i didn't because i'm not that person but um it was just brutal now i understand what they were trying to say Because what we're doing is crazy. I get it. You know, it's like how people come to us and they're like, yeah, I have an idea for an app. And you have to be like, ah.

It's a great idea, but there's a lot of things to consider. It's really hard and the chances of success are really slim. We were those people saying, hey, I think we have an idea for a hardware project. And they were the ones trying to be like, you know, you guys got to understand.

But I think what they didn't understand about us is like, we're trying to learn, even if it ends up as a failure, which it still could. What we're trying to get out of the process is doing something new and learning something. So that meeting ended horribly.

I would quantify it as a complete disaster. And I think that really made Cable want to really, really do this in an even bigger way. Right after that, I reached out to Teenage Engineering. I probably sent just a cold email, or maybe I knew somebody there already. Yep, that's exactly what he did. And that was Jesper Kalkuth, head of design and CEO of Teenage Engineering, reading an excerpt from that email at the start of the episode.

It was just like, hey, we have this crazy idea for this game system, all this other stuff. And we exchanged, you know, a couple emails. And the first question they had was, uh that sounds amazing and can we make a game for it too i was like oh god it felt so good i was like there are people that understand and pretty soon cable and jesper got together to talk about it in person i remember we had like a drink

At Disneyland one time. Yeah, of course. And then I went to Asheville for the Moogfest and met with Cable and his team. And they showed me the first prototype of the play date. it was basically just a circuit board we really only had one guy developing the initial prototype of the board which is dave simply because he was the only one with really any electronics experience so he is the one that attached the screen to a

printed circuit board and got the software working and actually brought a game up for the first time on a prototype playdate, which still blows my mind. I don't know how he ever got that working. So it all started with that circuit board. that Panic showed me in Nashville and I felt it could be a little bit smaller I think it was like one and a half of the size that it is today

So it was a little bit higher, more or less like the classic Game Boy. I think, you know, we all grew up with Nintendo and especially for me the most inspiring memory I have is from the Game & Watch series. I think I was in the fourth or fifth grade when they launched their Game & Watch. I was blown away by... The style of everything, the level of detail, the time they had spent in, you know, like the small illustrations on this little game device.

Panic decided on the code name Asheville for their Game & Watch-inspired device in honor of that meeting in Asheville, North Carolina, where they first showed the prototype to Jesper at Moogfest, an electronic music and technology festival named in honor of synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog.

They also had some good barbecue on that trip, but I guess Asheville sounded better as a codename than pulled pork. And originally it was going to be game and watch style games, which are like LCD segments, kind of like an old school clock where it just has like shapes that it can turn on or off. It doesn't really have...

pixels all over the screen. That's not how our screen works, but we thought, well, maybe the games would look and work like that. And we played with that idea for a while. But it turned out that the Game & Watch aesthetic only took them so far when it came to making games that were fun to play. I think I remember coming into the office on a Monday and being like, there's a problem, and that is that Game & Watch games are not very fun. Because it's true. Those games are great, but...

for like an hour, maybe half an hour. Like, you know, in 1982, they were incredible, but they're just not super fun for very long periods of time. So then that was when we fully crossed the threshold into, I think it should be real games.

It's kind of interesting to think about that because clearly we were thinking... in terms of scope and cautiously right like we can't make a whole game system maybe we just make simple game and watch games even back to we maybe we just start with the clock because that's like an easy thing every step Sort of just the natural forces pushed us towards something more complicated but something that was better and so

Once we decided, yes, it should be a real real system that plays real real games, then that sort of unlocked all sorts of other stuff. That kind of opened up this huge box of, well, how do we get all these games in there? How do we make this platform that can support all these games? It went from a very hard project to an incredibly hard project at that point. They set out to make this thing real.

with some help from their new friends at Teenage Engineering. They really loved the challenge, and so they started suggesting some different inputs on it. You know, like, okay, there's a D-pad, and there's some sort of action button thing, sure. Then they were like, what if there's a crank for radio? input? What if there's some sort of touch surface on the back or on the side?

What if there's a pinball style spring that you can pull and release? And they sent back a bunch of these ideas, and all of them looked cool. There is even one version of Playdate with a little circular display on the back, so you could flip it over and see some other part of a game or access some other controls.

the design process is for me you just start with a lot of ideas so i 3d printed a lot of different form factors with different proportions try different colors and the layout of the buttons you know we both wanted to keep it very very simple but still a little bit find our own identity in this. Why reinvent the wheel? when it comes to gaming you know it's very effective but usually when i design stuff i really like to add one at least one thing that makes it unique famously

Jesper, the teenage engineering designer, said that he wanted to free us all of our touchscreen psychosis. Everything we do is to create kind of like an alternative to the, what did I say? touchscreen psychosis. To us it's very unsatisfying to use a touch device. I get it and I think it's a great interface for creating a lot of different applications without, you know... having hundreds of buttons and knobs and stuff so it's very effective for like a smartphone but for a gaming device

A gaming device to me is almost the same as a musical instrument. It's about zero latency, muscle memory, and you need to feel that you are in instant control of everything that happens. And that tactility... However you solve it, if it's like pressing a button or turning a knob or a crank, it's very important for the whole experience and the joy of being in control.

and using your hands. Eventually it came time to sort of decide what this thing is and what it isn't it couldn't really have you know like 15 different inputs so we all responded to the crank idea the strongest so it was going to be the crank d-pad two buttons and then, you know, some housekeeping buttons like, you know, power and menu. And it landed there. So it was decided. Playdate would be a delightful little handheld gaming console with a high contrast black and white screen and a crank.

And every so often, it would surprise you with a brand new mystery game to play. The next step of engineering the whole device, taking all the ideas and see how we can solve them. I'm also really happy that we... could solve that, the crank could fold in, so when you don't need it, it's not there. I really like how that came out. With the industrial design, that is Playdate's overall form, mostly in place, it was kind of like that meme about drawing an owl in two steps.

First you draw two overlapping circles, then you draw the rest of the owl. Panik had drawn some nice-looking circles. Now it was time to make the rest of the owl. Trouble was...

Panic was still essentially a software company. You know, we don't have an entire hardware team. We have Dave. Dave Hayden is the one that kind of got us going at the beginning because he knows quite a lot about hardware. It's been quite a while. But it was just me on the project for the first few years. I'm Dave Hayden. I'm an engineer. Yeah, I guess I'm a real engineer now. I used to call myself a programmer. I was basically given free reign for...

a couple years to just play around and learn and educate myself, which was amazing. Of course, then I had to actually produce actual results. Which he did. And Panik hired some more people to help out eventually. We brought on Stefan, and he definitely is.

the most seasoned electrical engineer. Stefan Burstrom is a consultant panic hired somewhat early on. When he's not busy skydiving, he helps out on some of the electrical engineering for Playdate. He took my prototype schematics, fleshed them out. figured out all the power stuff that I didn't know anything about, and then did the PCB layout. PCB means printed circuit board, just FYI. I think the...

Big mistake was that we had a working prototype in just a few months, and we thought, oh, this will be easy. This will be great. Well, it has been great, but it has definitely not been easy.

Hardware is hard. Maybe that's why they call it that. The problem with hardware is, you know, it's like physics and stuff. It's not like, let's just throw open the debugger. You know, with software, if you have a reproducible test case... you can fix your bug. That's usually all you need. If I can get it to reproduce, we're good to go. With hardware...

You can get it to reproduce on a single unit, and it may not happen on any of the other units. Having always worked in software for 20 years, if something goes wrong, you can always do a patch, or you can tell people, oh, you can fix this yourself by going and deleting this file.

making this change. But hardware is hardware and it gets made in a factory and then it gets sent out to people and you no longer have any control over it. And that's scary. It's a first time for us and we're trying very hard to do it right. The surprises that have popped up. have just been things I never would have imagined could be problems. There's a lot of those that I just didn't know about. And that just comes through experience. Like we all know about them now.

Had we seasoned hardware people on the team, then probably they would have been like, hey, watch out for X, Y, or Z. But definitely a lot of things can go wrong that I would not have expected could go wrong. And I mean, thinking about the clock chip and thinking about just some of the esoteric, you know, like... Even the amount of effort and work we've put into like making the D-pad and the buttons feel good like that.

That's like a single bullet item on a list of goals, right? Like, D-pad should feel good. And it's like, okay, what does that mean? There are a million answers to that question.

Sub questions to that question depending on how I think you want the case to be and how the flex board needs to sit inside the case and and it's like The tiniest of things that that you think are automatic are definitely not automatic way more so than i think for software although software has the same problem like okay and we need a button that uh logs the user into the server well there's you know a ton of ways that you can do that um but

They're very easy to iterate and try. I guess that's the difference. With software, we can open up Photoshop and try 50 different approaches in, you know, a half an hour. With hardware, if you're thinking about the way the D-pad feels... That's the only way you can solve that is to try to build things and, you know, 3D print things and...

laser cut things. And that is just like a totally different universe of complexity. On the other hand, it's super rewarding because you're holding things and... touching things and feeling things and it's like a physical manifestation of your work as opposed to just sort of this ethereal thing that people download. So, you know, you win some, you lose some. But it's hard.

We had some idea of how hard it would be to actually make hardware, but the number of little details is surprising. Hardware is hard, but it's not impossible. That's Steven Nersessian. He and his wife, Jessica Nersessian, have worked on Playdate since 2016. through their manufacturing consulting firm, Metric Design Works.

We found Steven Nersessian through Teenage Engineering. They recommended him as somebody who could help us navigate the really complicated process of actually building Playdate. And he is a consultant, and he has done this. many, many times before with various companies, and he has been just invaluable to us. He found us the manufacturer we work with, S&O, based out of Malaysia. He's done many projects with them in the past, and he has helped us figure out how to

get the parts for Playdate, how to design the custom parts for Playdate. He's done a lot of the mechanical engineering for Playdate as well. It's not an exaggeration to say that Playdate probably wouldn't exist without him. I'm kind of the overall coordinator between

all the different disciplines that go into making a hardware product. I was an individual contributor on the mechanical design. Jessica was an individual contributor on the... quality control level i work with the electrical engineers and the firmware designers and the manufacturers and the executives that panic to kind of refine the specifications i've worked extensively with

teenage engineering in the past and once they had finished the industrial design and kind of initial mechanical engineering concept They advised that a metric should get involved and kind of take it through to the finish line. We were able to focus on it and really be hands-on with panic to guide them through the process. And it was a complicated process.

Playdate's hardware and software were developed in tandem, with each side relying on the development of the other. The most challenging part of this project was that everything was custom, not just physically. But also inside, I mean the software, the operating system, the firmware, everything to make the games possible beyond the physical product required so much customization.

an iteration that we couldn't go as fast as we wanted to on the physical side because we needed the software to catch up. And then once we got... the software and loaded it on and we found challenges we had to then again physically iterate and electrically iterate and so they were being done in parallel but once everything converged and we were able to test everything together

Well, then there were changes that had to be made. And so that just made the process take longer. One thing gated the other, and we had to just let that happen. Yes, despite the focus on Playdate being a hardware project and the difficulty of that. There are a lot of software and firmware components that all have to align, not only with the device itself, but with each other. So at the top level are the games that developers make to run on Playdate.

Then there's the operating system on which the games run and that manages the whole device, and the firmware that's kind of below that, interfacing directly with the different hardware components. Then, adjacent to the on-device software and firmware,

There's the software development kit, or SDK, that game developers use to write their code, and Playdate emulators for Mac and PC, where game developers can run, test, and debug that code. And then there's the software that runs on completely separate devices on the actual Playdate assembly line.

devices that run diagnostic tests at different points of production. My name is James Moore and I am the developer responsible for building the software that runs on the factory assembly line. James Moore has done an incredible job working on our QA hardware and software that makes sure every playdate behaves the way it's supposed to. That was a big learning curve because we've... Never done hardware QA before. We know a lot about software QA at Panic, but doing it on hardware...

is a really different proposition. And so we have all these different stations that are built up there that test a different aspect of play data as it comes around and comes down the manufacturing line. And James has just done a great job building that software from essentially... ground zero. The factory software is pretty different in that I have to interface with a lot of pieces of test equipment and they by and large all speak a text base.

protocol over a serial board, which goes back decades as far as computer interfaces go. And so it was kind of fun to resurrect my knowledge from the 90s of talking to robots over serial ports and doing lots of text-based message processing. It's pretty different from the kinds of things we do today with server and client communication over JSON or what have you. Each one of these pieces of test equipment has its own way of telling you what it's seeing or what values it's wanting you to know.

about so they're all very unique and special. This was also quite a bit different from what I do normally at Panic in that everything was running on Raspberry Pis which introduces some constraints on processing power.

and some of our tests are very processor intensive. Working on an assembly line, building a device like this is an exercise in Murphy's Law like I have never seen before. Absolutely. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong. The first trip we took to Malaysia, there were multi-day-long stretches of just knocking down a bug and running right into the next one just all day long. And this was all working perfectly well in the office. But once you get...

there, all kinds of variables are introduced. An assembly line is a living beast and you can't really replicate that. in the office. Dakota Ward worked on electrical engineering and on some of the assembly line software as well. What I've learned is that there's going to be tiny variations in every single unit and then if your software doesn't account for that it's going to fail. It's one thing to write software in an office in Portland.

And then it's another thing to have 300 units cruise through that software into Malaysia and to see all the errors and all the corner cases that crop up and then to have to adjust to that. It really took us going over there and being there physically. seeing the process and seeing what the workers do to gain an understanding of that. Even if you have all the same test jigs, you're not going to have 10 people standing around all working with them. At the same time, at different...

places of assembly. And at the same time that I'm trying to fix bugs in the test code, Dave may be making changes to the firmware, and so he might fix a firmware bug to address something that I'm seeing, and there might be some unintended consequence from that.

that could cause a failure at some other place in the assembly line? Yeah, it's Mark's problem now. Well, not entirely. But Panic did hire Mark Jessam to help with Playdate's firmware in 2019.

Mark is one of our senior firmware engineers, and he comes to us after having worked on both the Pebble Watch and the Fitbit to... actual products that really shipped he's actually shipped hardware projects before we have not so he's one of the few people here at panic that's actually done this before and that has been incredibly valuable he got himself up to speed really quickly and

And he works on things like making our Wi-Fi faster, making our power consumption lower, making our downloads faster, just a lot of things like that that are kind of... in the plumbing, but really, really important plumbing that we need to have working just reliably and fast. And so that's been a huge, huge help. I've really enjoyed the fact that we're a small team. That's Mark. It means that I get to touch and work on

Absolutely every part of our firmware, anything that needs to be fixed, I know that I can just look into and it's not worth handing off. When I first came onto the team, I was invited down to Austin to go spend a week. getting to know Dave and sort of working down there, which was really nice. You know, I had a good week of sort of deep diving into how things work and discussing...

you know, plans and what we want to do. Sort of kick off my time working on Playdate. It was super valuable and great to spend time with Dave in person as well. Yeah, Dave knows all the good barbecue places. He took me to a great place. I can't remember the name of it, but like a little trailer off on the side of like a highway. And it was absolutely phenomenal. It's everything that I'd heard about Texas barbecue. Barbecue. Ah, we were talking about firmware. So developing firmware is this.

sort of marriage of software and hardware so what i do is the operating system that allows for games to run on the device as well as allowing for games to interact with the hardware itself. So the Playdate has... buttons that a user can press and the game needs to know when these are pressed, just as an example, making hardware interactions available to the software that's running on the device. We know exactly how everything's working from the ground up.

Whereas something like a modern desktop OS, it's, you know, things don't work and you don't know why. And it's... Good luck with that. So I guess it's kind of good and bad that we always know that we can eventually figure out what the problem is at the very bottom level. You can write the code at the very bottom of the stack. That's really fun being able to get down really deep into the guts of the thing.

Reliable firmware updates has been a pretty big challenge on the device. It requires a lot of things to work together in harmony. Wi-Fi our you know web service that's serving these updates to us as well as you know storage on the device and we need to make sure that all the components are in place in order to successfully update and not brick the device. We don't want to ship bad firmware that ends up bricking, you know.

hundreds or thousands of devices. I want to ensure that people are having a good time, but also, you know, we're not causing this great device that they have to just be completely unusable. It's a challenge both in the sort of stress as well as in the technical and fun aspects as well.

Pretty thrilling. I am just blown away that this weird dream we had suddenly became like, here we are on the other side of the world in a factory making it happen. It's an iterative process. That's Steven Nersessian again. You start with your first prototype. We prove the concept. We can do the thing. Then we make something in...

roughly the form that it's going to be. And then we all sit down and evaluate if we all like what's going on or what criticisms we have. Move to the next stage with the Playdate project. There were many, many, many iterations just to get it to the point where everyone was pleased with what we had in our hands. It was, at times, a frustrating process. Each iteration of Playdate seemed to bring up new problems to solve.

Greg remembers one trip to the factory in October 2018 that was, at first, a little demoralizing. we got there and the units that had been produced for us which were sort of test models they both looked bad and the buttons didn't work and it was kind of a disaster and we did previous units that worked great and so i was like

How did this happen? It felt like we had taken about a nine-month step backwards. That said, when we started working at the problems, figuring out what was wrong, we figured out... all these problems and we we solved them but it was at that point of despair when i kind of realized you know what i'm not going to be upset about this i'm just going to take these problems as they come and just accept that problems are part of the process

And just go with it because hardware is tricky. And so the iterations continued slowly and steadily to avoid the nightmare scenario of a bug or an issue in not just a few test units, but in thousands of finished devices. you don't want to build thousands and have to fix it in thousands right so it's about doing control runs so it's being very very deliberate and disciplined about making 10 checking those 10 there's a problem let's fix that problem

Keep doing that until the 10 are perfect. And then there's another 10 and there's a different problem. And then you have to fix that problem. And then increasing that quantity to 25. Do that for a few weeks. And at each of those stages.

Being on site was invaluable to be able to be there and on the spot to be able to approve and advise and say, yep, let's go to the next stage. Let's now try to build 50 and see how that goes. And as it's scaled.

just we were able to help them refine their process and and build confidence that they were doing the right thing it's not something that can be done remotely if they send us pictures of something and say well do you accept it i can't necessarily see it in the picture i need to be on site and actually inspecting and that helps calibrate for them what we find to be the level of quality that we're looking for because they know that i'll see it and

They won't let it through. That's Jessica Nersessian. Also with Metric Design Works. And I focus on quality assurance through the whole process, both in connecting with what's coming from the vendors and then also... Supporting each of the different operators in calibrating with what the standards are that PANIC's expecting to see, and then developing the QA.

process and training the quality assurance staff at the factory and then i also help with setting up the line and other things as needed and within our partnership i also try and focus on sustainability and research ways of getting a project ready for end of life i actually come from kitchens i used to set up lines for creating huge

meals for a thousand people. So it's very similar to setting up a factory line. Both instances you're taking components and then having to have everybody with the same... high level of detail and focus every single part.

The Constitutes play date is custom. So even something as simple as a screw, you can't just go onto a site that we normally could to say, okay, I just want that screw. Everything is being made from scratch. are packed in quite tightly. And so even for the screw, we needed the head of the screw to be a thinner dimension than what we could find off the shelf. We needed it not to be quite as long because then it would go and hit the LCD, right?

Every single component is being made on a custom basis. We receive components part of the factory reviews every single component and sees that it's quality then it goes to the line and then imagine a crazy puzzle that is incredibly hard to put together and you're doing it with 15 other people And so each person does a small component of this and then passes it to the next. And anyone who's not at full calibration of what our quality is.

we'll pass on something else and we don't want it to get all the way to the end of the line and have to scrap. the unit so it goes through multiple checks both in firmware also visual inspection and then it goes on to quality assurance so it's getting checked for minutes at a time not just whether or not the crank moves, but that's a big one. But every gap we measure, every...

millimeter along the edges of the device. We check for the amount of dots. We check for scratches and each iteration of the different builds we would have new things come up where sometimes the crank would sag and before it never did that or we would have a gap at the screen and it would never do that before and so it's a lot of the group getting together and trying to figure out how to resolve

new issue. There's 15 individual stations with templates and jigs that help things be aligned properly. The first one is checking the LCD to make sure the LCD lights up. The next one is gluing that LCD into the front housing. And that's a different person who's manning that station and whose job is to understand what is okay and what's not okay. And so...

Being there, we were able to work with each individual station and each individual person. And there are multiple people that run that station depending what day it is. If one person's sick, they need a backup. So it's training all the individual people. and sensitizing them for what we're all looking for. So how do we make it as error-proof as possible? The answer is a little at a time.

And while adjustments to the assembly line and quality assurance tests continued to be worked out at SNO in Malaysia, Panik was hard at work back in Portland on the operating system, or OS, and the software development kit, or SDK. basically all of the various infrastructure that game developers would need to actually write a game and put it on a playdate. It's been a collaborative process with a lot of different folks at Panic.

with contributions from Sean Inman on a tool called CAPS, which is a web-based tool for creating and editing Playdate fonts, and Will Cosgrove, who built the Playdate simulator for Windows that developers use to run, test, and debug their games if they use a PC. and firmware and low-level OS work from Mark Jessam. But a lot of the work on the operating system in SDK was done by Dave Hayden and Dan Messing.

Dan Messing has done an incredible job on the operating system and on all the kind of user-facing apps, including the main launcher for Playdate. My name is Dan Messing, and I'm a software engineer at Panic working on Playdate. So I worked on a wide variety of things, everything from sort of...

home screen to the settings app to a lot of different aspects of the SDK so things like pathfinding and collision detection and some fun stuff like blurring 2d images and that's actually a good example of collaboration because I think I did the first implementation of

blurring and dithering and then Dave came along after and did a bunch of optimizations to it to make it faster on the hardware. A lot of it's been stuff like that where everybody touches something in one way or another. It definitely has evolved over time from the first sort of implementations where Dave figured out how to get a picture.

showing on the screen it's sort of grown i'd say it's grown sort of in conjunction with the season one game so it was a good sort of feedback loop as we were working on the playdate os games were being developed for it either the season one games or just folks in the Playdate Developer Preview had been working on games for a while. So as...

people worked on games, it allowed us to develop the SDK sort of in a very focused way. People making the games would, you know, ask us if there was a way to do something and we thought, oh, oh, it would be good if we provided a way to do that instead of...

making every game implement that thing on its own. One example would be a pathfinding algorithm. There was one game that needed it, and they were going to implement their own solution in Lua. But at the time, I thought, oh, I'll just do a C implementation because pathfinding is sort of a common thing for games.

developers to need, so might as well build into the firmware, make it faster for that developer and available for all developers. And I think there were a lot of situations where things like that happened. When developing the SDK, we have to do a lot of API design for that. API stands for Application Programming Interface. In our case, it means standard ways for your code to tell the Playdate system what to do, like that pathfinding algorithm Dan just mentioned.

And I think it was fortunate that I was so familiar with the Mac and iOS SDKs like Cocoa and AppKit and everything, because I think they're pretty nicely designed APIs. So that was good to sort of have that background of what works well and what doesn't.

work well. So I've been on the other side. So has Dave Hayden, and recently. He said his experience with working with the SDK for the Bluetooth chip that Playdate uses has been an example of what not to do when designing our own SDK. Bluetooth is kind of a many-headed Hydra sort of beast thingy. There's all these different layers to it and protocols and whatnot. And the chip that we're using on the Playdate, their code is...

Not the most developer-friendly code I've ever used. Of course, Dave found something fun in the Bluetooth implementation somewhere. Fun? Nothing. There's absolutely no joy in it at all. I'm not kidding. It is almost the most old-running thing I've ever done. Working with the SDK is... Oh, God. It just kills. I mean... Yeah, I could...

Give you lots of complaints, but I don't like to complain. Haha, right. Uh, so... It was good to keep the Playdate game developer in mind when developing our own SDK. We didn't want anyone to have a bad experience developing a game for Playdate. And like Playdate itself, the OS and the SDK get their own quality assurance process.

Asher Cabrera has been doing an incredible job on QA, getting these releases of our software development kit out in a timely fashion. That's been a huge deal because we have developers that rely on this software. It has to work. We don't want to break any of the old software, any of the old games that are out there. It has to work every single time. And so he's done an incredible job making sure that it's reliable. And that's super important because every Playdate is also a developer unit.

The SDK is still in a limited preview now, but eventually it'll be available for free for anyone who wants to use it to make a game for Playdate. No pressure, Dan. It's interesting being on the side of making an SDK for people to use and trying to think about it in a way that makes their life easier. A lot of the stuff that I'm thinking about...

is how to make the people that are using the software have a good time and coming up with ways to make it easy to use. And all that stuff is consistent. And speaking of consistency, every operating system has to have its own internally consistent interface grammar.

The design of things like system settings, menus, input fields, and buttons may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a particular device, but that kind of base level design not only gives different systems their own identity It's crucial to get right so that users can quickly learn how to use a device and know what to expect with each interaction. Here's Nevin again.

So I worked on the built-in software, the OS for Playdate on the design of that. We went through a bunch of different ideas. Oh, an iterative process? I'm sensing a pattern here. One thing we realized early on and that we felt strongly about is that... This is not like a smartphone. It's not going to have like a persistent status bar that shows your, you know, Wi-Fi network strength and such, because those are not as important in a device that, you know, you don't use for a hundred.

things a day you use it to play games so a big focus for me was that this is a device that gets you to playing the next game that you want to play and kind of stays out of your way now when i say it stays out of your way that doesn't mean that it's dry and has no personality you know there are times when you have to use the os you have to connect to wi-fi you have to change something in settings you have to choose the game that you're going to

play or install so we try to make that part fun one thing is we have that crank and so it's not so much that we use it a lot in the os but a lot of ideas around how the os is designed were made so as to kind of speak to the crank. I want a shirt that says speak to the crank. I try to avoid having grids of buttons and things that look touchable. I mean, you know on some level that the play that does not have a touchscreen, but still your lizard brain wants to touch it. So I try to instead have...

lists of things that scroll up and down. So the main launcher where you find, you know, all of your games is this like linear list that you're scrolling through of the games and you can, you know, use the crank to scroll through it. So every game's launcher art, you know, think of that.

as like the icon on your phone can be animated so when you're on it it can be animated when you launch the app there can be like an animation into the app and you know and the sound follows it so ideally each game's Personality is there when you're about to.

launch that game or when you're going through the games checking them out one by one that is where i hope people spend 99 of their time when they're played it not changing their wi-fi password and that is where i like having each game provide its own stamp of There are also some fantastic surprise animations created by a company called Chromosphere.

so with the playdate os there's not a lot of it if that makes sense the main things that you will see as you use it is that launcher where you see all your games and launch them you have the settings app which is kind of a bunch of like tables of text where you change what kind of clock you want to see and your wifi network password. So the thing with the settings app in the menu is that they're quite simple and they don't waste your time.

That's something that's important to me, that when you're trying to change your Wi-Fi password, you are not being kind of sidetracked by a bunch of goofy animation when you're just trying to do this administrative task.

that doesn't mean that they have like no flavor whatsoever for instance when you launch the settings app it shows this little animation as it you know goes from the launcher art to the app that's just because that launch takes some number of milliseconds to happen anyway we might as well show you you know an animation same thing with the menu button dan messaged that this really nice little swipe of that menu

When it happens, that kind of stuff does feel like personality and like a little bit of a vibe to Playdate. Almost as important as the visual feedback you get from using the crank to scroll through games are the system's audio cues that provide user feedback for various inputs. Playdate's interface is full of delightful clicks and beeps, thanks to sound design by Simon Panrucker, who along with Cable Sasser also composed the Playdate theme. You can hear the full song at the end of this episode.

So yes, the interface design is vital, but of course, it's just one aspect of the overall look and feel of Playdate, with its one-bit black and white screen, the curious crank that flips out from the side, and its cheery yellow plastic case. You see a lot of yellow. Panic has a long history of liking the colors yellow and purple. They were right there in the icon of Transmit, one of our oldest apps, and we've always liked them. I think the reason we like them is, one, they're like fun.

summery colors you know that make you feel a little bit like flashy they're also colors that most companies out there are like too cowardly to use in their branding people move towards like blue and red you know rather than you know purple or yellow or, you know, orange.

When it came time to start talking about the color of the actual play date, I think the thing that informed the decision the most was the fact that Cable had on his desk a Famicom disk. The Famicom disk system was an accessory for Nintendo's family computer game system. It was only released in Japan, and used its own special floppy disk cartridges.

and those were that like exact a bright warm yellow and it's also square about the size of a playdate and it's also made of plastic and so just sort of like spotting this thing on his desk it's like oh my god it needs to be that yellow we're really fond of an era of electronics kind of in the 80s and in the early 90s where things weren't afraid to be colorful and kind of boxy and have uh weird proportions or things being off center or so we kind of went from that era into the

or really the iMac I guess ushered us into sort of a more refined version of that which was everything is transparent plastic and you know fairly clean and then it started to get cleaner and then it started to get cleaner. And then it's like, everything's a rectangle that's white or, you know, everything has rounded corners and a silver.

And that seems to be where most things are today. So I think we are really looking back at, I mean, God, even the original, you know, the Sport Walkman, that yellow Sport Walkman is so good. Sony really... were sort of the masters of creating that kind of stuff. But I feel like that's sort of the era, and that's what we wanted to be, was something that felt...

fun and cute and cool and did not take itself too seriously. Because it's weird how we went from the iMac, which most definitely didn't take itself seriously. I mean, it was like, you know... Candy purple and then there was the blue Dalmatian one or whatever and there's like I mean even god is there a computer that could be goofier than that sunflower hinged lamp iMac with that

Goofy rounded bass, but and all that you know, but it was cool and cute That sounds just gone. But anyways, it's a bummer because I kind of like it when things are goofy so even though we tried some other colors just sort of you know as tests we just kept coming right back to that yellow because it's bright there's not necessarily a console or even like a piece of consumer electronics that is canonically yellow you know if they offer a bunch

of colors eventually they might offer yellow but it's not something they rush to as like their you know original color so it just felt like we could like own this yellow and we could feel so proud and happy to make a thing that is known for being yellow the box had to be yellow too

When you receive your playdate, it'll come in its cool yellow box, which I hope you think is cool enough to keep. If not, I totally understand. But if you decide to keep it, it's sort of the size and shape of a book. So it'll fit nicely on your bookshelf. You can just jam.

it in between two books we originally wanted to put on the side on the spine the number one as in like season one of playdate but then we thought that would be cruel because you know if there's a two and a three it's sort of like

forcing people who are in the collector mindset to collect them all and you know we don't need to give people any more stress in their lives yeah no kidding if you've listened this far you're probably understanding why this project has been such a massive undertaking for a fairly small software company

Around 20 people when work on Playdate began. A little bigger now. But we've gotten pretty deep into the story of Playdate without mentioning that microscopic elephant in the room. SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that caused the global COVID-19 pandemic. You can probably see where I'm going with this. Of all the things that we were mentally prepared for in trying to create our first hardware product, you know, just like everybody on the planet.

Nobody could have seen what happened with COVID. It's like all of the human beings that have gone through this and are continuing to go through this as we record this, you know.

It was a one day at a time thing where all of a sudden, you know, we're like, huh, this thing looks like it's getting kind of serious. Hmm, weird. I remember not understanding anything about it. I remember asking like, wait, so am I... what's wrong with going to the store and like other people at panic having to like explain to me how how a pandemic works feel kind of dumb in retrospect but just with every passing day things got a little bit

more unusual and one day we're like boy i don't think we should be going to the office anymore everybody grabbed their machines and you know we're all just 100 working from home remotely and you know there's Good and bad, but like, I think if you had told me that, yeah, oh yeah, in the final mile of creating this thing, you're going to have to switch working remotely. My instinct would have been, that is a horrible idea and it will.

lead to absolute disaster. And clearly I am wrong. I would have been wrong because it has not been that bad. I think we learned that... We can do this, that we can be apart from each other and still creating something together. And it's not quite the same, but...

Functionally, we just kept cranking and making things and working through the process. Then there's the second part of it, which is the factory. Our factory in Malaysia did shut down for just a brief period of time earlier this year. Maybe... two or three weeks, it actually wasn't very long. But the biggest issue for us was the travel restrictions that Malaysia put in place. Just as we were about to start ramping up production, they required us to get special permission.

in order to enter the country and we thought we could do that but it wasn't that easy and the other thing was they required a two-week quarantine once you arrived you had to stay in a hotel once you got there and that just made us traveling there that much harder

Fortunately, our manufacturing consultant, Stephen Nersessian, he and his wife, Jessica, bravely and heroically decided to volunteer for this duty. That helped us out just tremendously. We needed somebody there when manufacturing was starting up. watch over quality, watch over the production methods, make sure everything was going well. And having them there in person just made all the difference for us. We basically had a surprise semester abroad. Steven and Jessica ended up staying in...

Malaysia for five months in the middle of the pandemic. So it took us six months just to get approval to come into the country. which usually we just fly, get a landing visa, no problem. In the course of that six months, we were working with wonderful officials from the government.

from the u.s side from the malaysia side everyone working together to get us out there but we're flying 14 hours and we don't know if we're going to quarantine together and we don't know where we're going to be and we don't know what the food is going to be so we packed a huge suitcase with provisions and gin and we

arrived at the hotel and all the staff were in hazmat suits and we were being carted around in these different cohorts and finally we did in fact get to quarantine together in a small gray room run by the malaysian government But on the other side, we were finally able to get out to Penang, out to the factory, and there was a lot of movement control.

had to go to the police station regularly and get approval. We had roadblocks where we couldn't pass between different areas, which was problematic for the whole... process of vetting vendors because there's a vendor who's supposed to make the screws and we can't go and visit their factory and see what their quality is like. And so

Everything ended up being a bit elongated in that way. Restaurants were closed, grocery stores were accessible, but we had to only stay within a certain area or the police would stop you. So it made it a bit of an adventure. It was pretty grueling. I mean, it's 45 minutes each direction to the factory and back. And we were there somewhere between 8 to 12 hours a day, depending on what the push was.

And masks all day in the factory. We still weren't vaccinated at that point. So we were nervous. The cases were better there than they were in the U.S. at the time. But I don't know. It was. It was an adventure and we had no idea we were going to be there so long. Most trips when we go there, there are a few weeks, maybe a month at the most.

And then we come home and we unpack and we repack and then we get situated to go out again. This time we were there for five months. It really is kind of a trickle down issue where we couldn't go to the supplier side. in most cases because they were in a different district and we couldn't travel to that district.

Or if we could, we couldn't go in without a negative COVID test and end, end, end. There were so many things that layered up. On top of that, even them getting their suppliers, getting raw materials, getting steel, getting paint.

getting plastic resin those things even got elongated so just anytime we'd had one of those iterations where we said well this isn't quite right let's make a design change instead of taking a week like it normally does that might take three weeks the on the electrical components i think by now everyone's heard about the chip shortage and those are standard chips

that are being made and being supplied to to many people around the world that's that's just one aspect of kind of the supply chain in that case it still is an ongoing challenge you know every day it's some new vendor that's extending their delivery deadlines. wanting to increase costs. It's just made it an already uncertain process. It's added that much more uncertainty to it. So parts did become really difficult to find this year. Any electronic part.

strangely, is in short supply. It's some of the obvious things like the screen and the CPU, but also things like the chip that controls the USB port, for example. They're all difficult. to come by now. All have lead times that stretch into the several, you know, six months, nine months sometimes. And so that's been a real challenge. We have enough parts to build the first 20 or 30,000 playdates. The tricky part is...

trying to build that 20,001st playdate. That's when we have to wait on some new parts to come in. And it would be easier if we had a clear forecast for how many playdates to build, but we still have no idea how many customers out there want a play date and so that's made it really difficult to plan ahead which is why the pre-orders are so important for us to figure out actually how many people want this thing. We did have to raise the price a little bit on play date to make up for some of the

the cost increases that have taken place over the past year. Some of our parts have gone up by 20 or 30 percent, which is a pretty big increase. But also because of the parts shortage, there's sometimes an opportunity for us to get parts faster if we offer more for them, say if a part is three dollars.

and we can't get it. We could say, well, if we pay $450 for it, can we get them any sooner? And sometimes we can. So we wanted to both cover the cost increases and make some room so we could pay for additional increases if it meant... We would get parts sooner. Okay, so this won't affect Playdate pre-orders, but the factory did end up having to close again recently for most of July 2021. Our factory...

fully closed a couple weeks ago until the end of the month, which is 100% the correct thing to do. But being so far away. You know, it's hard. We want everybody there to be safe. I mean, God, for a second, we're like, can we help send vaccines to the factory? Like, you feel kind of powerless. I don't want any of the incredible people that are building this product every day to certainly making a play date is not worth being sick. And it's hard to be.

so far removed from that situation and feel hopeless in being able to help them but we know it's a very good place to work and they definitely care about their workers so i know They're going to make the right decisions and look out for everybody's well-being.

When you're so far removed from factories and manufacturing like most of us listening to and recording this podcast are, it can be hard to remember that manufacturing is essentially a human process, and not very automated at all in most cases. There are no faceless robots assembling these playdates. It's a bunch of passionate, hardworking people at S&O. S&O stands for Sharp and Onkyo. It's co-owned by both of those companies. S&O is great. Just incredibly...

helpful, incredibly enthusiastic, and very motivated to make our project succeed, which is a wonderful feeling. This is a factory that's been open for decades, and most of the people... who work there have been working there since they got out of school so there's this deep connection and a family sort of atmosphere we have such a wonderful team and it is a human endeavor it's not

just putting a widget in one end and having it squirt through a machine and then pop out all finished and ready to go. And we all have been working on this since 2016. It's been an endeavor that the... operators at the factory are invested in as well they're excited we were spending new year's eve all together getting the line in order and trying to get everything out and me shouting across to everyone okay we have 10

We have 10 and everyone excited and clapping and all our time in Malaysia has helped us connect at an individual level where I know Linda is the one at inspection and Bala is the one at QA and Vani is the one. at audio and everyone is working together. And that collaboration is wonderful. With a project as big and complicated as Playdate has become, and all of the setbacks from manufacturing issues to pandemic delays, it's easy to find yourself asking, Why are we doing this? This is hard.

I think the biggest lesson I've learned is to not be discouraged by failure because failure is really part of the process, especially with something this complicated and the fact that we're doing it for the very first time ever. We're going to fail a lot of time. while this is being developed. And it's easy to get discouraged by that. And I definitely have been discouraged at some moments. But, you know...

We've solved every problem we've hit so far, and I am hoping that we will continue to do so. I think we will. Definitely. And incredibly, through the upheaval of the pandemic, people have continued to make amazing games for Playdate.

It's been really cool to see season one expand and change over time from the original concept, which was partly in response to the Netflix binge-watching culture that was emerging in the 2010s, where a new show would come out but release all of its episodes at once. So people could binge watch the entire new season of whatever it was like Arrested Development at the time or something like in one day. And a lot of people would do that. And I sort of did that. Maybe not.

in one day, but over two or three days with some of these shows. And then we realized that we talked about these shows for two days and that was it. They just like evaporated from the cultural, you know, conscience. And so we thought that... There is something cool about the sort of weekly water cooler effect of having stuff that is delivered weekly. And so we thought, well, what if we have a season of games? So you get a game a week, which gives you a pace. So you're not just like...

quickly trying to play 20 games and then maybe like not really giving a chance to, you know, a game because there were 19 others to get to. I think there were a few things going on at once that led to sort of this idea. One. In the office, Nevin and Greg had started doing this thing they called Match Cut Movie Club, where you would show up to a movie theater for a movie.

Or multiple movies. And you had no idea what the movie was going to be. You just had to trust that Nevin and Greg have pretty good-tasted movies, which they do. And the idea was that you roll in... You sit down and you just see where the screen takes you. That's a very unusual concept in today's modern times, where certainly with the arrival of the internet, nothing is a surprise anymore.

I mean, every movie that comes out, we've tracked for years. Every video game, every inch of the development is revealed. We have a lot of information. So thinking about Match Cut Movie Club. I think was probably part of the inspiration for season one. We thought back to what video games were like kind of pre-internet and how you didn't know what was coming out next week.

it just you would go to the store and there was just a huge surprise shelf full of stuff that you didn't even know was going to be there and that's the kind of experience we wanted to recreate where you didn't know what was coming next and it was just a you know Series of endless surprises Even if not every game is a hit for them or not every game resonates with them

The feeling of up there's a new game today I can't wait to check it out that I just want people to have that feeling because it's such a good feeling and I and I feel like as we go through life it gets harder and harder to capture that feeling initially we thought well maybe we'll sell

You know, 10,000 Playdates, we can pretty easily make all those, put them in a warehouse, ship them all out, get them to everybody. Everybody starts the season on the same day and plays the games, and that all works out great. The further down the road we got with Playdate, the more we... realized that season one is not really compatible in any way with how things are manufactured in our naive beginning mind we thought well we'll make

x number of playdates and we'll just ship them all to everybody and then everybody gets all the games at the same time at once and that's not really i'm gonna say possible We think we might have more than 10,000 customers now. We don't know how many more, but it could be more. It could be a lot more. We can't build and ship that many Playdates concurrently. It's just not really feasible for us.

Instead of having the model where everyone was playing the season at the same time, we switch to a model where the season starts at the moment you turn on your playdate for the first time. Once that happens, you'll get the first two games, and then every week after that, you'll get two more games. for 12 weeks, and so everyone is on their own season schedule rather than on one coordinated season.

universal season schedule. It means that everybody has the same experience. Everybody has the experience of getting these games over time in the same order. Same sequence. And it's just a more consistent and we hope more fun approach for people who get their play dates later in the year. Some people will get their play dates at the same time since they'll be shipped in batches.

But one cool way to experience the games of Season 1 might be to organize a sort of Playdate book club with your friends. we're going to have a lot of really cool games and it's only natural that you'll want to play them with your friends and so if you and your friends want to sync up and decide to hold off on you know the certain game until a certain date and then play them together either live over Zoom or just talk about them after they're done. I think that sounds like a great idea.

And the funny thing to me is that we thought it would be a struggle to get 10 games made for this. So we started working on some of our own games and very cautiously approaching some people about making them. And now, you know, we sort of have the opposite problem, which is that so many people want to develop games for play. Yeah, so the season is now 24 games. It was originally 12, but we doubled it. There's just so many.

amazing and different types of games that we had funded that was just hard to not include. There's some people that were just already part of the Playdate community that we ended up including in season one and one of the developers, Nick. Magnir had been in the early developer community, I guess, for Play Day. And so seeing his game in the community, we thought that the game was...

of pretty good fans. That's Arisa Sudangnoy, who handles developer relations for Playdate. Arisa came to us from Valve, and she is our developer relations manager, meaning that she is in charge of communicating with all of our game developers about...

Playdate, what's going on with us, and finding out from our developers what they're working on, what issues they're having. And that's key for a product like Playdate because the 24 games that make up the season are really a huge part of the value of Playdate.

We want to make sure those games are top-notch, and it's Orisa's job to make sure that developers know what we're doing, and they're informed about our schedule. So she's on top of all that, and then also she's taken out a bunch of other duties, like working on our warranty.

and our return policy and it's just been a huge help. She's done a great job. Everyone seems pretty easy to communicate with. It's pretty awesome that we have just... people around the world from us to japan germany i think the main thing was that we want to make sure that we're not just having developers that

already established, just having, you know, developers from all sort of backgrounds that are interested in making games for the Playdate. So how did Panic find the developers whose games will be included in Season 1? We obviously knew...

There's no way we're going to be able to build all the games for this thing by ourselves. And so the first question we asked was, who do we know that can make games? Fortunately, our paths have crossed with many gamers over the years of panic. Fun fact, one of the weirder panic overlaps was that we made t-shirts for the game Katamari Damacy.

Years later, that connection led directly to its creator Keita Takahashi creating the game Crankin's Time Travel Adventure for Playdate Season 1. I think I remember us all sitting down and just writing on note cards the names of basically every developer that we thought was doing cool work or we thought could do cool work.

And it was a lot of note cards. It was a difficult process because then you have to approach them and be like, hey, here's this thing that is hardware from a company that's never made hardware before with a seasoned system that's never been attempted before.

in a crank that's never existed before and our budgets aren't super massive do you want to make a game for a device fortunately the cool thing about creative people and game developers is that there's definitely a group of people that just super resonated with that batch of ideas one of the mistakes we made in marketing was leading with the big names and that kind of set this impression that like

Here's another device for that same club of indie developers that are successful and that you've heard of, which is really not what we wanted at all. But... you know, marketing brain says, oh, man, you got to get people excited about this thing. And, you know, we got to use the big names. And I think that set the wrong impression.

And so we worked to correct that. That like early announcement really was beneficial for us because it let us learn a lot of things without selling the product yet. And it gave us an opportunity to correct a lot of things without selling the product yet.

And I'm really, really, really grateful that we did that. So that allowed us to sit down and say, okay, the whole goal of this thing is that it's for everybody, that you can get the development kit without having to pay a bunch of money, that every unit is... a dev unit that you don't have to have special hardware to make games for Playdate. If we're clearly trying to build something that is open and accessible, but the season needs to reflect that too.

We can't have a season that says this is for, you know, the folks you've heard of, but also say this is for everybody. And that was one of those times where, I mean, criticism, nobody likes it because it doesn't feel good. But it comes from an important place and you have to listen to it because there's a reason why people are saying, hey, this thing is...

This doesn't make me feel great. You can react to that in two ways. You can say, well, you know, too bad. Or you can step back and say, oh, huh? Yeah, that's right. I didn't really think about that and we will work on that. So we definitely took a step back and shored that up and reached out to more people and more developers and I think made the product and the season.

significantly better as a result. It's been kind of like my personal goal to bring in more voices to the game industry and more diverse voices. And so working with Sweet Baby. Having that opportunity to work with them has been really rewarding. They believe it's very important that we provide a way for people to get work on a project and get credited for it so that they can put it on their resume.

and find other work in the industry. Sweet Baby is this incredible group of super talented game makers. And we talked to them about making... a game for play date and they did and then we talked about making more games for play date because they have this incredible endeavor where they are connecting veteran developers with super talented developers that

maybe don't have credits yet that don't have the experience in a shipped game but have incredible abilities and skills and like that is such a hard barrier and you just you need to be seen And you need to be taken seriously. And that's really hard to do when you can't say, I shipped this. And so Sweet Baby's awesome idea is to pair people up and have a combination of experience and new experiences. It's so smart.

It's so cool. And so when they said, yeah, we would love to put some teams together to make even more games for Playdate, it's just a super no-brainer. I'm so glad to be working with them. And the stuff they put together is...

Super inspirational for us. It makes us excited about the platform. Again, it's just that great feedback loop of happiness, which is the best case scenario for a collaboration. Sweet Baby's Lost Your Marbles is one of the 24 amazing games that will be included with season one.

In the spirit of keeping things mostly a surprise, and because I'm trying to keep this episode under two hours long, I don't want to list all of the Season 1 games here. But you can see the full list on our website, play.date.

And outside of Season 1, Panic also has an ongoing Playdate developer preview. The Playdate developer preview was a way for us to... really accomplish two things one get playdate in the hands of brand new developers who have not touched this platform before and see how it goes well it's confusing what was hard to set up what do they need from our sdk it's just a fresh set of

experiences that in a way is kind of like a beta test of the sdk and then simultaneously kind of a beta test of our hardware this has allowed us to check does anybody have any problems with the crank. You know, we're going to manufacture a lot of these and send them out. So we really got to make sure that they're good. And because we had a very limited number of units to give out versus the amount of interest there was from developers, there are only 200 to 300.

developers in the preview right now. We plan on expanding and releasing the SDK publicly at some point in the future, but we're wanting to kind of make sure that we can provide the sort of support that developers need and the documentation.

necessary before we do so the developer preview kind of solved both birds with one stone you don't solve a bird with a stone i just don't want to talk about killing birds yeah it was a twofer it was actually tremendously useful and The best part about the developer preview for me was watching people go from zero to like something in a really short period of time, which.

told me that we are kind of on the right track. There are tons of developers who have been making really cool stuff. So what about a season two? If we do a season two, we will have that audience that already has playdates sitting on their desk. So the dream of a synchronized season. is way more possible with a season two than a season one. So, you know, we'll see how that goes and cross our fingers that that can exist. Who knows what might happen in the future?

Regardless, it's truly amazing to see the ingenuity and variety of games that people have been creating for this tiny device with a one-bit black and white screen. All of the quirks of Playdate, I think, help tremendously in attracting developers.

to want to make something for Playdate. If Playdate had a full color OLED screen and a powerful 3d chip it would take a very long time for one person to say yeah i'll make a game for that by going in the opposite direction of where gaming has gone lately we return to a scale in which one person, two people, three people can make an awesome, entertaining, you know, lengthy, meaningful title. And the constraints enable that. It's like, oh, constraints. I love constraints.

And so that was an obvious yes. That's Sean Inman, who developed Playdate Pulp, created the Playdate font tool called Caps, and whose game Ratcheteer will also be part of Season 1. Panic asked me to pitch some games and the crank inspired a lot of interesting ideas for abilities that you would unlock in the game. You know, we have a one bit black and white screen. And so in some sense, you're like.

how could you ever impress somebody with graphics on a one-bit screen? But people get that it's a one-bit screen and calibrate their expectations accordingly. So you're like... Whoa, how did that happen? Like you see this cool animation that's really super smooth. I think a lot of it comes from the choice of that particular screen. You kind of almost don't get it until you see it in person because it's extremely sharp, especially under.

bright light you know it gets better the more light is shining on it you know unlike most displays you have today it's one of those kinds of things where it's kind of an artificial constraint you can put on someone like a game designer and say, what can you do with this limitation? You know, how can you be creative in this box? And I think people have come up with some really cool ideas.

i love the black and white 400 by 240 pixel playdate screen i kind of like don't want to design in anything else anymore it is so freeing for me personally to not think about color and not think too much about like even things like line weight and whatnot i like to think that when i'm going to draw something in pixel art there's like one way to do it

it's like you have to draw an arrow at 16 by 16 pixels and it's like well there's only one way to do it of course that's completely false you know if you asked 20 different pixel artists to draw that you will get 20 different arrows there's different kinds of flavors to give to art even when it's that small and that simple a lot of the constraints that breed creativity is when i'm working on games the actual physical

constraints of the device you know having a black and white screen being small and all that kind of stuff but yeah it definitely goes all the way down the stack to having to get creative with solutions to make sure that you're not overtaxing the hardware you have things like battery power that you need to consider you know you want to

somebody to be able to play their playdate for hours on end and not have to rechart it every 30 minutes. So there's these sort of constraints to consider that I find bring out a lot of creativity in my work and are really fun to think about and interesting problems to solve. When you're a kid, you get the like giant box of 80 billion crayons. And it's like, okay, you maybe like dink around with a few of them. But it's kind of overwhelming a little bit. But...

Somebody gives you that classic eight pack or whatever. You got your primaries. You can draw your rainbow. You know exactly what you want to do. And it's almost freeing in a way to be given less than be given more. And particularly for the people that are attracted to this device in the first place. Panic really wants Playdate to be for everyone, from developing games to playing them. Mark Jessam has been working on something that will help make Playdate physically accessible to more people.

One thing that's been a lot of fun has been developing this mirror application which we are sort of targeting as a streaming and accessibility tool that you run on your computer and you stream. things like the screen to your computer and you can send button presses from your computer back to the device. That has been a super fun and I think also very worthwhile project from a usability standpoint.

Just sort of ensuring that absolutely anybody who wants to play Playdate will have the best chance that they can. And since every Playdate device is also a dev unit, what about opening up game development to people who might not know how to code? The Plated SDK is fantastic, but it's not something that, for instance, I could use because my development skills are limited to some basic HTML and CSS and copying and pasting bits of JavaScript from Stack Overflow.

So developer Sean Inman has been building a web-based application called Playdate Pulp for non-programmers like me. It's inspired by development environments like Adam Ledoux's Bitsy. Nevin did the interface design. So we want to make it really easy to make games for Playdate.

game development can only be so easy if you've never done game programming before there's always like a lot of setting up of just like tools and learning the basics of how you know programming works and then putting pixels on screen and then learning about you know how to solve different problems and physics and math and whatnot

And I think anyone can get there with enough time and with enough effort and they can learn that. Hey, thanks for that vote of confidence. But that sounds like a lot of work standing between me and the post-apocalyptic zombie text adventure I want to make.

But it's also sometimes nice to give people a way to go from sort of zero to a game in a super short amount of time. And I really wanted us to have an answer for that. How can somebody who has never made a game before, but they really have a story.

to tell or or an idea for a game how can they make a game quickly and so we came up with something we call playdate pulp pulp is a web-based tool for making adventure story based games where you're like a character who's walking around this world that you design encountering other characters finding stuff picking up stuff and sort of exploring the world and running through the story of it. Pulp is cool because it opens the doors for so many people that don't know how to program.

They don't normally do game development. And so allowing creative people to be able to make cool games without the knowledge of complex programming languages.

Pulp is limited in scope. There are definitely types of games that Pulp was not really designed for. You're not going to make like a... super fast real-time shooter game in pulp just because it's not what we made it for but you can make a classic game where you're like exploring a village or some dungeons or a house or something like that pulp is something you can

without ever writing a line of code you can basically draw your art in it you can lay out these like rooms or environments you can put down characters draw those you can write what dialogue they say all of that can be done without any code

However, if you're interested in learning a little bit of scripting code, pulp also supports something called pulp script where you can have those simple programming solutions like if my character has a sword then they can defeat the dragon at the end and so on it really is not very like demanding

in terms of the hardware that you run it on. The game that you're working on is saved to your account on our servers. So you can just come back to it another time or another computer and pick up where you left off. And when you're done with this game, you can just download it.

dot pdx file that's the like executable game file for playdate connect your playdate via USB and just move this file over and you've got your game made in pulp in a web browser playing on your playdate you can send this file to your friends They can play it on their play dates. So in that sense, you can go from, you know, sitting in front of a web browser on your computer to playing a game on your play date in minutes. I don't know if there's like another thing like this for, you know.

handheld consoles out there but to me it's really cool that you can jump that quickly from an idea to drawing your art writing your dialogue or whatever and then playing a game on your playdate Stepping back a bit, it's really wild to think that Panic has made not only this handheld gaming device that's 100% custom, but also developed its operating system from scratch, developed a full SDK that third-party developers have been using for a few years now.

plus this entire web-based development environment where anyone can make their own Playdate games that will then run on any Playdate device. It just seems like a lot. But wait, there's more! Yeah, of course.

We knew that people would want some way to protect their playdate and also to kind of make it a little more fashion-y. So we started thinking about some sort of a protective cover for it. Now the Playdate has like the crank on the side. It has buttons on pretty much all surfaces, you know, on like the front, on the right side, on the top, you have ports on the bottom. So we didn't think that like a kind of a case that fully encloses it would really.

work well we were thinking about other ideas and so we were thinking about the axes along which you can put some sort of protective layer without you know blocking the crank or or anything and then we started thinking about basically like a like a book jacket you know so the way that this playdate cover works is imagine sort of like a book jacket turn it you know sideways so that it closes top to bottom it clicks onto the back of the playdate

It clicks magnetically, by the way, into these like corner screw holes on the Playdate. And then it sort of folds over the top and it then closes it, you know, from the back to the front, kind of like a book closing. It also makes it look kind of like an ice cream sandwich where you have these like...

you know, two layers of the, you know, soft, cushy plastic of the cover around the Playdate. The cover is purple. The Playdate is yellow. It's a really cool color combo. So it does protect it because it protects the screen. It covers the buttons. It'll protect it from getting, you know, bumped in your... bag, but it also makes it look like a tiny little hardcover book that you can put on your shelf. The cover is super adorable. And then, of course, there's the Playdate stereo dock.

So the Playdate Stereo Dock is our first major accessory for the Playdate. The idea came from Teenage Engineering. They sent us a concept drawing of this thing that just looked incredibly cool. It made Playdate look like a little TV set and we... immediately fell in love with it. It is a little yellow cube that sits on your desk, and you can mount the Playdate on the front of it. It's got a magnetic front. Playdate snaps right onto it.

I felt, you know, like, okay, so if you don't have it in your hand, it would be really nice to have it like a desktop companion, something that you can have on your desk while you're working. It can just sit there. And it does a couple of things. One is that it will charge your playdate like a dock. The other thing that's important is that it also has stereo speakers built in. And so we're working on a special app that will stream really cool music to you. Wade Cosgrove has done an amazing job.

On the Pool Suite app for the stereo doc, people will get a lot of joy out of that, I think. Pool Suite FM for Playdate is a music player for Pool Suite's hand-picked playlists. Incredibly cool, kind of. 80s-ish lounge music. It's not their music, it's music they stream. That will play through the stereo speakers. It's also, I'm a pen freak, so of course it has like two slots for a pen.

And I'm also happy that Panic moved on with that and made a special pen for it. So I'm really looking forward to having one on my desk. This is being developed by S&O, by the factory. And they have a long history with working in audio, so they have a lot of experience. We had multiple design concepts that we explored for quite some time.

Before we converged on this concept of it being a thing that you put in one place and it's your charging station. Plus speaker. Plus pen holder. Just some trivia for you. The stereo dock was two separate pieces. There was the snap-on speaker, Bluetooth speaker, and then that itself would snap on to a dock slash battery pack for the Playdate.

so the idea was that if you want a slightly thicker playdate on the go you could snap on the speaker and then if you want a very thick playdate slash one that also can sit on your desk you can also snap on a battery pack You can see that in the design today where we kept the seam between the two units because we thought it looked kind of visually interesting. But in getting into the realities of that product, that was a lot going on.

at once with the planet stereo dock it was difficult to engineer something that was all of these separate pieces and so at some point we said okay let's make this one piece And then we said, and let's probably remove the battery because we don't need that anymore because it's now going to be just sitting on the desk. The Playdate stereo dock is awesome because it provides...

a cool home for the play date. That's my favorite thing about it. You know, rather than just have it sit on your desk, it's this beautiful looking thing. It's a nice looking clock. Oh, so I guess Bannock did make a clock after all. The company's 25th anniversary is coming up in 2022.

For Panik, working on Playdate has been a wild and exciting and tumultuous 10 years. But now, finally, if you're listening to this, pre-orders have gone live. Our plan is to... take orders for as many playdates as people want we don't want to shut down orders early some people will get their playdates relatively quickly some people may have to wait a little bit longer a few months

maybe even longer than that, depending on what demand is, and knowing that you will get a playdate at some point. Of course, you can always cancel the order whenever you need to, if the wait is too long or for any reason at all. But we wanted to try and make this process. as frustration-free as we could. And that was the most important thing is to just let people place an order and then save their place in line. So that's the plan.

We're all feeling some combination of excited and extremely nervous. So we knew that this day would come. We're kind of prepared, but also like maybe mentally not prepared. It's satisfying to be at the point where... It is going to be put into a box. It is going to be shipped to somebody. And we're going to know what demand looks like. It's going to be a lot of fun. And I'm also anxious to know what that number is so that we can start planning supply chain and ramping the volume.

appropriately it's just a little bit nerve-wracking and exciting i'm optimistically nervous or i mean i'm excited no i don't know a mix of excited and nervous maybe i just have a

Tough time telling the difference between the two. I'm ready for it to ship. I'd like to have people of all ages be able to sit down with the system and have some... sort of fun experience with it regardless of their their background i'm anxious i'm just really curious to find out the number that we have been wondering about for the past six years is how many people want a play date that's been

kind of a mystery to us for a very long time. And it'll be incredibly, I hope gratifying to find out that it's maybe even a few more than we thought. From where I'm sitting right now in my home office.

Doing this at 11 43 p.m. It's very difficult for me to talk about any of this stuff because I don't know how the story ends and Trying to dissect this project in the middle of the project is almost physically impossible for me there's just too much wrapped up in it a fairly significant portion of my life and the lives of my co-workers all the people that have worked so hard on this thing for so long i just hope that nobody

comes out of this experience feeling at all disappointed. So I'm going to be optimistic and hope for the best. But yeah, feel a little shaky. Maybe I also need to go to bed. I am excited despite my trepidations, despite my uncertainty about what's going to happen in a few weeks or a few months. I am excited to see what happens. I am excited to... see how people feel when they get their units and excited, definitely most excited to see what people create.

Excited about it finally coming to fruition. I mean, what's better than a device that just makes people happy? The entire purpose is to have fun. I can't wait to see what happens next. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode of The Panic Podcast. This is the final episode of Season 1. It was delayed along with Playdate because I really wanted to sync it up with pre-order day. So thank you for your patience and thanks for listening. And here's some news I hope you'll be excited about.

There will be a separate Playdate podcast featuring more behind-the-scenes Playdate stories and interviews with Playdate game developers. So follow us on Twitter for more updates on that soon. We're at Playdate. Some of the interviews in this episode were recorded back in 2018.

And recording them is what inspired me to make the Panic! podcast in the first place. Other conversations you heard today were recorded more recently, over video calls. But so many people have worked on and contributed to Playdate that I couldn't possibly have interviewed them all for this episode.

And I'm still leaving a lot out that hopefully I'll follow up on in the Playdate podcast. Kyle Rimkus has been focused on getting the payment system up and running to take pre-orders. Tim Coulter has been working hard on the websites.

Sandwich made us the most phenomenal ad for Playdate, which you should definitely check out. Pop Agenda has been wrangling all of our PR stuff. They've been amazing. And special thanks to Teenage Engineering, Metric Design Works, S&O, and of course, everyone at Panic. There is not a day goes by that I do not appreciate and I am not amazed by what the people I work with are capable of. And that's just the best feeling.

to be inspired by the people that you work with and it in turn bringing out the best in you. The best people to create things with are the people that go, sure, like... let's try that. Sounds interesting. Sounds fun. And that's not exclusively, let's try that because they also have to be people that can say, well, we tried that and maybe we should do it like this, or maybe we should do this other thing instead. That's an important balance.

But I'm always, always thankful to be surrounded by people who will just jump in and try things and just see how it goes. The Panic! Podcast was written, produced, and edited by me, Krista Mergen. And our amazing theme music was composed by Cable Sasser, who also wrote the Playdate theme you're hearing now, along with Simon Panrucker. Nevin Mergen designed the podcast page and artwork. Tim Coulter built the website and Wrangles the podcast feed.

Michael Buckley made the super cool Audion web player featuring tons of faces he revived from the Audion archive. You can see and use it by hitting the play button on any podcast on our podcast page. I hope you'll join us over on the Playdate podcast feed. Look for updates on that soon. Thanks and bye for now! All right, I was recording with a Neumann U87 and a little Tascam field recorder DR-60D Mark II

Okay, have a great summer. I'm going on holiday now for four weeks. Yes, we have four weeks in Sweden. Bye-bye.