What would you say is the most challenging part of curating a Playdate season, now that you’ve done it twice? Picking the games for Season Two was very challenging! We received around 70 pitches from Playdate devs. There were a lot of great games and we weren’t able to include them all in Season Two.
Do you have to make a conscious effort to make sure the games aren’t alike, or does that just sort of happen naturally with the nature of the hardware and the indie developers? Not really! There’s such a vibrant and wonderful developer community for Playdate that it wasn’t hard to make sure games weren’t similar. I think the small teams of devs making games for the first time, and many collaborating with other devs in the community has made Playdate games so unique!
Speaking of developers, who can we expect to see games from in Season Two? Are there any you’re particularly excited about? There’s a lot to be excited about in Season Two! I will say that I’m extremely excited that we were able to get the Playdate developer community more involved in Season Two. If you’ve bought games on Catalog you may be seeing some familiar names for Season Two!
Would you say the games in Season Two are more complex than the first? Not really! Season One had a nice variety of games from different genres so we were able to do that again with Season Two.
What role has community feedback played in shaping the direction of Season Two? The community played a huge role in shaping Season Two – we weren’t even sure if there’d be another Season when Playdate released, but we were happy to see that so many people loved the format and wanted another Season! We got a lot of info from the Playdate survey that we send out once you finish Season One and great feedback from the developer community on things like pricing for Season Two, what day of the week to release games, and which games they enjoyed most in Season One (and why). All of that info from the community helped shape Season Two.
What is the process like for getting a game listed on the Playdate Catalog? We have a typeform for people to submit their game to Catalog, and a small group at Panic that play all of the game submissions! Catalog is curated by us and we play these games to make sure it’s a good fit for Catalog. If the game is approved, we then schedule them for release on
Catalog in one of the 5 spots where we release games every other Tuesday.
Does your history in developing apps for the Mac inform how you run the store on Playdate? Yes! We wanted to avoid the “race to the bottom” with our store, and we felt that heavily curating what goes on Catalog was an important part of that.
Do you think your wider role as an indie publisher for PC and consoles helps out the Playdate? Being a game publisher before Playdate released has been very helpful in understanding the gaming landscape and how we can make a positive impact in it – things like how we can make development more accessible, what we want in a store, etc. It also helped that people knew Firewatch and Untitled Goose Game. I believe it has helped build trust in Playdate as a game
console and a platform knowing that we’re intentional in the games we publish and how we are as publishers.
How do the new games for Season Two fit into the larger vision for the Playdate library? Our vision of the platform and for Catalog is for it to include not only games from experienced game developers but also from brand new developers. We want people to be able to tell their stories and make the games they always wanted to make, and I believe making game development more accessible with our SDK and Pulp, and a welcoming developer community has allowed more people to make games for the first time – Season Two is just a great example of this.
Are people still coming up with new and inventive uses for the crank on the side of the system? Yes! It’s been fun to see what different ways people are using the crank for. There’s a guitar simulator app, Strummer, that was released not too long ago using the crank to strum the guitar! The crank works great with it! We also have a Crank Wonders collection that’s curated by us, if you want to check out games that highlight the crank really well!
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