Playdate Podcast

Arisa Sudangnoi: Catalog is great way to quickly and easily get cool new Playdate games, but this time it’s right on the Playdate itself. It’s a handpicked collection of things we really like that we think you’ll really like, too.

Christa Mrgan: Welcome to the Playdate Podcast, bringing you stories from game designers, developers, and the team behind Playdate, the little yellow game console with a crank. I’m Christa Mrgan. Today, I’m talking with a Arisa Sudangnoi and Neven Mrgan about Catalog, the brand new, on-device game store for Playdate. We’ll also hear from some of the developers whose games appear in Catalog’s debut, and we’ll be joined by Steven Frank, who designed one of Catalog’s best features!

Okay, so first off: what is this thing? It’s a store but not exactly like itch.Io or steam. I’ll let Designer Neven Mrgan and head of Playdate Developer Relations Arisa Sudangnoi tell you all about it.

Neven Mrgan: Catalog is our selection of games, and as the name says, it is sort of meant to be thought of conceptually as like a magazine or like a holiday toy catalog that you get that has some cool things you might not be aware of, that are hopefully attractive. And that would be fun to get.

Arisa Sudangnoi: I guess this is just like me. I don’t know if like everyone else, but like personally I think a lot of stores can be very overwhelming with just so many choices. And so I hope that Catalog can find some way to make it not too overwhelming and people trust our tastes and our willing to try new games that maybe they haven’t tried, like-- or they’ve never really liked puzzle games in the past, but will try it out because Panic is recommending it, kind of thing. So a little bit similar to like Season games, but you’re not in that season format. People have the options to buy whatever game they wanna buy.

Some of the games are made with Pulp, which is really cool. It’s our, you know, browser editing tool. You don’t even need to know how to code to make a game. And then we have the SDK that people have also used to make their games for catalog. . So a lot of the games are from the community. And we also have some developers who are more well known have been around for a bit, too. So, we hope there’s just this mix of like, really diverse content. Hopefully you can see that with the day one, like list of games, right?

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. A lot of different kinds of games are part of the Catalog launch. From story focused and adventure games to action puzzle games, and even an innovative, interactive comic. And like play date itself, Catalog was made by a surprisingly small team.

Arisa Sudangnoi: It’s a very small Gosh, like-- so Kyle and Andy are working on the, like, backend tools and the form to like edit your store page and all that. Getting the developers onboarded and having that page for them.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, Kyle Rimkus and Andy Bayer have been working hard, setting all of that up and getting things like payment processing ready to go. And Tim Coulter also worked on the Catalog website.

Arisa Sudangnoi: And Yeah, so there’s four people who are working on sdk update things.

Christa Mrgan: Dan Messing and Marc Jessome worked on the operating side of things, and Dave Hayden and Will Cosgrove worked on updating the SDK.

Arisa Sudangnoi: We have Wade that’s working on the Catalog app on the Playdate itself.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, Wade Cosgrove is an engineer who’s been with Panic for over 21 years now. And his brother Will has been here almost as long, and Dave Hayden even longer, which is still wild to me. Anyway:

Arisa Sudangnoi: there’s Neven who’s designing both the website stuff and also the Catalog app. And there’s Greg who kind of helps oversee all that stuff and kind of whatever’s needed, I guess.

Christa Mrgan: Greg Maletic is Catalog’s Producer. And Sally Hatfield handled QA. So yeah, not an enormous team for an entire on-device game store.

Neven Mrgan: Panic is a very small company, and there are only so many people that we can dedicate to Playdate and any feature that we put in that involves people we want to think about to make sure that it’s a good experience for them. What I’m getting at with that is that it is not realistic for us to run a large game store the way that like Apple does, or Nintendo or itch.io or something like that.

What we can offer is basically a smaller Catalog of games where we can have a relationship with those developers and we can look at those games and we can make sure we support them however they need and then we can put them on the Catalog.

Arisa Sudangnoi: I previously was on the STEAM business team working, you know, on the STEAM platform, and it’s a very big store with a lot of developers and games available.

And so, So I know how difficult it is to build a store and how much work it is to manage it.

Neven Mrgan: It would be really hard for us to open up to basically, Open submissions for all of these games simply because that’s not something we’re set up for.

It’s not what our company does. Luckily, there are many people who are! Itch.io is a great experience for that. Their one business is running a game store, and guess what? It works really well with Playdate. So, we’re happy that it does, and there’s so many games out there that you can side-load onto your Playdate.

With Catalog, the idea was more to make it like an editorial, curated selection of games that we think are cool and that it would be really nice for people to get for their Playdate. So that’s kind of what we’re focusing on for now. In the future, who knows what all will happen, but for now we just wanna make sure that it’s a really nice experience for the users and for the developers who, you know, have to go submit these apps.

We’re sort of building the whole thing from start to finish. Like we’re building the back end, you know, the database that holds this and the server that’s serving it to everyone. And you know, developers get to use these backstage tools to manage their game, upload their assets, you know, describe their game and all of that.

So it’s. Quite a bit of work. I know everybody’s working on, you know, a bunch of different apps and web tools and whatnot. We’re not the only ones in the world doing it, but given that we’re also making the actual console and some games for it, and then all the non Playdate- related stuff, it often feels like we’ve bitten off such a huge, you know, chunk.

So we wanna focus on quality and I think we are there. I think Catalog is really fun. Catalog is obviously like an app on your Playdate where you can launch it, look at these games, install them to your Playdate, but it has a whole web component. If you go to play.date/games, that is like the web equivalent of Catalog. What’s fun about that, because it’s a website, We’re not gonna limit the developers to like Playdate- size one bit graphics. They can do anything. So they can do full color graphics, large graphics. They can describe their game in a ton of text. They can use animations, you know, whatever they want. So that way each game gets a really nice page on play.date/games where you can read more about it and it’s like partly it’s a service to the users so they can look at it and kind of decide if the game is for them.

And partly for some developers, I feel like it’s a service in that you might not have your own website where you put your game, but if you make this page nice, hopefully that’s something you can show to friends and family and, you know, might feel good about.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. And like Neven mentioned, Catalog on the Playdate is its own app, kind of look another game except obviously much bigger and more, I guess you would say involved with the operating system. So I asked about designing it and how Neven managed to make it feel different from just the standard game launcher.

Neven Mrgan: When you think about a list of games on Playdate, that’s what the launcher, the home screen, is. It’s a list of games and each one takes over the whole screen and you step through them. We could have done something like that for Catalog, but a, it’s maybe confusing. You might go like, well, am I on the launcher, Am-- or am I actually in Catalog?

And two, I think you know, especially once we have a number of games in there, that’s really slow. So instead I’m thinking of it as this like magazine layout where there are different kind of like sizes of games, not to make some look more important than others, but just to sort of entertain your eye and make it more fun to step through them and sort of discover what’s behind each little thumbnail.

What game is that? Some might choose to put the name on there, some might not. So there are almost like little, you know, packages, little widgets you pick up and go, huh, I wonder what’s in here.

When I make an app for Playdate rather than a game, I try to keep two things in mind:

one, our screen is small, and two" in a "app", you might have to convey a lot of information. Catalog is like that. If you think about a game and like a listing for a game-- showing you the game, telling you about it, informing you so that you can, you know, decide to buy it. We need to tell you, you know, its name, who made it, what the game is about, show you some screenshots, show you like accessibility and rating info and stuff like that.

That’s kind of a lot to put our, on our small screen. And so I try to focus on how can we make this simple and how can we make the developer shine and take over, basically. It’s their game. And this is more about them than it is about us. So my focus is always to highlight their art and their words and you know, sort of turn the spotlight on to them.

We can still make Catalog fun in itself, of course. And, the idea of browsing a little, mini store on your Playdate is hopefully fun in itself.

Christa Mrgan: It really is. But, okay. So there are a ton of amazing Playdate games that already exist outside of the Season One games. How did we decide which games would be on catalog on day one?

Arisa Sudangnoi: There was a variety of ways we found these games.

We have a pitch form that people who are making Playdate games that are interested in working with us, whether that’s having their game on Catalog or getting funding, they can pitch us their game on that forum and we look through them. And so we found some of those games for day one Catalog on the pitch form.

And then some of them were people that we’ve worked with in the past. So, you know, Chuhai Labs, for example, has Carve Jr. on our, day one for example. And Yeah, there’s a lot of people there from the community that we know of that have been active in the community for a while.

We found a lot of games that were already on itch that were pretty well known and people were excited about and also people internally were also excited about it. So we made sure to get those games on Catalog as well.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. One example of a game that was already on itch.io is A Joke That’s Worth 99 Cents…

Arisa Sudangnoi: We were in contact with the developer Phillip, beforehand, I’m trying to remember. Yeah. So he, he was interested in getting his game on Catalog and because our pricing is in whole numbers versus like 99 cents or $2.99, we asked him like, “oh, is it okay if the price was at a dollar?” And he’s like, “oh yeah, and like, no problem. I’ll make like 1 cent content.” And so he comes back with a build of just like this 1 cent content and it’s just amazing.

I just love it.

Philipp Stollenmayer: My name is Phillip, aka a kamibox, and I made “A Joke that’s Worth 99 Cents” together with Lorraine Bowen, who made the music and read the joke, and I designed and developed it.

" A Joke That’s Worth 99 Cents" is an annoyingly long joke about a very tiny person who lives on the crank of a Playdate with a bouncy butt, and your challenge is to keep him bouncing on top of the crank.

When I give this game to people, they immediately know what to do because all you have to do is keep the tiny guy bouncing on the crank by turning the crank. But it is so annoyingly hard that reading the joke line by line can be super rewarding.

I love to be on Catalog with my game, because it got me in this situation where I found out that the lowest price tier is one full dollar. And of course I can’t let a game cost $1 that is called “A Joke That’s Worth 99 Cents”. So it got me in the situation that I had to think of something worth 1 cent.

And so I made a very short joke that’s worth 1 cent and that is now the update 2.0 for “A Joke That’s Worth 99 Cents.”

Christa Mrgan: That’s awesome.

And here are some of the other games you can find on catalog on day one:

Dustin Mierau: Hey, I’m Dustin Mierau, and I’m the creator of Playmaker. Playmaker is a, creative space for the Playdate. Like the tools that inspired me as a kid: Mario Paint, HyperCard, Kid Pix. My hope for Playmaker is that it becomes something that may inspire you to paint a picture, make some music, to build something.

I’m very much excited very much looking forward to just seeing what people create with Playmaker, and I hope that you’ll send them to me. So, you know, Just whatever it is. I’m just really excited to see you know, I’m on Mastodon and Twitter and I can’t wait.

Jörg Tittel: Hey, I’m Jörg Tittel, the director of Skew, which I’ve developed together with the one and only Frédérick Raynal, the man behind incredible games such as “Alone in the Dark” and “Little big Adventure” and Toy Commander on Dreamcast. I approached Fred to make this spinoff of “The Last Worker,” which is this crazy, big ambitious game for VR consoles and PC that’s coming out on the 30th of March.

You know, the Playdate has a crank and so it should be the prime destination for a spinoff. And so we made this delightfully fast realtime 3D game in which you steer a little Cobot voiced by the incredible Jason Isaacs through these tunnels and past obstacles. And the problem is he has a nuke in his butt!

And so, if you hit something he’ll blow up. So, you know, you’ve got, his life in your hands. And it’s really fun. It’s realtime 3d. It moves super fast. It’s gets super, super hard very quickly. So, thank you for playing. Check it out. Skew now on Catalog!

NaOH: Hey there. I’m NaOH. I made Swap Machina along with Zion D Hill. This started out as a project to see how far I could take the Pulp engine, even resulting in a Pulp to Lua converter, which you can now find on GitHub. Just like the crank, I think Pulp is a dare. Take this thing and do something we didn’t expect.

So I hope that you’ll enjoy our fast-paced retro style puzzle game, which is also a celebration of what makes the Playdate so inviting. All right, now go get your name on the leaderboard!

Eran Hilleli: Hi, I’m Eran, Artist and animator on Grand Tour Legends.

Finn Ericson: I’m Finn. I did programming and music. We both worked closely together on all aspects of design.

Eran Hilleli: Grand Tour Legends is a crank operated, arcade bicycle racing game.

Finn Ericson: Grand Tour Legends is really easy to get into, but it has quite a bit of depth to it. We wanted to make something that felt fresh, but still a hundred percent natural to play on the Playdate. Also, to conjure the sense of wonder that some games did in our youth.

Jake White: Hi, I’m Jake. I’m the programmer and one of the designers of Bloom. Bloom is a narrative game about running a flower shop. It’s a real time game, so it’s intended to be picked up once or twice a day while you slowly experience the story and tend to your garden. I think what makes people love Bloom is definitely the story that Ben has managed to tell.

It’s told through a series of text messages from characters in the game, and I think it has a way of sucking you in as you wait for the next text to come in. And this format is also why I’m so excited for it to be on Catalog now. It’s always been a game that we kind of designed for people to be able to pick up in between playing the Season games, and now that it’s on Catalog, it kind of just seems like the perfect fit.

So Bloom 1.1 is a pretty huge content update with most of the new content taking place after the end of the original game. But also with some other fun features like a sound test, lots of new artwork and some new collectibles. You can get it on Catalog and if you already bought it on Itch, it’s a free update.

Ron Lent: Hello, I’m Ron Lent and I’m the creator of Eyeland. It’s a little adventure. You play as this character that has to find their way through a series of different quests and puzzles by exploring the environment and interacting with the characters they come across. There is a lot to do and see, I think one reason people seem to really enjoy playing it is because I enjoy playing it!

I’ve learned with my artwork that it’s always better to make the thing that I want to see for myself and not worry too much about what other people might like. So you know, the only way for me to truly gauge what’s working is if I make myself the target audience. In fact, in the beginning, this project was just a way for me to abide my time while I was waiting for my Playdate to arrive.

So it was just going to be a game for me and maybe a friend or two. But it kept growing because it continued to be fun working on it. And at a certain point I thought, I think I might wanna share this with everyone. It was a total labor of love and I think it shows. This whole thing has been a little overwhelming, in a very good way. So I’m very thankful. I love this odd little community.

Cadin Batrack: I’m Cadin Batrack. I’m the artist and creator of The Botanist, which is a scrolling, interactive sci-fi adventure comic about a space botanist and his robot companion. I think this is a really cool project for Playdate because the quality of the Playdate screen almost makes it seem like you’re looking at a printed comic in the newspaper.

But then you get this really great sense of depth from the parallax scrolling, and then with the sounds and animations and little interactive scenes throughout the comic. It all just really comes to life. I think it ends up being a pretty unique experience, and I think people will like it a lot.

Alastair Low: Hi, I’m Ally Low, and I’m the artist and designer on Tapeworm Disco Puzzle. We were a three man team around the world, me in Scotland, our programmer Valdir Salgueiro over in Brazil. Our audio was created in France by Vincent Verger, also known as Tuï. Tapeworm is a puzzle game somewhere between Lolo and Snake.

You play as a nightclub owning worm inside a cassette tape, and you have to unravel the mystery of why some fleas are acting strange. I think people will like the game because it’s an unusual spin on a common puzzle mechanic with weird characters and a silly backstory. It’s also designed to never be too hard.

It gradually introduces new mechanics. It’s easy to drop in and out, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome and of course it does have that award-winning soundtrack.

Rebecca König: Hi, I’m Rebecca König and I created a game called Down the Oubliette.

Down the Oubliette is a mix of a dungeon crawler and a tower defense game. You go into the basement of this abandoned house-- well, abandon by the living. There’s still plenty going on down there. On the way down, you have to get the debris out of the way and set up your ghost hunting equipment to deal with whatever you uncover.

How far down you get depends on how effectively use your equipment and manage resources. Good luck. Most of all, I want people to have fun with it and experiment. It’s a series of bite sized puzzles with more than one solution, and I hope people will enjoy that and just try things out. And if they get stuck, I hope they will do something else and then go in for another round whenever they feel like it, because it’s so easy to carry a Playdate with you.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.: Hi, I’m Xalavier Nelson Jr. And I’m the creative director on Recommendation Dog!! So Recommendation Dog!! Is an action puzzle game about being a small dog with a very big job. You work at this temp agency putting the right people in the right places to solve folks’ problems. So you are taking the crank and you’re spinning through your rotary organizer-- Not gonna use the copyrighted name-- to find the people who will best fulfill the job. And you do it as much as you can as new cards come in as more complicated jobs come in. As time seems like an increasing enemy. What I love about Recommendation Dog!! Is just how enthusiastic it is about being this focused weird thing! You bring happiness through a very roundabout absurd way and a lot of my games revolve around absurd nuanced ways of delivering joy or fear-- crippling existential fear-- And I love how Recommendation Dog does both!

Sherveen Uduwana: My name is Sherveen Uduwana, and I’m the game and level designer for Reel Steal for the Playdate. date. Reel Steal is an art heist game where you play as lovable thieves who use giant fishing rods to rob a series of evil billionaires, out of their ill-gotten goods. You’ll use the Playdate’s crank to lower yourselves on this fishing rod. Pass the vents and security systems of these sprawling mansions.

Uh, “Mission Impossible” style. So you can swap out the prized artworks with hastily scrolled forgeries before reeling yourself back up, artwork in tow. It’s both a heist game and a fishing game, only you’re fishing for justice. I love getting to work on games that spark joy. And I think it was very cathartic to work on something where you get to bully some billionaires with uh, nothing more than a fishing rod and a dream. And I hope that comes through when y’all are playing it. It was a joy to work on.

Christa Mrgan: Both Recommendation Dog!! and Reel Steal are available for free on Catalog! And then there will also be a separate episode all about these two games! So keep an eye on the Playdate Podcast feed for that.

And Catalog’s launch also included four other games. Two of them, Hidey Spot and Word Trip, were created by Panic employees Neven Mrgan and Shaun Inman, respectively. Neven appears on this episode, as well as some others, including The Story of Playdate, b360, Snak, and Inventory Hero.

And Shaun also appears in the first episode, plus in Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure, and we’ll also be on the upcoming episode about his Season One game, Ratcheteer.

Two other games-- Carve Jr., A snowboarding action game by Chuhai Labs, and Direct Drive a silent movie musical game about being an intern in the music industry in 1927 by DACvector, are also featured in the Playdate Update video that was released last week. It’s all about Catalog, and there’s a link in the show notes. So be sure to check it out!

Neven Mrgan: The day that Catalog comes to your Playdate, I would like the experience to be something like this: boom. On the launcher, you have the new catalog thing. You go to it, Hey, it does a little animation. When you highlight it, you launch it. It loads a list of games that we’re currently highlighting. Some of them you might recognize, like, yeah, I was looking forward to that. Some of them might look intriguing, like. I don’t know what that actually is. You scroll around, you find some things, and when you dig into them, you get like nice big art. You get screenshots, you get descriptions, you get to see who made it, maybe there are some names that you will recognize.

And then you can buy it right there. There’s a really fun interaction to actually buy the game. It’s called Crank to Buy. Uh, It’s sort of a way to confirm it and also to have fun while buying your game.

Christa Mrgan: Yes. Maybe the best part of catalog is the actual process of buying the games. I could have left you with just Nevins, quick description of it, but I wanted to bring on Panic’s Crank to Buy expert, to tell you all about how that feature got designed.

Steven Frank: Hello, my name is Steven Frank. I’m one of the co-founders of Panic, and I do a little bit of everything here.

Um, When the idea came up for doing a on device store for games on the Playdate, Uh of course the first thing that someone said was, can you crank to buy? And I honestly can’t remember who said “crank to buy” first. It might have been me, it might have been someone else. It doesn’t really matter. But I had some thoughts about it and I I went and built a prototype of the idea and then Wade Cosgrove took that and did a ton of work on it and that became what is now in the Playdate Catalog. you know The idea on paper seems pretty simple and obvious. You turn the crank a few times and it starts a purchase, right? But I had a few design ideas that I wanted to try out in my prototype, and that’s what I was experimenting with, as I was building that.

So, for starters, , you actually don’t have to turn the crank if that’s an accessibility for you or you just don’t like cranking, or you hate fun, you know you can just press and hold down one of the buttons or I think in the final version you can just press the buttons and it will go through the normal purchasing process.

So you don’t even have to crank to buy, in Crank to Buy!

If you are cranking to buy it uh starts to fill up a progress bar and if you slow down or stop cranking, that will start to decay back down towards an empty progress bar.

And it doesn’t go straight to zero if you stop or slow down. Because you might wanna start back up again and it would be kind of a pain to start all the way from the beginning. The other issue was getting confirmation from the user that this was actually something they wanted to do. It’s it’s a lot of fun to just play with that progress bar, move the crank, watch it go up and down.

And I didn’t want people to accidentally trigger purchases just from messing around with it. But I also didn’t want there to be a dialog box that came up at the end of it that says, are you sure you want to buy this? Yes or no? Cuz that’s a pretty boring thing to follow up a pretty fun little interaction with.

So I came up with a few different ideas to try to get across the idea that, something’s about to happen and you can still change your mind if you want to. So, the first part of it is the Playdate crank obviously doesn’t have any physical resistance. There’s no way to make it tighter, harder to crank.

But uh there are some tricks that I kind of used to make it seem like the resistance of the crank is increasing as that progress bar is getting fuller and fuller. One thing is, , the uh the math changes slightly, so it requires a little bit more aggressive cranking to move the progress bar at the end of the bar than it does at the beginning.

It also makes these kind of ratcheting click sounds like as you fill up the bar and at the, at about the time that fake resistance kicks in, those get spaced out further and further. . So it’s like a, so it feels like it’s struggling a little bit more to fill up. And that kind of tricks your brain a little bit into thinking like, oh it’s it’s getting harder to do this.

And then right around that point, the resistance quote unquote kicks in. That start to feel a little bit confusing to the user. Like, I’ve been doing it the same way this whole time, and now it’s suddenly harder to make this thing move, so to try to resolve that problem. I changed the label on the progress bar from just the words cranked by to " keep going" to confirm.

And the idea behind that was to communicate that yes, you are still doing the right thing but you just need to kind of, increase your your speed, step up your game a little bit if this is what you really want to do. If you want to go through with this… But if you just kind of start out at a kind of moderate speed and continue with that speed the whole time, you won’t actually probably get to the end of the progress bar.

It won’t work.

When you get the progress bar to about 60%, it kind of starts twitching around a little bit. And then at 90% it starts twitching around A LOT… And the idea of that is it’s to evoke tension. What I had in mind was the idea of a spring being compressed and it sort of, you know, fighting back.

It wants to spring back open. And the shaking sort of visually suggests that if you keep doing what you’re doing, something is going to happen. Uh That is not r eversible and it might be something you don’t want.

Christa Mrgan: Oh, just to jump in here and say that you can request refunds for Catalog games. So crank to buy is not completely irreversible. okay.

Steven Frank: So, it’s another kind of visual cue that is " please confirm that this is what you want to do."

That had unintended psychological side effect that I noticed which is with all of this sort of tension building up, you kind of really want it to resolve. So you want to see that bar fill up, you know, you want the shaking to stop and the bar to complete, and sort of by extension of that to complete the purchase.

And I acknowledge that’s a little bit evil and I do feel a little bit bad about that. I try to uh look at the silver lining, which is hopefully maybe that generates uh a little more income for our third party game developers who I’m sure would appreciate that. . And it’s also probably a good idea to point out that it is possible to put a pin lock on your account from our website.

And I recommend you do that if you have kids so that if they pick up your play date, they can’t just go into the Catalog and Crank to Buy everything they see.

The shaking progress bar effect was toned down a little bit in the final Catalog. The whole thing overall had to fit in a much smaller screen area, and it also doesn’t happen at all if you’ve turned on the system wide accessibility setting to reduce flashing or excessive animation.

Crank to Buy has a couple of different sound effects. It makes that uh ratcheting sound that I talked about before. That’s done with the software synthesizer. It’s not a sample. And there’s also a second tone that comes in the background and it kind of gradually rises as the bar gets fuller and fuller.

It’s like a boo. And that’s sort of a secondary, are you sure? cue, but audible instead of visible. And if you stop cranking and you let the bar decay, then that tone also descends. Boo boo boo boo Boo. Which is a sort of secondary no cost alternative to eliminate that psychological tension of not going all the way through with the purchase.

Last but not least, the prototype version had the uh amusing weak trumpet fanfare from SpongeBob Squarepants when you completed the uh purchase. That is not, of course, in the shipping version. That was replaced by a fanfare from Simon Panrucker, who did a lot of other audio design for Playdate.

And there’s a bunch of other music cues in catalog that he did. Such as while it’s communicating with the server there’s a different sound if the transaction fails for some reason. And last but not least, the shipping version of catalog has a uh improved burst of confetti upon your successful purchase than my prototype does.

So please enjoy that and we hope you enjoy buying games on our Catalog!

Neven Mrgan: I think it’s gonna be a super fun first day for people when we launch Catalog.

Dustin Mierau: With catalog now, I think Playdate owners will start to better understand that this little yellow device that they purchased is also a, computer that they can build for and learn on. That they can make things for their Playdate and then share or sell them. Playmaker will be there in the catalog too, which, obviously I’m very excited about because it’s just it’s just wonderful obviously to be able to meet players where they are.

Jörg Tittel: I’m just so super proud to be on Catalog to be a launch title on Catalog, and I’m just full of admiration for the whole team at Panic and this gorgeous device that has brought me so much joy and to so many of us over the months and it’s just pure fun and it’s everything that games should be all about for me.

Eran Hilleli: We’re thrilled to be on Catalog for the community exposure. We poured a lot of love into this game, and being able to connect to Playdate gamers means everything to us.

Ron Lent: I’m really kind of blown away to have my game included in the launch of Catalog.

Cadin Batrack: I’ve been waiting to release this specifically on Catalog because I like that people can purchase and download the game right from their Playdate. And also as someone who’s typically very bad at marketing myself and my projects, I appreciate getting that added promotional boost from Panic.

Alastair Low: I’m really excited and honored to be lucky enough to be in the launch of Catalog. It’s really a dream come true to be a launch title on a cool new platform, and I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Rebecca König: The main reason I’m looking forward to Catalog is that I’m lazy. The Playdate has a great website to side load games, but I still don’t do it nearly enough because I have to search for the games first. With Catalog, I can finally get it in one place, and I really hope that my game helps broaden the GA range of genres on Catalog because I don’t think there’s anything quite like it.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.: I’m so excited for these games to be launching with Catalog because Playdate enables new types of game experiences, new types of games, and seeing the amount of incredible titles that have already been released on itch.io, I can’t wait for it to be even faster and easier for Playdate players to get their hands on those games and to load them up on their consoles and really engage with what the Playdate developer community has been producing 'cuz it’s honestly astounding and really encouraging for the future of what video games can look like on and off the Playdate.

Sherveen Uduwana: I’m really excited to see all these games launching on Catalog. I was already really impressed with Playdate’s first Season of games, and I think the way they’re thinking about creating room for new types of games and experiences and bringing players along for a really fun and playful journey with all of these games launching is very exciting, and I’m really happy to be a part of it.

Christa Mrgan: So how often will Catalog be updated with new games?

Arisa Sudangnoi: I think we’re hoping for once a month and don’t know how many games we’ll have every month, but we definitely want some rhythm so that people can keep coming back to Catalog to check new games that are available. But we, we don’t want it too frequent where people get so exhausted with like, new content constantly.

So, yeah, there needs to be a balance.

Christa Mrgan: Have you made a game that you’d like to see on Catalog? I’ll put a link in the show notes to our Catalog pitch form!

Arisa Sudangnoi: Anyone can pitch us a game, basically.

Christa Mrgan: Yes. Even me-- if I ever get around to making a game, which I’ll admit is unlikely since I’m not a game developer or a programmer, but, hey, thanks to Pulp, you never know!

You can check out all of the games available on Catalog in the Catalog app on Playdate or via the Catalog website. You can also watch the Playdate Update video all about Catalog on our YouTube channel. Thanks so much for listening and we’ll be back soon with more episodes in the Playdate Podcast feed.

And if you don’t have Catalog yet, go to Settings> System and then do a system update to get the latest version of the Playdate Operating System. Catalog will eventually download on its own after this update, but if you don’t want to wait, you can manually download catalog by going to settings and then games.

The Playdate Podcast was written, produced and edited by me, Christa Mrgan. Cabel Sasser and Simon Panrucker composed the Playdate and Catalog themes, and Simon Panrucker created the audio cues and sound designed for Catalog.

Huge thanks to Neven, Arisa, Steven, and all of the amazing game developers who recorded sound bites for this episode. And thank you to the entire Playdate and Catalog teams, including support by Thomas Lister., Elizabeth McGill, Mike Freuden, Jesus Diaz, and Amy Forbes. Thanks also to our new financial controller, Jen Lieb.

Thank you to Tim Coulter and Ashur Cabrera for working on the website and setting up the podcast feed. And to James Moore, who made me an awesome Playdate audio extraction app, to Neven Mrgan who created the podcast artwork and site design. And thanks as always to everyone at Panic. Playdate is shipping now and available to order at play.date.

Steven Frank: Okay, I’m just gonna sit in this room and talk to myself for the podcast, which is a normal thing that people do!