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Following the launch of Panic and teenage engineering’s new indie console ‘Playdate’, I decided to create a simple but fun game based on being a goalkeeper.
Creating the game involved a few fun challenges:
- Creating 1-bit graphics in Figma
- Learning Lua from scratch
- Applying Lua to work with the Playdate SDK
After around three weekends’ of tinkering, I released my first version of the game, which included these features:
- A goal for you to protect
- A player you can move around the pitch
- Footballs which randomly spawn and randomly (but increasing) speed as the game goes on
- Highscores which are stored in the Playdate’s internal storage over multiple play sessions
- Power-ups to collect
- One for slowing down the footballs
- One for speeding up the goalkeeper’s movement
- One for doubling points per save
- One for triggering all power-ups at once!
- Scene management
- Starting screen with prompt to start playing
- The main game scene where the play happens
- The game over screen, where your final score is displayed
- And last but not least… when you pull out the crank (yes, Playdate has a crank) a wall appears to help you block shots. You can even move the wall around using the crank!
I plan to continue adding to the game over time when I think of ideas on how it could be even more fun, and eventually I am going to make the code open-source and write a tutorial so others can learn how to make games for the Playdate too.
The game is now available to download for free on Itch.io