The journey from discovering that Playdate had an easy to use SDK to releasing Fishagon's first game for the platform was a fast and efficient one haha. I was watching a Twitch streamer and noticed they had a Playdate game linked in their bio; I had always been interested in the console but in the past looking at custom consoles or emulated consoles also meant learning a complicated development environment. However the developer in the stream said it was a very easy to work with SDK? So I thought I'd take the jump.

A week later I've released DexSweeper for the Playdate! I'm happy to report he was right. The Playdate Lua SDK is fantastic to work with and there are great tutorials about getting started by SquidGod.

Now obviously my game is not incredibly complex; it is minesweeper. I've been on a real kick of this classic game for the past few months and have been playing a ton of variants of the game. My favorite personally is No-Guess, in that variant the code always generates a solvable board without the need for any guessing of safe tiles. This is a great mode for learning minesweeper patterns (logical selections based on the surrounding values of revealed spaces). 

I included No-Guess as a mode in DexSweeper for these reasons. A dexterity version of minesweeper is already quite challenging, so hopefully that makes both this game and minesweeper in general more approachable for people. 

The intention is to continue releasing more modes for the game so that this is a definitive way to play minesweeper variants on the playdate console. Currently I have two variants I want to add to the game; the first one is a "Chaos" variant where the bombs are moving on a set interval of time. The other is a time trial variant where you try to complete increasingly difficult boards within a set span of time. \

Also a lot of people are probably wondering / waiting to see if this will come out on Catalog. I submit to Panic and hope it will. I may have overshot and submitted before I had completed ver 1.0 so they might reject it and I'll need to reapply with the finished game. I'll keep improving the game until they accept it for sure though haha. 

As well leaderboards will come out as soon as Playdate releases the 2.7 update for the SDK. My leaderboards will not use Catalog's regardless if the game is accepted on there or not. We'll use custom ones that contain both Itch and Catalog times. 

There are also a few minor bugs people have reported and hopefully those will be fixed as soon as I can. Sorry about that for the people who have got their first victories and hear the victory music on loop now haha. 

And finally thank you so much to the people who have already purchased the game! If you could leave ratings and/or comments it would be highly appreciated!