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It's Getting Fishy...

A game about fishing for the Playdate game console, a retro feeling console but with modern programming capabilities and interesting controller inputs.

Made for CodeJam 15 Hackathon 2025

Playing the game

Even if you don't have a playdate console, you can emulate this game by downloading the SDK right over here, which includes a Playdate Simulator.

Once installed, open the simulator and open the codejamgame.pdx folder, containing our game

Inspiration

We wanted to take advantadge of the unique crank mechanism in the Playdate. While thinking of different ideas, we decided to go with a fishing game, as we thought it would be fun with the crank and very intuitive.

How we made it

This game was made entirely using the Lua programming language and the Playdate SDK

We tested and ran this game on real hardware, using a real Playdate console.

Art

Pixel art was made by us using Piskel, a free online pixel art editor.

Maps and tiles were made using LDtk.

Music

Music was made by Santiago, who has musical experience, using Ableton Live

Sound effects

We used sounds that inspired us on YouTube for the different sound effects of our game

Challenges we ran into

• None of us had touched Lua before, so it was quite the learning curve!
• At first, we couldn't load the game into the console! We realized the console was running an older software version, so we had to find a way to update the software.
• Our game was having very poor performance when running on actual hardware, we had to go back and refactor some of the code to make it more smooth and performant

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• We made everything ourselves in a very short amount of time. The code, the music, the art, the sound effects. All from us.

What we learned

• We learned how to make games, a very different approach to development as what we are all accustomed to.
• We learned to code with specific hardware in mind, being aware of its limitations, its constraints, etc
• We used our foundations of programming to quickly learn a new language (Lua) and apply it to a challenge.

What's next for It's Getting Fishy...

We want to see how we can release the game to the public! We will look into releasing the game on itch.io and seeing if other Playdate owners can play it on their consoles!

Built With

• ableton
• lua
• playdate