Sonar

Sonar is a game where you must navigate through a mine-filled expanse of water to reach a goal on the other side. The fast you complete that task, the more you can pat yourself on the back. However, your sonar has seen better days, and you must manually crank the Playdate handle to build up a charge to ping. That same handle is your throttle, so you need to balance swapping between modes to avoid running headfirst into seen or unseen hazards.

Stumbled on to the PlayJam3 page and figured, why not, I'm feeling creative.

The result was 3 days of me trying to learn how to use the SDK, how to program in Lua when all my brain is doing is trying to type C#, and generally putting something together that probably makes folks more familiar with the language and the SDK cry XD.

Look, it's not winning any game design awards, and you're not gonna read about it on Kotaku. It's a rough around the edges, and incomplete idea. But my main goal was to try and learn something new, which I did. The Playdate seems like an interesting little device, and 1-bit limitations for art are always fun. Whilst I may or may not continue this project further, I will certainly consider looking at more Playdate development in the future.

Ideas that were way out of scope but would have been fun:

- Overcharging your sonar causes a burn out, locking your steering, or changing your speed, or various other fun punishments.

- Enemy patrol boats that ping you, need to be going very slow to avoid detection.

- Authored levels, and some tutorialization (not that a wall of text telling you how to play isn't great and all....but yeah).