itch.io

I payed $15 for a booklet. It's overpriced.  I didn't say the content was bad, but that $15 is too much for what you get.

Pico8 games are also coded in Lua, as are several other game development environments. At the moment there are more resources for Pico8 than Playdate, so it makes sense for people to get practice within Pico8 then carry that over to playdate - if they want to. If someone has no interest in Pico8 then they can ignore my advice.

Mboffins videos, tutorials etc, aren't more visual they are more practical, you learn by doing, and there is a lot of it, and I payed for it because its high quality stuff. Squidgod's booklet is about Lua coding in general, it's more technical. Practicality and tinkering are very important for beginners, since knowledge forms out of experience from the specific to the general. Print() code, or it's equivalent in other languages, whether its cout or something else, won't cut it if you want to figure out how the machine is running and build machines of your own. And, I almost forgot to mention, the help from AI is huge, it's explanations and examples are extremely helpful.

Its a decent resource but you're paying $15 for a 44 page booklet.  I guess we're paying for what the book will eventually become. It isn't much different than any other beginners coding book where the examples mostly involve some kind of print function.

I like his videos on YouTube, which are one of the few resources available for playdate programming, so  I try to look at it as donating for those videos and getting a booklet thrown in.

If you're a beginner, like me, then I recommend also checking out Pico-8,  which I only recently heard about, that's also coded in lua. Search here for mboffin's top-down adventure game tutorial, and his tutorial carts. Then use ai to explain whats happening. Take small ideas from those carts, and the ai explanations, ask "how do I..." and "What if?" questions, then make your own tutorial carts and save them in a folder. This is more useful than writing print() code.

Great sound toy, very simple to use but potentially very powerful for exploring textures and rhythms. The only issue I've encountered so far is it needs to be louder to match the playdate output sound when you adjust the volume. Would be cool if you could crank tape playback like the op1.