Byte-sized Swift: Building Tiny Games for the Playdate

I’m excited to share swift-playdate-examples, a technical demonstration of using Swift to build games for Playdate, a handheld game system by Panic.

→ swift.org/blog/byte-sized-swift-tiny-games-playdate/

Swift is a versatile language for embedded systems due to its memory safety and ergonomics, as shown by porting games to the Playdate handheld console using the new embedded language mode.

The author ported Conway's Game of Life, resulting in a 788-byte binary smaller than the C version's 904 bytes, and created "Swift Break," a paddle-and-ball game with features like bounce physics and menus.

These games use Swift's high-level features such as enums, generics, and automatic memory management, while interoperating with the Playdate C API without dynamic allocation. The swift-playdate-examples repository provides ready-to-use code and setup guides for simulator and hardware, demonstrating Swift's potential for constrained platforms.