Posted July 21, 2025 by dfug
Happy "end of season 2" to all Playdate owners! Did you enjoy the games?
I actually haven't played most of them yet... since as soon as I heard the SDK now officially had networking support, I saw an opportunity to get some brainworms out of my skull.
And now, two months later, I'm proud to present my second ever Playdate release.
Yonderu! DoujinSoft is a comic reader for the Playdate which is directly hooked up to the DoujinSoft Store, the largest content archive for 2010's WarioWare DIY.
Comics in WWDIY are black-and-white 193 x 126 x 4-strip images, which makes them a nearly perfect fit for the Playdate screen!
Ala Garfield-in-the-newspaper, the game will download a new comic every day from a curated selection for users to read, share, and rate.
And if you want more, you can also download all the latest comics uploaded to the store by the DIY community... which is still pretty active! Here's a comic with a Deltarune ch3 joke, for example.
...And of course, you can use the crank to scroll between pages.
I always felt that comics are kind of the black sheep of DIY's offerings - The microgames are obviously the main draw, and the music maker gets a fair amount of love from the same folks who like to make absurdly complex compositions in Mario Paint... There's some real funny stuff in the 40000+ comics uploaded to the archive though, and I'm hoping this Playdate outing will help shine a bit more light on them.
While the Playdate is a nice fit for this kind of pick-up-and-play (or is it pick-up-and-read?) content, I did have to rework a few bits of the experience for it to work on Panic's 1-bit console;
The comic iconography has mostly been redrawn, and I used some MacPaint patterns to replace the colors that comic creators can use for their covers in the original game. It gives quite a different vibe from the original!
The sound bites that play when you start/finish a comic have also been changed compared to the originals; I had fun digging through samples to make 10 new intro/outros, but that was at the point where I realized I might have spent way more time building this than I had anticipated...
That time included picking up the actual DIY comic creator again to make an in-game tutorial too. The text tools on the original NDS are still painful, and my drawing skills haven't really evolved since 2014...