Interview with Rae

Rae is one of the darlings of the Playdate community — always ready to help people in the Playdate Squad Discord; creator of games like HEXA, First in… Line?, and the upcoming RowBot Rally (coming to Catalog on December 17, 2024); and generally friendly internet presence. Find her on Bluesky or her website if you’re into that kind of thing.

Since RowBot Rally will shortly be in our hands (wishlist it then buy it!), she agreed to an interview with the best unofficial Playdate-specific site on the internet! (This one.) Let’s get into it!

Playdate Unofficial: Hi Rae! We first got to try the RowBot Rally demo over a year ago, and it's finally coming to Playdate on December 17, 2024. First question: why'd it take so long??? Was it HEXA's fault? And what were some of the biggest challenges?

Rae: Hello! I’d say the main/huge/biggest thing that made RowBot take so long was simply scope. I started working on it around April 2023, had a TON of ideas of what to do with it, and even with significant paring-down over time it’s still been a massive undertaking. A surprisingly large part of it, much like most other decisions I make in life, has been just how good of a bit it is. Making full animated cutscenes for a Playdate game? I thought it was HILARIOUS, so I decided to plow forward with it. Now in hindsight, after having done them all, I can definitely say that it was QUITE FUNNY (I hope you can detect the strong sarcasm in this second beat here).

There were definitely other factors that led to it taking a while as well — in late December 2023, I decided to rewrite pretty much the entire codebase from scratch — I wasn’t happy with how it was looking, feeling, or how hard it was to add more code changes under the hood. I think the final blow came after I took a few months’ break from the codebase, and then when I tried to implement a simple save file tweak, the entire thing broke down in so many different places that I literally just scrapped the whole thing. Apparently that worked out?!?!?

Interestingly enough, since you mention it: my other games really didn’t get in the way at all! Those happened because I was, quite frankly, tired of working on RowBot full time, and I just wanted something else to do quickly to decompress. HEXA was originally done in just a few days — the initial concept image came about on July 4th, it was submitted to Catalog on the 10th, and it wound up being released as soon as the 30th. I think it’s a record!

Original HEXA concept image — you can definitely see a lot of differences!

Optimization was also a pretty huge roadblock to solve, even/especially after the code re-write. I could (and probably should) make an entire postmortem about this game’s development, but there were a ton of struggles, micro-optimizations and frustrated screams as I loaded the game up to my Playdate and found that we still hadn’t quite reached 30. Eventually, with a lot more adjustments and some delta time, I think we reached a relatively stable point that I’m happy with. It might not stand up to severe scrutiny, but I think it’s gonna be more than enjoyable.

PU: You're kind of a big star in the Playdate Squad Discord, and we all saw one of your comments in Cabel's GDC presentation. Are you/have you been active in other Discords and communities, or is the Playdate Squad special? What do you like about this one?

Rae: I mean, I’ve been around and participating a bit in some other stuff, idly? I’ve been around in a few places, and you can probably find some old art for stuff I’ve done in the past on my website. I honestly think Playdate has one of the nicest and most genuinely helpful communities around — nearly everybody’s always super respectful, offering to help or at least listen, and definitely willing to hype each other up about exciting news.

I’ve been around in some other communities before (right now you can catch me in the Puzzmo Discord!), and I’ve made some really good friends over the years whom I love and respect a lot. I think per capita, the inner Playdate community’s had the least amount of “drama” & silly things happening. I think I’ve only really ran into a case or two at best where I was genuinely like “huh???” about somebody’s behavior — on the whole people are super respectful and caring, which I appreciate a lot!

The name-drop in the GDC prezzie, btw, complete surprise to me. I only found out about that when I watched the telecast a few weeks after the show. Genuinely had me tearing up, I cannot lie!!

PU: What's a normal day in the life for you like? How much Playdate gaming vs. development are you able to do, and does one help/hinder the other?

Rae: If I said “sleep” and nothing else, I’d only be half-exaggerating. (My schedule’s been abnormally screwed lately honestly, and that’s saying a lot considering it’s usually already pretty screwed.) Lately, it's been kind of just juggling RowBot, and any other short-term obligations that happen to spring up. I’ve definitely not had enough time to play as many games as I’d like to, Playdate or otherwise — rest assured I’m definitely still buying ‘em, though! The backlog continues to grow… fortunately, now that I don’t have a looming deadline at my feet, I’m hoping to take the month pretty much off to just totally vacay and maybe catch up on some great titles I’ve been missing out on. Or play Night in the Woods again.

I think one thing that really draws me to Playdate games as a game dev who really got their start on the console, is that once you get into that developer mindset and learn the ins-and-outs of the SDK, you can actually kinda “reverse-engineer” a game just by looking at its face and trying to understand what makes it tick. For example, I can see something like Grand Tour Legends, and I can be like “oh, this is how they do it! they can use a pre-rendered video of the entire track that loops around, and then play it back at a variable speed depending on how fast you’re cranking”. But then, you still have mysteries! Things like, “how do they do actual 3D-rendering of the opponent racers? how can they seemingly move behind the walls of the single-layer video? what are the intricacies of the stamina meter, or the timing of the boosts?” It’s like an extra puzzle on top of the actual game, is figuring out how they made it.

PU: For RowBot Rally's development, what came to you first? The crank-to-paddle idea, or the art, or the concept, or something else? Did other games influence or inspire you, and did development shift greatly by the end compared to where you imagined it going at the beginning of the process?

Rae: It actually stemmed from a chat in a Minecraft server, hilariously enough! Toad can attest to this, he was there — at the time (April 10, 2023) we all had a Minecraft server running within the Playdate Squad (which I love and miss — I think we’re starting a new one up soon!!). If I can recall the convo correctly, Toad and I were brainstorming ideas to kickstart me into making some kind of game within a week (HA). Toad gave me the idea of a boating game pretty fast — obviously the crank could translate pretty nicely to a rowboat’s oar, so I could imagine controlling one half of a tandem-rowing situation. There was just one problem to solve about it, though, and I thankfully actually have the chat log from this realization…:

….a ROW-BOT

From there, it really was just kind of a total spiral — I absolutely do not think this game would be what or where it is now without the help of pretty much everyone in the devlog, especially those who’ve been there from the start. We were throwing ideas left and right, workshopping stuff; I think it almost holds up to Reel-istic Fishing with how molded by the community it’s become.

There have definitely been a lot of inspirations. If you’ve played literally any classic Sonic the Hedgehog game before, you can immediately see what I’m talking about: animal character, world being taken over by robots, evil villain who’s shaped like an egg; come on. I was also inspired in part by the PaRappa the Rapper series? At least, in that animated cutscenes seemed like such a super cool gimmick, especially for Playdate where it really hasn’t been done on too wide of a scale before. I basically wound up drawing a whole TV episode of a cartoon for this game! You can also see some of that inspiration in how the story mode is laid out, having multiple “circuits” that make the game increasingly more difficult. That particular beat comes from PaRappa 2, which I actually finally 100%’d a couple days ago as of writing!

I don’t think you could pluck out a point of this game that wasn’t inspired by somebody else, honestly. Even the boat! Well, the current in-game interpretation of the boat, at least. TheMediocritist was working on a project where they made incremental progress on a game daily for 100 days, and at one point they had an absolutely WONDERFUL-looking car that was being drawn completely out of polygons, real-time. It made me consider doing a similar sort of deal for the boat; I was overdue to re-create that part of the code anyway, and it would have resulted in MUCH cleaner rotation, transformations, and scaling — all of which I was planning to do, so it would be great to have control over.

Footage from TheMediocritist’s Project C

I asked them about it, and they wound up being a tremendous help in teaching me how to set it up! Some troubleshooting and BIG scores for optimization later, the boat’s looking the best it’s ever been. And that’s honestly just only one major example of how the Squad’s been such a significant help in shaping this game. If you’re reading this, and you participated in the devlog like, at all, know that you’ve probably helped more than you think in getting this game out the door (if at least by pure moral support).

PU: RowBot Rally made a big showing at PAX -- how'd that come about? I don't think you were able to go personally, is that right? But what was the experience like, having YOUR GAME be a big showcase for our favorite little console?

Rae: Honestly, I’ve really got Panic to thank for pretty much all the major press coverage that’s happened regarding RowBot! They first reached out to me in around December 2023 — Arisa asked me where the game was, what my timeline was looking like, and if I had any kind of playable vertical slice at the moment. Some talking happened, and I wound up with a premiere slot in the Playdate Update slated for that February! Honestly, that was a total dream come true, if ONLY because the slot by extension meant guaranteed keys to the Catalog for the game, which was a wicked barrier to cross.

I could probably go on and on about that update on its own — there’s probably a whole retrospective blog post I could write there — thank you Voxy for helping me edit that. But really, all the big marketing dubs RowBot’s had over the last year or so have been Panic reaching out time and time again. I got a brief highlight in the Wholesome Games showcase (which wound up being simulcast on The Game Awards YouTube channel?!?!), and spotlights at PAX, XOXO, and the Portland Retro Gaming Expo — the latter of which I actually was able to attend! It was so awesome seeing people in the flesh playing my game and responding positively to it, even if I was too shy to come up and say “hello that’s my game :3c do you like it”. It’s still absolutely nuts to think that they believe in my game this hard, and would like to keep showing it off to interested parties, and I’ve really got them to thank for helping me get my silly little boat game in front of so many eyes — there’s even more cool stuff happening that I can’t even say anything about yet!! I think it’s gonna continue to be a really fun time, and I’m super-duper appreciative of them for everything they’ve done.

PU: That's all the questions I have for now, but thank you for your time, and congratulations on the release! Any final thoughts on where Playdate is going, or where it's been, or anything else?

Rae: Thank you! It’s been very fun chatting. I really hope Playdate continues to flourish — it’s a great console that I really love for so many reasons, and I definitely plan to keep making cool games for it for as long as I reasonably can. It still stuns me that the releases in Catalog have been coming at such a consistent clip, and the games within have constantly been such bangers; it feels like an insane quality/quantity ratio you really wouldn’t see on other platforms. So long as Playdate keeps on trucking, I wanna be right alongside making things that (at least I hope) people will enjoy very much.