Interview with Scenic Route Software
You were with us through all of Scenic Route Week, where I played every Scenic Route Software game released on Playdate, all in a row, including one that as of this writing isn’t out yet (but will be on Catalog on September 10, 2024!). Now let’s learn a little more about the person behind the games!
Playdate Unofficial: How’d you get into game development, and what drew you to the Playdate?
Scenic Route: I got into writing games when my family got our first computer — an Atari 400 — when I was 8 years old. My aunt and uncle were both computer programmers, and along with game cartridges, they also gave me a Microsoft Basic cartridge. That was my first programming language, and I wrote a lot of goofy choose-your-own-adventure games with it.
Since then I’ve always had an interest in computer programming, and have been doing it professionally for most of my adult life. Making games is something I do for fun. It combines my love of problem solving and making music and art into one nice package.
I can’t recall where I first heard of the Playdate — it might have been a post on BoingBoing. It seemed like such a fun idea, so I signed up to be notified when it became available. I placed an order on the day they went on sale and managed to get into group one. I’d originally intended it as a Christmas gift for the kids, but since it didn’t come until May the following year, I set it up for myself and started playing around and was instantly intrigued and wanted to learn more about making stuff for it. I found the SDK documentation and went from there!
PU: You have many games of many genres. How do you decide what kind of game to make next? Where do you get your inspiration?
SC: Inspiration comes from all over. Post Hero was the result of my daughter and I brainstorming a game over Thanksgiving that went from a puzzle game to an adventure game. Shift was loosely based on a mini game in Superstar Saga on the GBA. I have a puzzle game that I haven’t finished yet that was inspired by a plate of cheese and crackers. I looked down as I was carrying it upstairs, saw they were in a grid and thought, “oh … there’s a game here!”
I have way more half-started projects than released ones, which I’m sure is true for anyone that makes games.
PU: You’re very involved in the Playdate Community. What’s so special about it to you? How would you like to see it grow/advance?
SC: Everyone is so nice and supportive! There are so many cool and interesting people making things for the Playdate, and the players themselves are fantastic. It’s a genuinely unique space to be in, and you can’t help but want to give back to it.
I’m very happy that the community has continued to attract more people, both players and developers. It’s really thriving, and while nothing lasts forever, I can certainly see it remaining active for a long time to come. Just look at the dev log section of the Squad Discord — SO much interesting stuff in the works!
PU: You make iOS versions of some of your games, too. How does that differ from Playdate development, and which is more fun?
SC: Well, color for one thing. And fading and scaling things is trivial. And iPhones have way more memory and a dedicated GPU. But it’s really not that different when you get right down to it. Generations and Shift II for iOS are both written with Apple’s SpriteKit SDK, which has a lot of similarities with the Playdate SDK. I like Swift a lot — it's a more sophisticated language than Lua — and I write it all day long for my day job, so I’m really looking forward to embedded Swift being ready for prime time so I can start writing Playdate games with it.
That said, making games for Playdate is more fun. Writing a really cool feature that tanks performance on hardware, and then figuring out how to optimize it might not sound like something that would be fun, but I really enjoy it.
PU: Your family is clearly very important to you – how do you balance time for them, and making games, and presumably a day job until Playdate can make us all millionaires?
SC: Super important, yeah, and they always come first. My family is very supportive of all of this, and they know that I’m the type of person who isn’t really happy unless I’m making things — be that games, art, or music. I also try to involve them in the process with play testing, bouncing ideas off of them, incorporating their feedback, that sort of thing. They also know that if I wasn’t making games, I’d be doing something else obsessively, like drawing or playing drums.
A not insignificant portion of my games were written in the parking lots of ice rinks and baseball fields up and down the east coast waiting for my son’s travel hockey or baseball games to start. It also helps that my kids are older — it definitely took way longer to wrap up any project when they were little.
PU: Last question: what do you want to do next?
SC: Finish and release The Whiteout! I’ve been working on it since Post Hero released in 2023, and it’s been a huge effort. I keep getting distracted with new ideas, but I’m doubling down on it now and plan to have it out by Spring of 2025. Which, according to the game’s lore, is exactly when it started snowing and never stopped.