We have at long, long last released the Playdate SDK to the general
public.  It's kind of funny that it shipped before the actual hardware,
but the hardware isn't too far behind now.  With today's SDK release,
devs will be ready to put games on their consoles as soon as they
arrive.

Every Playdate is a "dev kit", no special hardware required.  It can be
programmed in beginner-friendly Lua or expert-friendly C.  Honestly,
I recommend at least trying the Lua interface, even if you are an
experienced programmer.  It's just more... fun.

This "fun factor" is actually something we've heard a lot about
from our early access devs, and I agree.  Putting together a
quick proof-of-concept on Playdate is easy and breezy.  You're not
plate-spinning megabytes of dependencies or huge toolchains like, well,
literally every other modern development environment.  The compiler
is a single executable.  The API docs are comprehensive and easily
readable.

The Lua API is similar to (but not the same as) Love2D, as a general
point of reference.  You can get something simple up on the screen
and moving around in a dozen or so lines of code.  Projects build and
run in the simulator nearly instantaneously, making for a lightning
fast edit/build/debug cycle.

Even if you don't have a Playdate device on order, you can still
download our SDK and simulator to play around with.  It's completely
free, and you can distribute your creations however you like --
you don't need to go through us.

Today's release is the culmination of literally years of hard work by
a small team of extremely talented people, each of whom I'm honored
to work with.  I cannot wait until people actually start receiving
their Playdate consoles and see their work spring to life in glorious
1-bit graphics.

The SDK is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux at

    https://play.date/dev/

Have fun!