ADX on Playdate

A unique console…

The Playdate handheld console has been gaining popularity in the indie game community recently. It offers a directional pad, A/B buttons, a black and white screen, and a crank that can be pulled out from its right side. The possibility of turning the crank has inspired indie game developers, leading to new and unique gameplays.

This gave the idea to our team to check if we could run ADX on the console to create sound effects and implement interesting sonic interactions.

… with some restrictions

Because the Playdate was made with retro gaming in mind, it has relatively low specifications, from its CPU clock speed to its memory capacity.
These limitations can make developing a game both challenging and inspiring at the same time, and this was certainly true when adding ADX too!

Luckily, ADX provides a function that calculates in advance the computational load it will place on a device. But even though it looked like it would work, some of us were still skeptical about our chances to make it work in a meaningful way…

 

New sonic interactions

ADX is now running on Playdate! To save CPU cycles, we had to select a codec with a low CPU load. However, ADX’s unique features, such as AISAC and track transitions using Selectors are working!

In this example, turning the crank operates a crossfade between two songs.

In this other example, we use a Selector for the transitions between tracks (with beat synchronization) and we operate the crank to control the level of a flanger effect.

It was a very fun experiment, and we are looking forward to trying to run ADX on other unique devices!