During my game launch earlier this week I learned two very important things:
- The Playdate's flash storage's performance degrades the fuller it is. In other words, the more games someone has installed the slower things load.
- The DRM added to Catalog games increases the boot time of a game.
Both of these contributed a startup crash for some users who purchased my game. I went into more detail in my garden post on my website.
I've been well aware of the 10 watchdog timer for some time now, and was testing on both my Rev A and Rev B devices to watch boot times. However since I wasn't aware of these two pieces of information, I didn't catch that under some conditions my game would fail to boot.
I've learned my lesson, but I'd like to make sure this information is accessible for other devs, so I have a few requests for the Playdate developer docs:
- Document the 10 second watch dog timer. I thought had read about this in the docs somewhere, but I can't find it as of today. Maybe I had picked it up from a Discord conversation?
- Document the quirk of the performance degradation as it fills up. Also ideally providing an idea of how different a device with empty storage vs full storage effects load times.
- Document that Catalog games have DRM which impact load times. Also ideally providing an idea of how much of an impact it will be.