Live, synchronous Playdate-to-Playdate multiplayer pong demo (Pang.date + Playlink)

Games
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There has been a lot of sporadic discussion of device-to-device multiplayer over the years. Since Paulstraw demonstrated turn-based multiplayer over the net in 2023, advances have been limited (though there are some cool projects on the horizon).

Over the past week, I made a tool called "Playlink," which more-or-less directly connects the serial ports of two playdates attached to a computer. In theory, Playlink should make real-time arcade multiplayer possible with two USB cables and any laptop or desktop. But would it actually work?

It does!

Check out the video above, or (if you have two playdates about), side load the pdx available here.

While Playlink works for real (I think?), this game is more proof-of-concept. There seems to be some kind of memory leak that occurs over time, and there are a lot of QoL changes that would need to be made for it to be final (for example, right now you need to restart the game manually, and usually restart the webpage, any time you retry the connection).

Still, I think it provides a basic tool to experiment with local multiplayer.

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This sounds awesome!! Would this be able to work with the Playdate Simulator and a physical Playdate?

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Sadly, I don't think so. The simulator does a lot of things using the serial port, but I don't think the virtual Playdate on your computer actually has its own virtual serial port.

The long-term goal would be to have a love2d online version of a game that could actually use web serial to connect to your playdate, but that's a bit over my head (and would not be plug-and-play for devs to implement, unless the Playbit playdate-to-lua converter is finished).

Edit: fixed typos from posting quickly before leaving signal range.