Ratcheteer DX

Shaun Inman on converting a Playdate hit to Steam

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The original Ratcheteer was a charming spin on the 2D Legend Of Zelda titles and originally launched on Panic's Playdate console. Now, its original developer Shaun Inman has decided to port the game to Steam and Switch. Here's how it all came about.

So Shaun, when did you first come up with the Playdate idea for Racheteer?

Panic approached me about their secret little handheld that they were working on. It had been about maybe a year since Retro Game Crunch where me and a couple friends made six retro-inspired games and the goal was six months, but it took a year because life, and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next. They presented Playdate to me, which had a d-pad, two buttons and a crank. And I was like, “This!” I love constraints.

How long did the original version take to create and what issues did you face while making it?

I want to say the core gameplay stuff probably took about three months. Just getting the game field down and programming all the different abilities and figuring out how it was all going to work within the constraints of the system. But then I started out doing it in the Lua runtime which is how most Playdate games are made and I was running up against performance issues on the actual hardware because it's got a very modest processor. So I started looking into porting it to C. And so that was a whole thing, as I'd never really made a project in C before and it was a bit of a learning curve.