Get Info: #abandoned

Post-Playdate: One Year Later

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 12:12:00 +0000

It’s been a year since October 2024, when I released my last game on the Playdate Catalog. Over the course of that month, I became increasingly concerned about an undercurrent of threatening and antisocial behaviour from one particular developer in the community—my frequent reports of which went unanswered. Eventually—exactly a year ago today—that tension surfaced as a campaign of targeted harassment. I was assured something would be done about it, but sadly, nothing ever was.

So I left the Playdate community. Over the following months, I faced various forms of harassment: doxxing, unsavoury DMs, spam campaigns targeting my email, cell phone, and social media accounts, unfounded accusations—the list goes on. I can tell you, this is not my idea of a fun time.

You might think that after a year this would be old news. Sadly, it’s not. I’ve long since moved on with my life and kept creating—for platforms as exotic as the Sega Dreamcast and as familiar as the web. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved, and of the choices that allow me to keep doing what I do best, regardless of the people who try to put barriers in my way.

While I continued creating award-winning games, the chance to build the game of my dreams came along—made easier by being an employee at a company that would handle funding, marketing, and the practicalities, freeing me to focus on doing my best work. It was a decision I didn’t take lightly, both because of potential ethical concerns and the fear of further harassment. I sought advice from close friends and had thoughtful discussions with several of them. One friend in particular told me they hadn’t heard of the company, so we didn’t discuss it further. That was back in May.

I announced my first work with the company in July—again, this friend said nothing. Then, in mid-October, I announced my new permanent position, and that same friend suddenly went off the deep end. I asked what had changed since May, when they hadn’t heard of the company, and why nothing was said in July, when I first went public with my new work—yet now, in October, they were suddenly so angry. Their reply:

“One of my friends saw your post and sent it to me saying ‘oh no,’ which is how I found out. And then another friend (who you also know) also said ‘oh nooooooo.’”

So, essentially, this friend had been incited into anger by others—the same social dynamic that fuelled the harassment a year ago. And the worst part? Those two mutual friends are key figures in the Playdate scene—the very people who once promised to address the harassment are now perpetuating it, a year on. I need to find a stronger word than disappointing, but that will have to do for now.

At this point, I’m letting things run their course and will continue to do what I do best: make games. I’m looking forward to you being able to play the next one.

Plus ça change—the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Have fun,
matt

Abandoned project: Band-kun/Beatnik for Playdate

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 11 May 2025 16:58:00 +0000

Back in November 2020 I was exploring the PC-98 back catalog, and stumbled across a strange game called Band-kun. Strange in that it’s a 1-bit black and white game on a platform that was capable of colour, and also because it’s a hybrid adventure/management/music/rhythm game. I was smitten.

The Idea

I was already developing for the Playdate, a modern 1-bit platform, and it struck me as the perfect opportunity to create a remaster of the game. So, I set my sights on securing the licence. The original title was developed by Koei—Japan’s equivalent to Electronic Arts—a giant now known as Koei Tecmo, whose owners are worth hundreds of billions. The game itself is credited to one of those owners: Yoichi Erikawa, who used the pen name Ko Shibusawa. I had a feeling this wasn’t going to be easy.

I published a thread about the game and my prototype on Twitter, introducing the game to the West, which remains my most popular post and thread of all-time (~20 years, for me) at over 450K impressions. I also mirrored the thread as a blog post which is no doubt an easier read.

The idea for the remaster was to not remake the original game at all, but rather to take the vibe and bring it into the modern era. So there were no plans to use the original music, or perhaps even the original graphics. I would leverage modern device capabilities and input methods to create a totally new experience a million miles away from the limited original game from 1990.

Challenge Accepted

A couple of days later, 18th December 2020, Cabel Sasser of Panic reached out:

“Hey Matt, I love a good challenge—do you want me to actually try to make contact with someone at Koei? Regarding Band-Kun? (Philosophically, the idea of reviving a long-forgotten PC Koei title is just enormously interesting to me ahhahah)”.

By 25th December 2020—thanks Santa!—Panic’s guy in Japan, Noby, had a breakthrough finding contact details and sent an email to Koei. Their reply came quickly on 27th December 2020 when a lovely person in Koei’s IP management department replied:

they knew of the Playdate and were waiting patiently to pre-order
they had the licence for the Band-kun game (music to my ears!)
there was an outstanding question about the music rights
and some remaining business questions for Panic to answer

The project then became in need of a budget to be set: for both the licence and for me to build it. Even with this discussion happening in late December 2020, it was suggested that the game could feature in Season 2. And that, unfortunately, was the last I heard of it. Sad, and surprising, but true.

Not one to give up so easily I submitted the game twice, kind of, in pitches to Panic.

Open Pitch: Band-kun

June 2022
to reignite the licence discussion
a reimagining of the original game for a modern device
as a team effort with musician and tools programmers; to hit a deadline
suggested budget was included
pitch pdf (191 KB)

On 1st May 2024 I sent a message to Panic stating that I was still interested in making the game and to check the status of the project, but never received a reply.

Season 2 Pitch: Beatnik

July 2024
an all-new game
let’s forget about the IP
completely revised and redesigned
as a solo endeavour; I was confident I could complete the new scope myself
no budget was required
pitch pdf (185 KB)

Go/no-go

Neither of the pitches were successful. There was no further discussion of the licence from 2020.

Regardless, I decided that I would continue working on the game and release it myself. This was the big project I was working on pretty much exclusively from May 2024 to October 2024. You can see elements of it in my New World and Band-o-matic tech demos.

In August 2024, I took a two-week break from working on Beatnik to develop Bender 2: Bend Harder, an expanded version of a game I originally made in 2012. As part of that project, I integrated some of the tooling and library code I had built for Beatnik to test and validate a few of the technologies and concepts. And that was the end of that.

Abandoned project: multi-site shopping app

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 10 May 2025 17:35:00 +0000

I order weird old stuff from Japan a few times a year: old magazines, CD-ROMs, digital watches, strategy guides, video games, playing cards, books, artwork and any other old tat that takes my fancy. The way this is usually done is by ordering through a proxy service that receives the goods on your behalf and combines and ships them to you at your convenience.

There are many such proxy services, each with their own website, fee structure, shipping costs, and other pros and cons. I grew tired of tabs from these various sites cluttering up my browser, so I decided to build a bespoke app to manage them. I couldn’t find anything close, other than an app for Russians to more easily shop on AliExpress. So, in September 2024, I built the app I envisioned as a rapid prototype and called it Otaku!

otaku (n.) in Japan, a young person who is obsessed with computers or particular aspects of popular culture to the detriment of their social skills 🤓

Otaku!

The app itself is a customisable set of tabs—one per site—each containing a WebKit view, along with a detailed settings interface that includes an editable list of search terms. So, you could easily do common searches and there was no need to repeatedly type searches terms into each site as they would be automatically be entered when you switch to the tab. Add to that Custom CSS to hide parts of the sites, Google Translate to view some sites in your native language rather than Japanese, currency converter, and several other useful related tools rounded out a comprehensive app.

Postmortem

It worked well, and I used it heavily for the duration of its development. it also gained a number of passionate users on TestFlight. My only criticism is that the specific design of the app and the unreliability of my naive WebKit implementation meant that whilst the existing friction was removed by facilitating easier multi-site management, new friction was introduced elsewhere in the user experience, and at the end of the day you’re still interacting with a bunch of websites of varying quality.

A better solution might be somewhere in between, perhaps using a more modern popover interface paradigm to switch between tabs rather than the back and forth of the navigation controller. Then there are options to capture the results via API and present them in a unified way, but this opens up more questions and friction at the point you want to buy something. In short, it’s a difficult problem!

SwiftUI is fun to work with, despite it throwing its hands up at several points and me having to revert to my last commit to get it back on track. I don’t really enjoy building iOS and macOS apps at this point in time, so Xcode became a bit of a chore and took a lot of the fun out of the project.

After pushing several updates up to the middle of October, I then let that final build expire and have never wanted to push any update or new version.

Thanks to all the users of this app for your valuable testing and feedback.

Video Demonstration

Below is a video of sample app usage. I select a search term (Hanafuda) and then use it on the different tabs along bottom of the screen. I then switch to a different search term (花札) and use that across the same set of tabs. Notice that at no point did anything need to be typed.

Abandoned project: Soccer for Playdate

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 01 May 2025 14:34:00 +0000

On September 30th, 2023, I was sitting in the cinema waiting for an anniversary screening of Talking Heads “Stop Making Sense” to begin when I got a message from Panic. They asked if I was familiar with Sensible Soccer. Naturally, I was—I’ve played it since its release in 1992, as man and boy. Back in 2000, I’d even made my own arcade-style take on it called Simple Soccer, and in 2002 I designed an official Sensible Soccer T-shirt that was sold on the high street. Panic had no idea about any of this, but luck works in funny ways sometimes.

Panic’s idea was to make a soccer game for Playdate, tied in as a promotional companion to the soccer-infused first-person slice-of-life game Despelote (out today—1st May, 2025). Very cool.

I was super keen, as you’d imagine, and quickly got to work on a prototype (download at the link). It let you move around the pitch, zoom in and out, and switch between different pitch surfaces. I sent it off and asked for a budget and scope. With the expectation set that the project was going forwards and while waiting for a reply, I kept going: I got the ball moving (using the same sort of ball movement trick I first solved 25 years ago and more recently reused for Fore! Track), and had two AI-controlled teams running around the pitch, tracking the ball using the classic Sensible Soccer grid system.

But I never heard back about the budget. So I stopped—just before adding goal-scoring. It would’ve been so cool.

Lesson learned. I now always ask for a contract upfront and of course don’t do spec work. If a client wants me to build something, they need to commit—and at the very least, meet me on the halfway line.

Abandoned project: firework builder puzzle game

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 21:39:00 +0000

I plan to occasionally list abandoned projects that I’ve decided not to take any further.

This one is a prototype for a “firework builder” puzzle game. I was calling it Hanabi, the Japanese word for firework, but I’m not sure I would have stuck with that for the final name.

It’s a visual programming-based puzzle video game along the lines of Human Resource Machine and influenced by block-based visual programming language Scratch.

I submitted it to the Draknek New Voices Puzzle Grant 2024, but was not selected. At the time of submission the core game logic had been proven, with a dozen or so block types supported, and I was learning how to program shaders as I had a very specific way I wanted to present the final firework animation. You can see the paper texture that I was generating using a shader in the video below. I had a dozen or so puzzles designed, including a heart shape which takes some thinking and combining of logic blocks to achieve!

Whilst the prototype was an iOS app—mostly to benefit from rapid prototyping using SwiftUI and to get touch control and easy list management for free—the final game could have been on any platform. The challenge would be user interface, followed by puzzles and visual design.

I gave up on the idea for a number of reasons, including but not limited to harassment.

Video Demonstration

Below is the video I submitted with my entry, dated 2024-10-07. I narrate and run through the concept, complete example puzzles, and talk about the “woodblock print” style of fireworks I was planning and in the process of implementing.

When Playdate Stopped Being Fun

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 21:00:00 +0000

For almost six years, Playdate (a little handheld gaming device with a crank input and 1-bit screen) was a space where I did some of my most creative and personal work. I embraced its quirks, shipped over twenty releases, and explored what a tiny, constrained device could do. It brought me joy, challenge, and a sense of purpose.

But over time, that feeling changed. Following a difficult incident in October 2024 involving targeted harassment—admitted to by the developer responsible, but met with no meaningful follow-up from the community moderators and no reply at the time of writing from Panic—I began to feel increasingly disconnected from the scene. I gave it time, hoped things might shift, but ultimately the silence made it hard to keep building with the same heart.

So, I’m stepping back. Not dramatically—just with clarity. Right now, this isn’t the environment I can thrive in. If that changes, I’d be happy to return. For now, I want to leave a record of what I made. I’m proud of all of it. I’ll continue as a full-time indie developer, but in another castle.

Be excellent to each other. And have fun.

Released Projects

2022-03 Today (the first Playdate thing sold on itch.io)
2022-04 Horse Race
2022-04 Audition
2022-04 Prototypes multi-pack
2022-04 Daily Driver (tech demo)
2022-05 Circular
2022-05 ST-DIN and Supermini fonts
2023-04 Sparrow Solitaire (with Mac Vogelsang)
2023-05 Piskel for Playdate (desktop pixel art app)
2023-07 Mandala
2023-08 Strategies
2023-08 DateDiff
2023-08 YOYOZO (“Best Games of 2023”, Ars Technica)
2023-10 Kye (with Jan Martinek)
2023-10 Super ICARUS
2023-12 Fore! Track
2023-12 See the Sky (with Thoru Yamamoto)
2024-05 Rorschach (featuring mouse control)
2024-10 Bender 2: Bend Harder
2025-03 Shark Turtle, originally created 2023-06

Cancelled Projects

Aero Club—Flight school simulation inspired by Mode 7 and Pilotwings
Beatnik—Rhythm game with interactive music and beat-matched dynamic visuals
Cosmic Trash—Arcade action puzzle with realtime ray-traced graphics
Daily Driver—60fps arcade racing with pre-rendered graphics (reborn as Dream Ride)
Koatari—Pachinko-style arcade game with pinball-inspired visuals, running up to 120fps
Mole Hole—A modern remake of Thoru Yamamoto’s escape-maze concept

Notes

Daily Driver won “Outstanding Technical Achievement (SDK)” at the 2022 Community Awards
Sparrow Solitaire won “Best Puzzle Game” at the 2023 Community Awards
YOYOZO won “Best Arcade Game” at the 2023 Community Awards
YOYOZO was named one of the “Best Games of 2023” by Ars Technica
Bender 2: Bend Harder was nominated for “Best Arcade Game” at the 2024 Community Awards

Thanks to JM, JS, MR, PP, SC for feedback on versions of this post.
Panic were sent a draft of this post ahead of publication.