crank

Crank is a wrapper for cargo when creating games for the Playdate handheld gaming system. This is just a tool, the actually Rust wrappers for Playdate are found in its own repository.

This software is not sponsored or supported by Panic.

Note: Development is on hold until the SDK is made available to the public.

Requirements

The Playdate SDK installed in $HOME/Developer/PlaydateSDK.

Rust, easiest installed via rustup

Rust toolchains nightly needed for build-std feature, installed with rustup install nightly && rustup component add rust-src --toolchain nightly, if you want to build for the Playdate device rather than the simulator.

Installation

Since crank is not yet on crates.io, one needs to download it with git and install it with cargo.

git clone https://github.com/rtsuk/crank.git
cd crank
cargo install --path . --force

After that one should be able to run crank

crankstart $ crank build -h
crank-build 0.1.0
Build binary targeting Playdate device or Simulator

USAGE:
    crank build [FLAGS] [OPTIONS]

FLAGS:
        --device     Build for the Playdate device
    -h, --help       Prints help information
        --release    Build artifacts in release mode, with optimizations
        --run        Run
    -V, --version    Prints version information

OPTIONS:
        --example <example>                Build a specific example from the examples/ dir
        --manifest-path <manifest-path>    Path to Cargo.toml

The command build is a bit of a misnomer, as it both builds, creates a .pdx directory and runs the game on the simulator or device.

In order to include assets like images, crank optionally reads a Crank.toml file with lists of files to include in the .pdx directory. See the wrapper repository for an example.

Crank is only regularly tested on Mac, but has worked on Windows in the past.