“But who uses iPhones anymore?", you say. "What if I want to play this game on my #Playdate, and what if instead of a generic CPU it was against SAM-Y from Shift?”

I hear you. "Four Corners: Square Up" - coming at some point.

(This is SAM-Y playing, not me.)

① Cheese 'n Crackers is a strategy game where your job is to re-arrange toppings on a cutting board to combine them into the most delicious snacks possible!

🧀 play.date/games/cheese-n-crackers/

I’ve made it smarter than “pick biggest rectangle” by weighting bonus tiles and having it favor those in its matches, and now it’s too good at the game.

But I do think the language features of Swift and the performance of the compiled binary outweigh the inconveniences.

That said, it hasn't been easy or all that friendly. I couldn't get the build script to work in Xcode, and I'm not sure if break points are even possible. If there is a run-time issue, the simulator crashes without a stack trace making debugging very, very hard.

I'd say this has been a very worthwhile exercise, and now that I've worked out the gotchas and filled in the C API's gaps, I think any new project for #playdate will be done with Swift.

The older #playdate project is now 100% converted to Swift, and after spending the morning making some optimizations, it runs at 48-50fps (The Lua version can barely eek out 30) and the worst drop I saw was to 43 for a single frame on a particularly heavy operation.