Crank is a wrapper for cargo when creating games for the Playdate handheld gaming system in Rust. 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.

• The Playdate SDK installed in $HOME/Developer/PlaydateSDK on Linux or MacOS, $HOME/Documents/PlaydateSDK on Window, or at the path specified by the $PLAYDATE_SDK environment variable.
• Rust, easiest installed via rustup.
• Switch to the nightly toolchain using rustup toolchain install nightly, required for the build-std feature.
• If you want to build for the Playdate device, you will need the thumbv7em-none-eabihf target. Added with rustup +nightly target add thumbv7em-none-eabihf
• All the requirements listed in Inside Playdate with C.
  • The GCC ARM compiler must be available in your system PATH environment variable. (This is usually done for you by the installer).

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

cargo install --git=https://github.com/jder/crank

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 and Linux in the past.