Initial release!

Hi everyone! I love nature soundscapes & field recording… and just got a Playdate… so … here’s an app combining them! It’s kind of a Playdate version of nature ambience videos or apps.

This is my first time making a game or doing anything with Playdate, so I’m interested in all kinds of feedback. Especially if anything doesn’t work for you. But also… what do you think of the concept? How do you like the crank to change rain intensity?

It uses three sections of an overnight rain recording from my backyard. It’s shocking to me how smooth a simple crossfade is between the three sounds. It sounds like you’re there listening to the rain ebb and flow. I think it’s because the source is rain which has a lot of randomization, but it ends up working really well!

I also added a very slow automatic variation, as if you were turning the crank one rotation up and down every 8 minutes. You can’t consciously hear it in the moment, but it keeps things sounding fresh.

It disables the Playdate autolock feature since hopefully folks will be listening for a long time. But it has a battery saver feature inspired by Playtime - Weird Alarm Clocks

Please watch the video and let me know what you think. If you have a Playdate, give it a try.

Take care,

-Brian

Playdate Developer notes

I grabbed three sections of a long rain recording at very different intensities, created loops in Reaper and then crossfade from light rain to medium and then from medium to heavy… from one continuous motion on the crank.

I learned the hard way that AD-PCM encodings (the preferred encoding for the device since it’s easy to decode) have a fixed block size (per file) and if you don’t have enough samples to fill the last block… you get silence… which ruins loops. Took a while to track that down. I’ll write a follow-up post because it was fiddly figure out and I’m not sure I understand the general case yet.