From first date to wedding date, all via the PlayDate. This is the story of how an Australian games developer has used a popular handheld console to secure a wedding date with his now bride-to-be.
Aaron Nielsen, aka @theaaronleigh, has used basic coding skills to create a brand new game for the PlayDate called ‘Love Letter’, an interactive title that, as you might have guessed from the title, is the sweetest marriage proposal that we’ve seen for a very long time. And no, we’re not crying, you are.
Love Letter is a beautiful little title, but as Aaron explains on his Twitter account, there’s a little bit of clever distraction before the proposal comes into play. ‘The player (my now fiance!) would need to try and deliver the correct ‘letters’ to their desired letterbox before time ran out. Each correct letter delivered would increase the score multipliers and additional time bonuses etc.’
‘But the timer and scoreboard were all a distraction,’ he goes on to explain, and this is where the genius element of Aaron’s masterful plan comes into play. ‘At the end of the game all the collected letters would spell “Will you marry me?” – that was my cue to drop to one knee. Oh and don’t worry, if she had selected “no” it would have asked “are you sure” and looped around! haha!’
The game went through many iterations over the six months. It started as a series of simple platforming levels. But after some playtests I decided to pivot toward a more hi-score-based arcade experience. Here's a snippet of the near-final version. pic.twitter.com/TwOKkWouGr
— Aaron (Pikaaroon) (@TheAaronLeigh) April 14, 2024
Proposal Mode – Activated
It’s ingenious, isn’t it? Aaron’s fiancé certainly thinks so, and she’s one of many who thinks Aaron should make this game public, with or without Proposal Mode activated at the end. Aaron explains that the whole thing took him about 6 months, turning to the PlayDate community and using Pulp Editor to code the game from scratch. I for one would love to have a go on this game; it makes me think of the Rito post-sorting minigame in the Wind Waker on Dragon Roost Island!
It’s nice to see some positive news for the PlayDate after the company reported some of the consoles mysteriously going missing earlier this year. $400,000 worth of stock mysteriously vanished into thin air, leaving the Retro Dodo team scratching our beards while wearing Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hats and puffing on bubble pipes.
The PlayDate is a fantastic little handheld that more people should try out; the crank provides a new meaning to hands-on gameplay, and the catalogue of titles has that kind of refreshing ingenuity that we haven’t felt since we experienced Game Boy DMG titles for the first time. It’s certainly a console that Aaron and his fiancé will hold dear forevermore, and we wish them (and their PlayDate) all the best for the future!
