What is space-trader?

Space Trader is a recreation of a beloved handheld game from the early 2000s, reimagined for the Playdate, a modern indie gaming device with a distinctive small screen and crank controller. The original game was a trading simulation where players traveled between planets, bought and sold goods, and tried to grow their wealth. This version brings that same addictive gameplay loop to the Playdate's unique hardware. The game is built using TypeScript, a language that adds safety checks to JavaScript, and runs on the Playdate using the official Playdate SDK. When you run the development commands, the project watches your code for changes, automatically rebuilds the game, and reloads it in the Playdate emulator so you can see updates instantly. This makes it fast to tinker with features or fix bugs without manually restarting everything. If you're a Playdate owner who loved the original Space Trader on old Palm phones, this gives you a way to play that nostalgic game on a modern device. For developers interested in Playdate games, this is a working example of how to build and structure a game in TypeScript that runs on the platform. The project is fairly minimal, the README focuses mainly on setup instructions rather than detailed gameplay mechanics, but it's a solid foundation for anyone wanting to understand how games work on the Playdate or who wants to contribute to expanding the feature set.