It looks so dumb. I wonder who they are marketing this at? Not your typical Fortnite / CS / Wow gamer.
I love indie games and experimental story telling, but $150 for 12 games, and one of them uses a crank... not buying it. Sorry. $50 on steam gets me a whole lot of weird, and I got a ton left to invest in a case of craft beer to enjoy along with it.
it's not even accurate - nintendo labo has shown there is a market for high spec high quality non standard games(as long as there is an assurance of quality behind it)
biggest hurdle for playdate is word of mouth - nintendo has that trust, i don't trust the company behind this. Same reason that android console failed - hell nvidia couldn't get enough support behind it
Panic is, ironically, a "moral panic" type of company. When e-culture shifts, they shift their policy accordingly. I would not trust them for stability.
What do you mean by this? What has Panic shifted on? The only example I can think of where they've shifted on anything is they released Transmit for iOS, then after a while they discontinued it, and that's because it simply wasn't making enough money for them to justify the cost of maintenance.
I don't see Panic approaching this as a "console" and looking for outside platform support. This is more like ten $15 Game-and-Watches bundled together.
If they offer more games after the fact that's cool, but at this price point I think most customers will love it for what it is.
Ahh, the Dreamcast. I love those consoles. Recently picked up one basically new. It's archived for the grandkids, along with some 8 bit machines and a six switch Atari VCS (2600).
In a few years, we are going to revisit the golden era again, and it's going to be as fun as it was last time.
I'm surprised you say that - I have an Apple Watch and I genuinely love the ability to scroll with the crown - I don't block the display with my finger and I get tactile feedback.
Not a meaningful amount of charge from gameplay, I agree. But it could have a "charging mode" where the screen goes off and you just turn the crank for 5-10 minutes to get a substantial charge because it already has the hardware thingie built-in.
That was my first thought as well. But would it actually be practical? Anyone have an educated guess as to how much cranking it'd take to get 30 minutes of play time?
Apparently the issue is torque for such things, the OLPC was originally going to have a crank but the force was too much for the laptop body to take long term.
OLPC would have needed a lot more power than this device, plus due to its small size the whole thing could be machined aluminium.
Especially if there's games that utilise the mechanic. could just have a much lower torque (and therefore lower-current-generation) since it's going to be used a lot. Missed opportunity.
It was removed because it wasn't going to generate enough power without cranking it constantly. And the ergonomics weren't great for kids.
They did end up making an add-on crank at one point, but I don't think it ever was widely distributed
I remember someone back then wrote a script to scrape Google Maps data and make it viewable on the GP2X, so you'd have offline portable maps. This was in 2007 or so, before smartphones became mainstream (not that as a student I could have afforded one anyway, or a data plan for that matter).
Ah those were the good old days! I wish I'd spent more time actually getting code up and running on those and the Dingoo A320 but it really was way over my head at the time.
Still contemplating a Dragonbox Pyra. The OpenPandora, despite a rocky start, played host to some incredible things.
I have loved Panic’s focused software for many years, and have several Teenage Engineering single-purpose hardware devices too (especially love my OP-1).
I have never typed my email into a signup form so fast.
Oh yeah, those were fantastic little devices. It's a shame that it wasn't popular enough to warrant successors. The OpenMoko people did some really innovative stuff back in the day, but hardware is tough.
The problem with single-purpose devices is they're a frivolous cost. When your phone can do everything, buying a separate dedicated device is inherently impractical. Of course, impracticality is also what tends to give things charm.
Put differently, limitations create interest, but they're also the opposite of cost-effective.
Touchscreens can’t [yet] replace a dedicated keypad for games.
That’s why you don’t see many platformers for mobile. The ones that do exist auto run for you or put virtual buttons on the screen, which I haven’t found to work well.
Not even digital controls could really replace analog controls. While as impressive as the Pubg controllers (essentially a gamepad with a dock) are I'm still amazed there is still no "the one mobile analog input" device is out yet.
I've never heard of that, but would've loved one. Kinda useless with cellphones, but I could see that being nice for backpacking if the battery lasts long enough.
I love single purpose hardware on an ideological level.
On a more pragmatic level, it feels more and more like companies creating semi-disposable toy electronics should be held to extremely high standards when it comes to how they source their components and the environmental impact of the lifecycle of their device, because this is ultimately cheap junk that’s hurting the environment.
"[C]ompanies should be held to extremely high standards when it comes to how they source their components and the environmental impact of the lifecycle of their device, because [it] ultimately [ends up as] junk that’s hurting the environment."
FTFY
All products should be held to that standard, not just "semi-disposable toy electronics", which it's not even clear applies to this.
When hardware is increasingly becoming just a way to interface with a larger platform (IoT, game console subscription services, etc.), I think there will be a certain nostalgia for more static, tactile and analog hardware. I collect records, own a couple pocket operators, and buy physical books for similar reasons.
Single-purpose hardware has identity. It has explicit purpose. If it is well-designed, it has an interface that is intuitive while encouraging a limited amount of experimentation. I think a lot of good software emulates these properties, but often with the tradeoff of being less extensible/integrable/power user friendly.
After entertaining the idea of getting a smartwatch for years but always feeling unimpressed, I started carrying a dumb casio. There's something great about machines that only do one or two tasks but do it very well. Look at ebook readers. They are not super popular, but they have a solid market.
On this point, I just got a Withings Steel HR [1]: It's a classic analog watch, with a sole extra function of measuring heartbeat and exercise on a tiny LCD in the back of the watch face.
I love that it's purpose-specific and isn't gimmicky like smartwatches. This also means the battery lasts about a month. Plus, it looks good.
I have several of them, and love each of them. My phone has far more capacity, and could stream effectively unlimited music from Spotify, but there's something unique and special about the Buddha Machine.
Same! In fact there's an entire subreddit devoted to the idea of very specialized tools [0].
There is one example that is still firmly lodged in my head from the labs in my electonic engineering degree. It was this big box with a nice keypad, a screen that could display a few characters, and a big handle to lock in place the integrated circuit you wanted to test. You would slot it in, pull the handle, then type the ID numbers of the particular IC. If it was functioning as expected, the screen would say something like "OKAY" and that was all this thing did. Truly magical! On further googling and reflection I'm now not so sure about how big the handle was, but the machine was something like [1].
Slightly off-topic, but the website design looks like a worse version of Teenage Engineering website (https://teenage.engineering/products/po) with larger font size (a bit too large imo). Not dissing the website though, it isn't that bad overall, just thought it was interesting, since I haven't seen many others attempting that.
EDIT: after a closer look at the page, I realized that they explicitly mentioned partnering with Teenage Engineering on parts of the device design. The website resemblance makes more sense now :)
Upon closer look, they got some nice game development partners too, like Keita Takahashi of Katamari fame. This partnership (with both Teenage Engineering and the likes of Keita Takahashi) seems like a perfect synergy in my eyes. While I am still not super excited about the product yet, I am very glad someone out there is going for stuff like that.
It mostly works well on mobile, but the layout results in hilariously big images on desktop.
The top unit could benefit from scaling to the viewport height. Right now the grey section is 100% the height of the viewport, meaning that scrolling is not an obvious interaction. Having some yellow and text peeking up could make that more intuitive.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. The site is awful on desktop - definitely designed for mobile alone. Which seems strange - considering the target market for this.
I just checked TE's web site, and it's good to see so many products marked "sold out." I hope it means that people are starting to realize that technology doesn't have to be boring.
In my experience, it does mean exactly that. Went to the local modular synth store (which I like a ton; they have tons of events like weekly meetups, workshops, etc.), and they often tend to run out of Teenage Engineering PO series devices. Talked to the owner (as it is a small shop, so he more often than not works the register himself), and he confirmed that they cannot stop ordering new batches, since they get sold out so quickly. And that's despite the fact that they sell it not any cheaper than through other channels (official website, amazon, etc.).
Can confirm, had to wait a few months before I could get my hands on their PO-33 sampler — one of my most cherished pieces of hardware now and def worth way more than its price tag to me (as someone who doesn’t generally buy music equipment).
Speaking of company/product names in the new top-level domains making cool domain hacks that aren’t even really “domain hacks” anymore (like TE’s great one), I was astounded to note yesterday in the giant Apple thread that Apple doesn’t seem to own “macbook.pro”.
I think it's cool. I'm not that old, but games these days mostly seem to be about squeezing every last dollar out of the consumer through shady means. I think this is part of why I don't play video games anymore. It's nice to see something different.
They say that the production run will be very limited. Which means there isn't much incentive for gamedevs to make more games later, as the audience can never expand beyond the initial sales.
They claim to have an SDK. Assuming that goes public (why wouldn't it?) it's 12 games + anything else they release + anything the community comes up with.
Point taken, but this is the difference between $12 for a Bud Light at a huge sports venue versus $12 for an interesting and memorable cocktail at an out-of-the-way bar. Both are expensive, but the latter is something you can't get anywhere else and might barely even turn a profit when everything else is factored in.
I think they're more referring to evolution of skinner-box and lootbox type of games, but yeah, this device was probably funded with a subscription model in mind.
Then buy different games? There are so many games out there, you don't have to buy from the sleaziest, profit-whoring of them.
N++, Papers Please, Geometry Dash, Return of the Obra Dinn, Ori and the Blind Forest, 1001 Spikes, Hollow Knight, the list goes on. Then you have things like The Talos Principle, which does have DLC, but it's many hours long, or Humble and their bundles and monthlies, or that Lichess and Pokemon Showdown are legitimately completely free.
The Playdate looks like a fun toy, but it's vastly more of a cash grab than the games I play regularly.
At that price, it likely wouldn't be e-ink. But even more so, the framerate of e-ink tech currently on the market isn't suitable for moving graphics. There are a few companies working on different ways to solve this problem but the existing e-ink patent is quite a thorn.
I think it would add unacceptable weight. And the mechanical stress would probably cause a redesign of the whole product. You don’t want the screen to crack the first time your 8 year-old gets a little enthusiastic about winding it.
Design wise this looks similar to something teenage engineering would make. Which I think is cool, I like their stuff. Specifically the op1 with the hand crank functionality
This looks pretty cool! There have been some horribly misguided niche consoles lately, (see the Amico), this one looks great by comparison. I can see it working as kind of a novelty product. I think the price point is a little high, since it's close to Nintendo handheld prices.
If it was a problem, wouldn't game controllers in general be a problem? There's always the assumption that left things (buttons, joysticks, etc.) are for movement and right things are for actions. Would it be better for a leftie if there were mirrored versions of game controllers?
That crank better be detachable in a slick way that keeps it from inadvertently popping out constantly or it's going to annoy the hell out of anyone who isn't a hardcore fan of the crank-based game genre. IRL it's probably not detachable and it's going to jangle around and annoy while gradually self-desructing in a way that leaves it useless yet permanently attached/annoying.
It also doesn't seem obvious that using one's less dominant hand for movement is optimal. Kind of like playing guitar. As a righty who go my start trying to learn solos, I always felt like the left hand had the harder job.
Sounds like Apple did the right thing in that case, but I'm not sure how one could move the crank over to the opposite side. Maybe by turning it upside down and having the controller buttons at the top?
I'm left handed. But when I use a mouse, I noticed after decades that I'd always been controlling them with my right hand. Attempting to switch now feels as awkward as trying to write with my right hand.
So I guess the answer is, it's whatever you're used to. Using my right hand for mouse-related tasks was not something I decided on consciously, or due to convenience, since early models (I'm talking C=64 era) did not have the handed designs of today's mice.
This is gonna be fun:
"Every Monday, via WiFi, owners receive a new game, the notification light on top of the case blinking to announce its arrival. Whenever you have five spare minutes, you’ll be able to reach into your own shirt pocket, and make time for your Playdate."
This looks neat. It reminds me of what you might get if Nintendo built the GameBoy today with similar tech constraints (BW screen, only two buttons, motion controls, etc.)
Chatter on Twitter from people at Panic indicates that you program it in Lua. Seems like C might also be an option. There’s definitely going to be an SDK.
Is this cute? Yeah, absolutely, but there are actually a lot of cute little handheld gaming devices just like it, except they have nicer screens and don't cost $150.
Like the Bitboy, Pixel Classic, PocketGo, Pocket Sprite. Even the Micro Arcade series which are credit card sized single-game handheld with full color screens.
Those all appear to either emulate other consoles, or come with games built-in, though. This seems to be closer to the MakeCode consoles discussed elsewhere in these comments, since it sounds like it will allow you to make your own games for it (although it's not clear yet how easy that will be).
In that respect, it seems fairly unique to me, if only because it is beautifully designed and polished. It seems like the other options for making your own handheld games are either a bit clunky (eg Adafruit's PyGamers) or require quite a lot of know-how and effort (eg Gameboy or DS homebrew).
I hope that this will result in a bunch of new high-quality indie games. It seems that people are unlikely to invest a lot of effort in making spectacular games for the PyGamer, because the audience is small... Nintendo-handheld homebrew has the potential for a larger audience, but requires so much work that I imagine a lot of potential creators are dissuaded.
I'm on the lookout for a shiny indie-friendly portable that's easy to develop for, because I think that could lead to some exciting new things. Maybe this is it.
That’s fair, I don’t know for sure (hence “I hope...”).
I think shininess is fairly likely, because they are collaborating with Teenage Engineering, who have a reputation for making nice things like the OP-1.
Homebrew is much more questionable. On their “media” page they imply that an SDK is forthcoming, but they certaibly don’t make it as clear as I would like.
At any rate, the point I was going for was less that I am 100% behind this gadget, and more that I think there is room for more options in this realm, and this ticks at least some of my boxes.
pimoroni 32blit may well be everything you described...
easy to develop for (LUA or C++, comes with free assets and tutorials)
Nicely designed (ok, it's not finely CNC'd aluminium but it looks a lot nicer than most of the chinesium or other indie-cades out there)
and open source - they've said the toolchain will run on linux too (I specifically asked)
I love this so much. I'm such a sucker for simple gaming mechanics, and I have some faith that these specific people could make this work.
I know devices like this often fail to thrive in the market, but Teenage Engineering has some experience making this sort of single-purpose device work for customers. Panic seems to be very passionate, quality and delivery oriented, and good at doing an exceptional job on familiar products. There might be some potential here. I'd absolutely take my chances on this thing if I could get my hands on one! My kids would love it too.
Personally the association with Teenage Engineering makes me more concerned that this will not be as exciting as it sounds. TE's Op-1 is a fine piece of kit, but their recent offerings have been very underwhelming. Also the placement of the crank and the form factor look very un-ergonomic.
Not from personal experience, but it seems that it's an all around decent synth/sequencer/sampler that makes a good musical scratchpad. People like it, and if I had a g to spare, I might join in.
The OP-1 is a well built, self contained musical instrument (sequencing, synthesis/sampling, effects, mixing) with a very clean industrial design and solid construction.
The main issues people have with it are 1) long-standing software bugs that don’t get fixed 2) TE doesn’t seem that focused on producing it anymore- it was out of stock for a couple years, and they raised the price significantly on the new batches.
It's an opinionated piece of hardware, designed and manufactured more or less uncompromisingly for a specific musician experience. I decided it's not for me (though its follow-up, the OP-Z, is a lot closer), but I absolutely adore Teenage Engineering's approach to pretty much everything, even when it's not personally my style.
made this in bed at 3am last night. sampled the vox straight from my phones headphone output into the line in on the op-1. its a beautiful piece of hardware that i take with me wherever i go.
sort of related to this (indie gaming hardware), I recently got the Adafruit PyBadge. You can program it with CircuitPython, Arduino or MakeCode (a microsoft visual coding IDE). fun if your idea of fun is making the game and then playing it, or figuring out how to port some existing game.
Its interesting but for these kinds of projects its the software library that will mean everything to how well this goes. I'm not going to spend that much for a device to play tech demos when I already have handheld gaming devices
This is interesting, but I can think of lots of things I'd put on the side of the device to make it unique besides a crank. It's an oddly specific way to provide analog and/or constant input (if it does indeed crank 360 degrees) from the player. An actual analog stick? A dial? A trigger? A switch lever? A touch sensitive pad? A trackball?
I think they were trying to do something really different. I'm interested to see what Bennett Foddy does with the crank. If you aren't familiar, he's a master of making games that really emphasize the control scheme. Check out out QWOP, it's lesser known cousin GIRP, or Getting Over it (which is one of those games that sounds horrible but is actually really fulfilling to play)
Hipster couples everywhere will have the crank to thank for bolstering their courage up to a level where it was possible for them to talk to one another. Eventually it will come to be viewed as an integral part of the tragic grand hipster narrative. That's the idea anyway.
That's the same price as a Nintendo 2DS, which is about as cheap as mobile gaming comes. So I mean, you might have opinions about how good a value it is, but it is not a very high price point for its market.
Playdate is not in the same market as the 2DS, or really anywhere near it. It's not trying to compete on any of the games-industry metrics, nor could it.
It's like comparing the latest Avengers movie with a niche YouTube show. You can compare the price of a movie ticket with a Patreon subscription, but what are you even comparing?
No, it doesn't. It only might. You or your kids might play it for 10 minutes and never touch it again.
How many people on HN have $100s spent on Steam games they haven't even installed once and probably never will? Or games they finally played but didn't like, yet too much time elapsed for a refund?
Based on the technical specs $150, even with 12 games seems like price gouging. It's not too far off the Adafruit PyBadge someone else mentioned in another comment only that comes with a color LCD and more buttons for only $35 ($25 if you get the trimmed down version). Sure it doesn't come with a fancy case and it's missing an analog crank (really?), but there's literally hundreds of free games you could get for it that I'm willing to bet are as much fun or more than every single one of those 12 free games that Playdate will include.
Sorry, this looks like a overpriced gimmick. The digital equivalent of a pet rock, or a more modern (and far more expensive) take on a tomagotchi.
Why are you willing to bet that "hundreds of free games" made by internet randos for a cheap gizmo are more fun than every single one of the 12 games made by experienced game developers?
It would entirely depend on the quality of the games, wouldn't it?
I compare it more to a subscription to Kindle Unlimited or Netflix. With the difference that once I played them all, I can even sell all the games and the device.
I'm prepared to pay 12$ for a good book. Then pointing to free books as an argument that said book is not worth 12$ is not really applicable. I am not just paying for some book, I am paying for a specific book. Like, say, there is a new book out by Neil Gaiman. I will buy that unseen, even if you tell me that I could get a free book by Somebody INeverHeardOf instead.
In the case here, I loved Firewatch and I am willing to give Panic the benefit of the doubt.
It's expensive but not nearly as expensive as I would expect a Teenage Engineering product to be. For example, their most famous product, the OP-1 (a small digital synth with a small LCD screen) is $1300.
This looks really cool and would be great for a fishing game.
I wonder about the lack of backlighting though? Hopefully the screen is much better in this regard than the original non-backlit GBA, which was difficult to see in low light conditions.
Doesn't a transflective LCD have a backlight? The media/FAQ page says pretty clearly that the device has a reflective LCD with no backlight, same as the GBA, which the parent comment was referring to.
As far as I'm aware these LCDs switch between black or very reflective silver and not so much black and white. Doesn't really matter what the ambient conditions are since the black is always reflecting way less light than the silver.
that... would be so cool.
I'd love to see ship games, or a u-boat game. Heck even operating the crank to elevate and/or turn an anti-aircraft gun or tank turret
It would be so awesome if this worked with Pico 8 or a similar fantasy console. I will be much more interested if the barrier to entry for making my own games is as close to zero as possible.
I want to make my own games for fun, but also to expose my son to the creativity and exploration of programming.
A physical console would make this experience so much more real.
Have you seen https://arcade.makecode.com ?
It's a free, open source, web-based editor for making games, and you can download games to a number of hardware boards, or play on your phone or any web browser. The cheapest hardware right now is $25 from Adafruit [0], but more hardware is coming out all the time.
Also this audience might be interested to know that soon there'll be Python support in MakeCode. More details on our language toolchain here [1]
This is awesome! Is MakeCode a subsidiary of Microsoft? It looks like it’s based on some Microsoft tech similar to Google’s Blockly I hadn’t seen before. I’m curious because I’m working on a product in this space.
Yeah, we're a team at MSFT (same org as VS Code). All* our code is open source. We use Google Blockly, and we've made a number of contributions upstream to them.
What's your product?
* Our server code isn't open source, but it's basically just a node app serving a SPA. Everything is client side. Works offline too.
My product is called Devev. I moonlit the product for the past few years while working at Microsoft. I quit about a month ago to get it over the finish line. I'm still pre-launch but here are some images: https://imgur.com/a/zLS1g0t
I worked on video games for the past few years and saw many less technical colleagues empowered by tools like Unreal Engine's Blueprint (https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/Blueprints). I thought that the same paradigm may apply more widely but the visual languages used outside of games weren't really hitting the mark.
Devev is a framework for creating visual programming languages. They are supported through extensions. For launch I'm working on an extension which parses TS types and allows you to use the existing code in nodes. That's what you'll see in my image above. This will allow early users to tap into existing libraries published on NPM.
I don't expect much traction with the launch version and plan to target a specific domain shortly after that. I'm leaning towards a build system where you can capture your dependencies in a visual graph. One of the applications I'd been thinking about was allowing users to build and share games or other applications in a web-editor similar to Scratch.
Devev is also a JS SPA and the client editor uses Electron. The client editor supports more features like multiple windows, editors panes and plugins. Additionally the client can parse new Typescript files but not the SPA. For the SPA to parse TS I'd need to deliver TSC over the web which I won't figure out for V1.
This is really cool! I've often wondered if a Blueprint-like editting experiences could be used more broadly. Looking forward to seeing this grow. I think there is also great potential for a very approachable debugging experience.
Targeting build systems seems like a great fit as well, since as you pointed out the build DAG is naturally a graph.
I love the idea of using typescript types to define visual code atoms. We do a very simple version of that to create our Blockly blocks, e.g. block definition: https://github.com/microsoft/pxt-microbit/blob/master/libs/r...
although I'm sure you could take that much farther.
Thanks for the reply. If you have any ideas for potential use cases or want to see a short demo of what I have running so far let me know if you'd like to get in contact.
Not affiliated, just also interested in new and emerging easy to use game systems, and this is just the latest in a long line of them I've been playing with ..
Strange. I've found the opposite to be true. They do a pretty decent job explaining why you need a web server and how to make a basic one. Once it's set up, there are tons of examples and resources to look at.
We built a few small web games with phaser. It was very easy to start and also easy to finish. You can prototype with it very quickly and there are a lot of resources explaining things to you. Recommend.
I don't know about changes in the last 2 years, haven't used it since then, maybe it's changed for worse but can't imagine
Same. I tried it a few months ago. Navigating Phaser2 vs Phaser3 alone was so bad that it radicalized me to believe that you should just rename a project after a full rewrite.
Everything I googled would give me results in the Phaser forums and the exercise was on me to figure out which version they were using, which was 100% Phaser 2.
And the API definitely wasn't written for Typescript support. For example, just changing the physics string completely changes the API available which felt like an exercise in obfuscation.
Also found the API so unintuitive that I was trying to repurpose examples to get what I wanted which is always a bad sign to me, like hoping your question appears in an FAQ because the code is too hard to read.
Ended up using https://excaliburjs.com/ which is written in Typescript thus much less guesswork. I really didn't like my experience with Phaser.
Games for Android and iOS are a real possibility, but general Android apps aren't on our radar. Our focus is CS education, and I'm not sure general Android apps would be a good fit for that.
That being said, our platform is fairly extensible so someone could create an Android Apps target. They'd need to create a new backend to target the JVM probably and some work to link with whatever pre-built Android binaries.
I played with arcade.makecode.com at MS Build this year and made a Taco vs. Burgers side scroller on the MeowBit. My kids love it! My daughters and I are coding up something with a duck right now and it's uber fun! Thanks for making that platform!!
What's really cool about PixelVision8 is it's a meta-fantasy console. IE, you can define your own spec/constraints and then code up a little game prototype in C# or Lua.
Looks like the PlayDate will support lua and apparently isn't a complete potato according to their presskit page, so it's not out of the question that platforms like PixelVision8 could port its runner to the platform and then you could author for actual hardware using the editing tool.
Check out BlockStudio [0] (disclaimer: I'm the creator) -- it lets you make simple retro-like games with a text-free program specification method (Programming By Demonstration).
What we're doing with 32blit is effectively Pico 8 with hardware. I'd be happy if we saw a tenth of the success that Pico 8 has achieved- some of the titles written for it are truly remarkable and seeing how people push the artificial limits is genuinely interesting and something I'd be honoured to foster more of.
After the device is released and is available for sale, a new game will be released for it and downloaded automatically each week for the first 12 weeks, when downloaded a little light will light up and you can have small play date with the Playdate.
That's IMO the only clever part of the device, the syncing up with users everywhere anticipating the minute a new game drops. It'll work great until a game fails to resonate with any particular user at which point negative sentiment and disappointment get attached to the device.
I'm sure it's a fun challenge for the game designers with the limited screen, and a crank mechanic.
But I'm really hoping they are also able to make some games with some depth and replay value to them for the players, a la the early mario, spyro, sonic or pokemon games.
> Then there's the contemporary modus operandi that gives the console its name. Every Monday, via WiFi, owners receive a new game, the notification light on top of the case blinking to announce its arrival. Whenever you have five spare minutes, you’ll be able to reach into your own shirt pocket, and make time for your Playdate.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 284 ms ] threadI love indie games and experimental story telling, but $150 for 12 games, and one of them uses a crank... not buying it. Sorry. $50 on steam gets me a whole lot of weird, and I got a ton left to invest in a case of craft beer to enjoy along with it.
biggest hurdle for playdate is word of mouth - nintendo has that trust, i don't trust the company behind this. Same reason that android console failed - hell nvidia couldn't get enough support behind it
If they offer more games after the fact that's cool, but at this price point I think most customers will love it for what it is.
This crank would have ruled.
https://i.imgur.com/tdESids.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/6AGrtRy.jpg
In a few years, we are going to revisit the golden era again, and it's going to be as fun as it was last time.
Especially if there's games that utilise the mechanic. could just have a much lower torque (and therefore lower-current-generation) since it's going to be used a lot. Missed opportunity.
https://www.amazon.com/Radica-Games-Bass-Fishing-Handheld/dp...
Maybe at this point it's supplanted by smartphones?
Anybody remember this guy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader
I don't think Panic is involved in organized crime, though.
https://www.xkcd.com/214/
Still contemplating a Dragonbox Pyra. The OpenPandora, despite a rocky start, played host to some incredible things.
I have never typed my email into a signup form so fast.
Put differently, limitations create interest, but they're also the opposite of cost-effective.
That’s why you don’t see many platformers for mobile. The ones that do exist auto run for you or put virtual buttons on the screen, which I haven’t found to work well.
On a more pragmatic level, it feels more and more like companies creating semi-disposable toy electronics should be held to extremely high standards when it comes to how they source their components and the environmental impact of the lifecycle of their device, because this is ultimately cheap junk that’s hurting the environment.
FTFY
All products should be held to that standard, not just "semi-disposable toy electronics", which it's not even clear applies to this.
Single-purpose hardware has identity. It has explicit purpose. If it is well-designed, it has an interface that is intuitive while encouraging a limited amount of experimentation. I think a lot of good software emulates these properties, but often with the tradeoff of being less extensible/integrable/power user friendly.
There already is, for me. I'd imagine a product like this depends on that nostalgia to a degree.
I love that it's purpose-specific and isn't gimmicky like smartwatches. This also means the battery lasts about a month. Plus, it looks good.
[1] https://www.withings.com/ca/en/steel-hr
There is one example that is still firmly lodged in my head from the labs in my electonic engineering degree. It was this big box with a nice keypad, a screen that could display a few characters, and a big handle to lock in place the integrated circuit you wanted to test. You would slot it in, pull the handle, then type the ID numbers of the particular IC. If it was functioning as expected, the screen would say something like "OKAY" and that was all this thing did. Truly magical! On further googling and reflection I'm now not so sure about how big the handle was, but the machine was something like [1].
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/specializedtools/top/ [1] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Digital-IC-tester-digital-in...
EDIT: after a closer look at the page, I realized that they explicitly mentioned partnering with Teenage Engineering on parts of the device design. The website resemblance makes more sense now :)
> By the way, the crank came from our friends at Teenage Engineering. They were our partners for Playdate’s design. Isn’t it nice?
Edit: you took a closer look while I was typing. You're excused. ;)
The top unit could benefit from scaling to the viewport height. Right now the grey section is 100% the height of the viewport, meaning that scrolling is not an obvious interaction. Having some yellow and text peeking up could make that more intuitive.
It's a style that Panic has used for years:
https://panic.com/transmit/
2) It's 12 games to start with. I'm sure there could be more later on.
N++, Papers Please, Geometry Dash, Return of the Obra Dinn, Ori and the Blind Forest, 1001 Spikes, Hollow Knight, the list goes on. Then you have things like The Talos Principle, which does have DLC, but it's many hours long, or Humble and their bundles and monthlies, or that Lichess and Pokemon Showdown are legitimately completely free.
The Playdate looks like a fun toy, but it's vastly more of a cash grab than the games I play regularly.
I tried to find battery specs on the page but couldn't.
But that is a crank, it requires a bit more dexterity, like holding a pen.
https://www.imore.com/how-set-apple-watch-left-handed-use
Sounds like Apple did the right thing in that case, but I'm not sure how one could move the crank over to the opposite side. Maybe by turning it upside down and having the controller buttons at the top?
So I guess the answer is, it's whatever you're used to. Using my right hand for mouse-related tasks was not something I decided on consciously, or due to convenience, since early models (I'm talking C=64 era) did not have the handed designs of today's mice.
Kidding aside, I am a leftie and feel same way. I guess that is where the mousepad was when I learned.
Edit- looks like an SDK exists, it's just not available quite yet: https://play.date/media/
Like the Bitboy, Pixel Classic, PocketGo, Pocket Sprite. Even the Micro Arcade series which are credit card sized single-game handheld with full color screens.
In that respect, it seems fairly unique to me, if only because it is beautifully designed and polished. It seems like the other options for making your own handheld games are either a bit clunky (eg Adafruit's PyGamers) or require quite a lot of know-how and effort (eg Gameboy or DS homebrew).
I hope that this will result in a bunch of new high-quality indie games. It seems that people are unlikely to invest a lot of effort in making spectacular games for the PyGamer, because the audience is small... Nintendo-handheld homebrew has the potential for a larger audience, but requires so much work that I imagine a lot of potential creators are dissuaded.
I'm on the lookout for a shiny indie-friendly portable that's easy to develop for, because I think that could lead to some exciting new things. Maybe this is it.
I think shininess is fairly likely, because they are collaborating with Teenage Engineering, who have a reputation for making nice things like the OP-1.
Homebrew is much more questionable. On their “media” page they imply that an SDK is forthcoming, but they certaibly don’t make it as clear as I would like.
At any rate, the point I was going for was less that I am 100% behind this gadget, and more that I think there is room for more options in this realm, and this ticks at least some of my boxes.
I know devices like this often fail to thrive in the market, but Teenage Engineering has some experience making this sort of single-purpose device work for customers. Panic seems to be very passionate, quality and delivery oriented, and good at doing an exceptional job on familiar products. There might be some potential here. I'd absolutely take my chances on this thing if I could get my hands on one! My kids would love it too.
The main issues people have with it are 1) long-standing software bugs that don’t get fixed 2) TE doesn’t seem that focused on producing it anymore- it was out of stock for a couple years, and they raised the price significantly on the new batches.
made this in bed at 3am last night. sampled the vox straight from my phones headphone output into the line in on the op-1. its a beautiful piece of hardware that i take with me wherever i go.
[1] https://arduboy.com/
Maybe these guys are really into fishing?
It's like comparing the latest Avengers movie with a niche YouTube show. You can compare the price of a movie ticket with a Patreon subscription, but what are you even comparing?
How many people on HN have $100s spent on Steam games they haven't even installed once and probably never will? Or games they finally played but didn't like, yet too much time elapsed for a refund?
Still, I guess there is a niche for this. It just isn’t me.
Nerds with disposable income who will play with it for a few hours, after which it’ll take dust on a shelf.
Sorry, this looks like a overpriced gimmick. The digital equivalent of a pet rock, or a more modern (and far more expensive) take on a tomagotchi.
I compare it more to a subscription to Kindle Unlimited or Netflix. With the difference that once I played them all, I can even sell all the games and the device.
I'm prepared to pay 12$ for a good book. Then pointing to free books as an argument that said book is not worth 12$ is not really applicable. I am not just paying for some book, I am paying for a specific book. Like, say, there is a new book out by Neil Gaiman. I will buy that unseen, even if you tell me that I could get a free book by Somebody INeverHeardOf instead.
In the case here, I loved Firewatch and I am willing to give Panic the benefit of the doubt.
This thing looks beautiful and that by itself is worth a premium price to a lot of people. I bet it's going to sell out instantly.
I wonder about the lack of backlighting though? Hopefully the screen is much better in this regard than the original non-backlit GBA, which was difficult to see in low light conditions.
It was tricky getting light to hit the screen in just the right way: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/06/13/lame-boy-advan...
I want to make my own games for fun, but also to expose my son to the creativity and exploration of programming.
A physical console would make this experience so much more real.
https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
Also this audience might be interested to know that soon there'll be Python support in MakeCode. More details on our language toolchain here [1]
Disclosure: I work for MakeCode :)
[0] https://www.adafruit.com/product/3939 [1] https://makecode.com/language
What's your product?
* Our server code isn't open source, but it's basically just a node app serving a SPA. Everything is client side. Works offline too.
I worked on video games for the past few years and saw many less technical colleagues empowered by tools like Unreal Engine's Blueprint (https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/Blueprints). I thought that the same paradigm may apply more widely but the visual languages used outside of games weren't really hitting the mark.
Devev is a framework for creating visual programming languages. They are supported through extensions. For launch I'm working on an extension which parses TS types and allows you to use the existing code in nodes. That's what you'll see in my image above. This will allow early users to tap into existing libraries published on NPM.
I don't expect much traction with the launch version and plan to target a specific domain shortly after that. I'm leaning towards a build system where you can capture your dependencies in a visual graph. One of the applications I'd been thinking about was allowing users to build and share games or other applications in a web-editor similar to Scratch.
Devev is also a JS SPA and the client editor uses Electron. The client editor supports more features like multiple windows, editors panes and plugins. Additionally the client can parse new Typescript files but not the SPA. For the SPA to parse TS I'd need to deliver TSC over the web which I won't figure out for V1.
Targeting build systems seems like a great fit as well, since as you pointed out the build DAG is naturally a graph.
When you mentioned games programming, I thought of Dream's visual programming: https://youtu.be/eMRp3QMAkz8?t=773
I love the idea of using typescript types to define visual code atoms. We do a very simple version of that to create our Blockly blocks, e.g. block definition: https://github.com/microsoft/pxt-microbit/blob/master/libs/r... although I'm sure you could take that much farther.
We run TSC in the browser in a worker thread, here's an example, in case that helps: https://github.com/microsoft/pxt/blob/master/pxtcompiler/emi... We use TSC for typechecking and our own typescript compiler for compiling down to ARM assembly.
Not affiliated, just also interested in new and emerging easy to use game systems, and this is just the latest in a long line of them I've been playing with ..
I don't know about changes in the last 2 years, haven't used it since then, maybe it's changed for worse but can't imagine
Everything I googled would give me results in the Phaser forums and the exercise was on me to figure out which version they were using, which was 100% Phaser 2.
And the API definitely wasn't written for Typescript support. For example, just changing the physics string completely changes the API available which felt like an exercise in obfuscation.
Also found the API so unintuitive that I was trying to repurpose examples to get what I wanted which is always a bad sign to me, like hoping your question appears in an FAQ because the code is too hard to read.
Ended up using https://excaliburjs.com/ which is written in Typescript thus much less guesswork. I really didn't like my experience with Phaser.
That being said, our platform is fairly extensible so someone could create an Android Apps target. They'd need to create a new backend to target the JVM probably and some work to link with whatever pre-built Android binaries.
If you have any suggestions or bugs, please feel free to comment on https://forum.makecode.com/ or https://github.com/microsoft/pxt. We're still in the early stages with Arcade so feedback is especially useful.
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=3935
So you could use any Raspberry Pi enclosure as a physical PICO-8 platform.
https://twitter.com/pixelvision8/status/1131370536477581313
Looks like the PlayDate will support lua and apparently isn't a complete potato according to their presskit page, so it's not out of the question that platforms like PixelVision8 could port its runner to the platform and then you could author for actual hardware using the editing tool.
[0] www.blockstudio.app
It's awesome and it comes with PICO-8 pre-installed (you only need to add the license key).
It can also run lots of emulators.
Source: know one of the lauch game developers, have cranked the prototype hardware
I think Dank Tomb's lighting is by far one of my favourite examples - https://hackernoon.com/pico-8-lighting-part-1-thin-dark-line...
After the device is released and is available for sale, a new game will be released for it and downloaded automatically each week for the first 12 weeks, when downloaded a little light will light up and you can have small play date with the Playdate.
But I'm really hoping they are also able to make some games with some depth and replay value to them for the players, a la the early mario, spyro, sonic or pokemon games.
> Then there's the contemporary modus operandi that gives the console its name. Every Monday, via WiFi, owners receive a new game, the notification light on top of the case blinking to announce its arrival. Whenever you have five spare minutes, you’ll be able to reach into your own shirt pocket, and make time for your Playdate.
[1] https://play.date/edge/