Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

Post by twic » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:34 PM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #347

sarchertech wrote: post #344

I refuse to believe that anyone came up with a crank based input system organically. Here's what I think happened. They decided that they wanted to make a low power black and white game system for people to use while camping. They decided that a crank charger was the best solution for this and went ahead with development. Further into the process they discovered that they couldn't get the power budget low enough to m…

I get the impression that you may not have played a lot of indie jam games. A hand-crank is one of the least weird things I've seen done. Hell, I once made a game where the controller was two people arm wrestling each other. At least a crank is practically usable. As a self-described inveterate hobbyist, I completely understand looking around a workshop full of parts and saying "gee, what could we do with that?" And…

Post by padobson » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:48 PM UTC

sarchertech wrote: post #344

I refuse to believe that anyone came up with a crank based input system organically. Here's what I think happened. They decided that they wanted to make a low power black and white game system for people to use while camping. They decided that a crank charger was the best solution for this and went ahead with development. Further into the process they discovered that they couldn't get the power budget low enough to m…

Post by herpes » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:54 PM UTC

dschadd wrote: post #345

sarchertech wrote: post #344

I refuse to believe that anyone came up with a crank based input system organically. Here's what I think happened. They decided that they wanted to make a low power black and white game system for people to use while camping. They decided that a crank charger was the best solution for this and went ahead with development. Further into the process they discovered that they couldn't get the power budget low enough to m…

Occam's Razor

Post by darzu » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:59 PM UTC

tyleo wrote: post #333

darzu wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/Bluepr…

Post by dmix » Thu, May 23, 2019, 4:10 PM UTC

Stephen-E wrote: post #350

sarchertech wrote: post #344

I refuse to believe that anyone came up with a crank based input system organically. Here's what I think happened. They decided that they wanted to make a low power black and white game system for people to use while camping. They decided that a crank charger was the best solution for this and went ahead with development. Further into the process they discovered that they couldn't get the power budget low enough to m…

Look at some of the other products Teenage Engineering has produced. They have a crank control for the OP-1 ( https://teenage.engineering/products/op-1/accessories ) plus other LEGO accessories.