Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System • Hacker News Board

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#361

Post by madeofpalk » Thu, May 23, 2019, 4:14 PM UTC

tommorris wrote: post #265

ninjin wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In London, it does not appear to be treated like something mobile – but in Tokyo it certainly is. You will see kids – mainly boys – huddle together around Switch screens or playing using the wireless wherever you go in suburban Tokyo.

I've seen one or two people using the Switch on the London Underground. Rare but not non-existent.

️

Until recently, I exclusively played my Switch while travelling - it’s great for planes.

It’s now permanently in my backpack and I play it on the tube on my daily commute. It’s great

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#362

Post by lostphilosopher » Thu, May 23, 2019, 4:24 PM UTC

borgel wrote: post #231

quacher wrote: post #158

From the Media Kit page, it looks like this device will use a Sharp memory LCD display (LS027B7DH01), which is similar to an e-ink display, but without refresh issues. The same display as in the SwissMicros DM42 [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ong91Ji3iDk

Same tech as the Pebbles too!

RIP. I miss Pebble.

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#363

Post by larrywright » Thu, May 23, 2019, 4:34 PM UTC

littleweep wrote: post #230

keyle wrote: post #80

Panic never stops surprising me. You'd think you had them figured out, they keep jumping onto another shelf. It must be fun to work at Panic. It reminds me of how tech companies were in the 90s. Clear mission, but open horizon.

To me it seems like very unclear mission

You’re assuming that their mission is something narrow, like “Build world class software for MacOS and iOS”, when it’s probably something much broader like “Build really cool stuff”.

To me this is the dream: a company that is so successful that you get to take risks and build cool things that you want to exist.

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#364

Post by Veedrac » Thu, May 23, 2019, 4:35 PM UTC

bubblewrap wrote: post #340

Veedrac wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just buy a Gameboy. Good games are timeless.

Which one should I buy? I don't really know the Nintendo world.

I'd recommend a Gameboy Advance SP, because the older, non-backlit, screens were genuinely poor under some non-ideal lighting situations, and you still get support for older generation games. But a standard Gameboy Advance or even Gameboy Color is still good. I'd avoid things prior to the Color personally.

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#365

Post by hombre_fatal » Thu, May 23, 2019, 4:40 PM UTC

frosted-flakes wrote: post #166

hombre_fatal wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But $20-40 for each game.

A $40 game provides 20-100 hours of high quality gameplay, which I think is a good value.

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?

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#366

Post by rgovostes » Thu, May 23, 2019, 4:41 PM UTC

twic wrote: post #351

moron4hire wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Line Wobbler! https://wobblylabs.com/projects/wobbler

I played this at the Videogames exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The breadth of visual effects they can achieve with just a 1-dimensional display is surprising. https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/videogames

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#367

Post by linsomniac » Thu, May 23, 2019, 4:42 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…

Reminds me of the story of the crank charger for the $100 "One Laptop Per Child" (OLPC), as told by one of the team members:

Everyone loved the crank charger built into it, but it exerted really large forces on the chassis. Our industrial designers came to us and said "This is a totally solvable problem: We just need to make the chassis out of milled titanium!" We were like: "Thanks guys, but that's so far out of budget..."

When I first saw the Playdate I thought the crank was a really odd use, a one-trick pony. Then I saw that Teenage Engineering was partnering on the design and it totally made sense.

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#368

Post by acjohnson55 » Thu, May 23, 2019, 4:50 PM UTC

jolmg wrote: post #40

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #26

I'm wondering if that crank would work for a leftie?

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?

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.

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#369

Post by darzu » Thu, May 23, 2019, 4:51 PM UTC

lostphilosopher wrote: post #360

darzu wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Very cool! Any plans for making it possible to create Android apps with this?

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.

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#370

Post by mntmoss » Thu, May 23, 2019, 4:54 PM UTC

bullfightonmars wrote: post #63

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. https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

It can be coded with Lua. Graphics performance still required considerable optimization. No info on whether development will be open to the public.

Source: know one of the lauch game developers, have cranked the prototype hardware