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Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

play.date

81–90 of 424 posts

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's what i thought it was for, and then maybe it could be used to charge something else with crank-power through usb

Yeah same here. I'm not sure I really buy it as control mechanism for playing though.

It looks uncomfortable to spin the crank while using the other controls, which means you’d want it to be used exclusively if at all.

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#83
post #78
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…

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.

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#84
post #78
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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#85
post #66

Isn't $150 expensive? Or may be I am just too poor, to throw money at anyone who asks for it.

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.

Used 2DSes or 3DSes are ubiquitous and around $110 or so.

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#86
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.

I've been using their software for easily 14 years. It's really cool to see them expanding like this.

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#87

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

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.

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#88
post #4

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 partner…

I like the visual style.

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.

Re: Playdate – A New Handheld Gaming System

#90
post #4

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 partner…

Playdate is way more usable on mobile. I can't really read the text of teenage engineering
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