The constraint-first angle matters more than people give it credit for. A 1-bit screen and a handful of buttons forces students to stop hiding behind art and sound, and actually solve readability and mechanics. Honestly surprised more programs do not do this instead of dropping students into Unity on day one.
Nintendo is the only mainstream game company that seems to understand this.
A good example is Elite Beat Agents was a fantastically fun rhythm game that could have only existed on the DS and 3DS with the little stylus pen.
You might think “the iPad has a stylus!” But it’s expensive (whereas my friend kept losing his DS Styluses so bought a pack of them for $10) and it doesn’t come with each iPad, so you’d have a fraction of a market, so no such game exists.
Having a CONSISTENT interface for your users is super important. A lot of game devs seem to go for fun second, or maybe never. It took years but just having a game controller seems to be a given for a lot of mainstream Steam games and it helps a lot with games that aren’t really great with a mouse and keyboard (Hollow Knight Silksong sold millions of copies at release)
If it is constraints you are after, you can look at fantasy consoles like TIC-80 and PICO-8.
They are designed to emulate the experience of 8 bit consoles: limited storage, memory, display, palette, etc... While at the same time making developing, distributing and playing games easy: high level language (LUA), built-in development environment, games are tens of kB sized "cartridge" files.
It's very difficult to overcome the push to teach the tools that will be used (or that out-of-touch people think will be used) professionally. We see the same issue in non-game programming where a lot of places start by teaching Java, which is an atrocious language for a beginner to start with, but it's not chosen for its suitability for learning programming principles, but because it's a big-name professional language.
HN readers who can write a console game before bedtime are not the target audience. A handheld device that Just Works and creates an authentic experience is worth a lot.
For a college class, a $200 textbook isn’t out of line (the ones people still buy…), which makes this a very reasonable investment in one’s education.
Are there other, cheaper routes? Of course. For an introduction? Fewer, and nobody wants to be told to use learn the principles using Scratch - even if that can actually work.
Making something real is inspiring, and this feels real.
That’s a very USA-centric view. 200$ for a textbook which will (often) only be used for a couple of chapters and was written by the professor shouldn’t be normal anywhere. The price of that book could pay for months (and in some cases years) of tuition in EU countries.
As someone from the EU who was always curious about the Playdate, I never got one because the price becomes even more absurd once you factor shipping and taxes. It easily goes to double or more. I wish Panic all the luck with the console, but I think we can agree that paying Switch 2 / PlayStation 5 prices for one is hard to justify.
There’s no discussion of price point in the article. There is in this thread, so one can only deduce that when the OP said “Re: price point” they are answering the thread, not the article.
And not everyone on HN is in Duke, or North Carolina, or the USA.
> more than 50 Playdates have been provided to students
Provided. To me that doesn’t seem like the students are paying for them. From other comments in the thread of former Duke students using iPods, it seems Duke lends you the hardware.
Furthermore, “tuition is expensive so buying expensive hardware is the least of your problems” is not a good argument. There’s a reason people in the USA drown in student debt. Whatever you can save is good.
They aren't drowning in debt because of supplies, they're drowning in debt because both the federal + state governments have stopped investing in education since the GFC in 2008. That plus a bloated admin body that cares about itself more than its literal mission (providing education + research).
> The price of that book could pay for months (and in some cases years) of tuition in EU countries.
To your later comment, the devices are provided. You dont need to buy them.
Also that's not actual price. the tuition fees are that, doesn't mean that's the price. It's just heavily subsizied by the government. Hard to find sources, but the actual price/student in Germany seems to be ~10k Euro/student/year.
> the devices are provided. You dont need to buy them.
I was talking about a textbook, not the devices. I think that was made pretty clear by my use of the word “textbook”.
> the tuition fees are that, doesn't mean that's the price.
Seeing as I’m talking about what people have to pay, that’s irrelevant. What even is your comment? You’re taking what I said and responding to entirely different things. That’s not how we have a productive, good faith conversation.
> Hard to find sources, but the actual price/student in Germany seems to be ~10k Euro/student/year.
There are more countries in the EU besides Germany. In some, you don’t pay at all.
Furthermore, each college has different costs, there’s not just a fixed cost for student for everything. The costs per student for philosophy are not the comparable to the costs per student for veterinary medicine.
You were responding to a comment about the price point being not that expensive, claiming that "200 usd for a college text book is very US centric", so I assumed you were arguing against that it's "worth the money".
So what are you arguing for? I genuinely cannot tell.
Like I said, I’m factoring in the price when you include shipping and taxes to Europe. If I wanted to buy a Playdate, it’d cost me close to the price of those consoles here.
There are plenty of free or cheaper alternatives, although platforms like pico-8 are (intentionally) hard to work with, especially as a first introduction to building games and / or coding.
ArduBoy ($99) [1] comes to mind. But your point is taken.
Also Playdate claims there are educational discounts, so I suspect students aren't paying $199 (or is it a little over $200?). (EDIT: another comment suggested $195 is the student discount—ouch!)
Having made multiple (dare I say) fairly successful games on the Playdate, I can attest to how fantastic the developer experience has been and how easy it was for my non dev collaborators to get going. Pulp was a great in road for them to get started with game dev, and it's been a blast (despite how limiting Pulpscript is for a professional dev)
My 9 year old is doing a game dev course in town where they use the BBC Micro Bit, a retro arcade peripheral (buttons, screen, sound, handheld), and some Microsoft game dev IDE. It’s incredibly compelling and feels a lot like this. But less than 1/3 the price and much more extensible and well-featured (the screen is colour!). I’m not sure I really see the value of the Playdate.
Playdate development has been a great experience. The limited colors and RAM helps me reduce my project scope such that I would actually finish them, and the limited CPU makes optimization exercises more rewarding. And it's not just all constraints either -- the sound/synth system is quite nice, and the crank is fun input method that takes some hands-on experience to fully appreciate.
The only downside is that there are still relatively few people with Playdates, and that puts an upperbound on how many people get to play your games.
Everyone is talking about the Playdate but I have a related Duke story about undergrad classes incorporating new hardware. My Digital Signal Processing course (ECE major) made a big deal about using these new things called iPods for class. Everyone got an iPod... for the semester. Even at Duke tuition prices you only got to borrow it. My recollection of the class work part was using a little piezo sensor that plugged into the microphone/headphone jack and recording your heart beat as a voice memo while doing a couple different activities. Maybe ten minutes for the semester. Then back at the computer doing a FFT to determine your heart rate. The lazy kids just got a copy of someone else's recording. This would have been 2004 or 2005. I think it was the third generation with clickwheel and monochrome screen.
The Playdate looks like what you'd make if someone only described the games kids made and shared on the TI-83 graphing calculator and then asked you to build a device.
I love the aesthetic of the playdate, the educational outreach, and how easy the whole platform is. It’s just so well designed all around. But the only way I am able to play it is by casting the screen to my computer, the screen is so tiny. Otherwise, I love it.
The Playdate seems an ideal device for busy dads and mums who would pick it up to play a few games here and there and
are into programming and maybe would like to teach their kids how to program. I've had a quick play with the tools and API Panic provides and they seem very, very good. The games on it seem to be ideal for short stints of gameplay and are made by some very creative folk.
This seems to be the ideal target audience for a device like this, however at around £250 including delivery here in the UK it's wildly expensive and falls well outside the 'frivolous expense once in a while' range for most parents (I'd say it would be a stretch at £150). I find that really strange, are these just economies of scale or is it a business decision Panic has made and now likely regrets?
For a Masters program it's pretty weird but I assume prospective students will be aware, and they move on to learning Unreal, so...
It's always struck me as a bit silly how so many schools use some very niche tooling as part of "simplifying" or "adding constraints". I would have thought that such stuff was kept at the undergrad level. Even DigiPen (where the "famous" undergrad CS-like degree has you writing your own engine (though used to also have an elective for GBA games)) has a separate newer game design degree that had classes mandating some crappy in-house engine or in later years joining teams with students from the other degrees and using someone's custom engine. When I was there, a friend was able to get a professor's exception one semester and allowed to use a mobile-first engine that got out of the way and let him design while also making it easy to add polish, easy to playtest and develop (it used Lua) and show or give to others since everyone has a phone, etc. The crappy in-house engine stymied the efforts of everyone else, and only ran on Windows. It took a while longer before the formal curriculum had other students allowed to move beyond the in-house crap to consider things like the entire field of mobile games and mobile design, VR games and design, and eventually learning industry-standard tooling that employers will expect familiarity with. (I think the courtesy of using an industry engine was extended to the main degree program too vs. continuing with a custom one; I'm not sure what ratio Unreal/Unity/Godot/other/custom have there these days.) And while last I've heard an in-house engine is still used at the beginning (and even replaced the second semester "make a game in pure C with only the Windows text console for 'rendering'" project), it's a rewrite of a successor and apparently isn't as crappy now.
For the Playdate itself, I've never seen the appeal... I have no interest in going back to that sort of screen. My Game Boy Color, besides having color, also allowed me to have a wormlight attachment plugged in to make up somewhat for not having a backlight. I don't think the Playdate has support for that. And the price...
Panic had a booth at Portland Retro Gaming Expo last year, they were super nice and the Playdates were a lot of fun to play with. Nice to see that people are continuing to enjoy the console, the production process seemed like a nightmare.
I've been interested in these cute little things since they were first announced, but I still haven't pulled the trigger on the 229 USD price tag. Apparently with the education discount they're 195 USD, which still feels steep. But hey, given that the dev tooling is all free (including simulators), it would be fine to play around with game development even without buying the hardware.
Pretty much all playdate games could just be enjoyed in the browser. The only thing you're missing is the physical crank and honestly it's a little gimmicky.
115 comments
A good example is Elite Beat Agents was a fantastically fun rhythm game that could have only existed on the DS and 3DS with the little stylus pen.
You might think “the iPad has a stylus!” But it’s expensive (whereas my friend kept losing his DS Styluses so bought a pack of them for $10) and it doesn’t come with each iPad, so you’d have a fraction of a market, so no such game exists.
Having a CONSISTENT interface for your users is super important. A lot of game devs seem to go for fun second, or maybe never. It took years but just having a game controller seems to be a given for a lot of mainstream Steam games and it helps a lot with games that aren’t really great with a mouse and keyboard (Hollow Knight Silksong sold millions of copies at release)
They are designed to emulate the experience of 8 bit consoles: limited storage, memory, display, palette, etc... While at the same time making developing, distributing and playing games easy: high level language (LUA), built-in development environment, games are tens of kB sized "cartridge" files.
HN readers who can write a console game before bedtime are not the target audience. A handheld device that Just Works and creates an authentic experience is worth a lot.
For a college class, a $200 textbook isn’t out of line (the ones people still buy…), which makes this a very reasonable investment in one’s education.
Are there other, cheaper routes? Of course. For an introduction? Fewer, and nobody wants to be told to use learn the principles using Scratch - even if that can actually work.
Making something real is inspiring, and this feels real.
As someone from the EU who was always curious about the Playdate, I never got one because the price becomes even more absurd once you factor shipping and taxes. It easily goes to double or more. I wish Panic all the luck with the console, but I think we can agree that paying Switch 2 / PlayStation 5 prices for one is hard to justify.
And not everyone on HN is in Duke, or North Carolina, or the USA.
Buying a game system is the least of your problems there
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47804719
Additionally, the page says:
> more than 50 Playdates have been provided to students
Provided. To me that doesn’t seem like the students are paying for them. From other comments in the thread of former Duke students using iPods, it seems Duke lends you the hardware.
Furthermore, “tuition is expensive so buying expensive hardware is the least of your problems” is not a good argument. There’s a reason people in the USA drown in student debt. Whatever you can save is good.
> The price of that book could pay for months (and in some cases years) of tuition in EU countries.
What happens in magical places with free or heavily subsidized college has little to do with what an expensive private US university does.
If a German college decides 200$ is too much they can use Godot or a variety of free alternatives.
> The price of that book could pay for months (and in some cases years) of tuition in EU countries.
To your later comment, the devices are provided. You dont need to buy them.
Also that's not actual price. the tuition fees are that, doesn't mean that's the price. It's just heavily subsizied by the government. Hard to find sources, but the actual price/student in Germany seems to be ~10k Euro/student/year.
Hard to find
> the devices are provided. You dont need to buy them.
I was talking about a textbook, not the devices. I think that was made pretty clear by my use of the word “textbook”.
> the tuition fees are that, doesn't mean that's the price.
Seeing as I’m talking about what people have to pay, that’s irrelevant. What even is your comment? You’re taking what I said and responding to entirely different things. That’s not how we have a productive, good faith conversation.
> Hard to find sources, but the actual price/student in Germany seems to be ~10k Euro/student/year.
There are more countries in the EU besides Germany. In some, you don’t pay at all.
Furthermore, each college has different costs, there’s not just a fixed cost for student for everything. The costs per student for philosophy are not the comparable to the costs per student for veterinary medicine.
So what are you arguing for? I genuinely cannot tell.
Also Playdate claims there are educational discounts, so I suspect students aren't paying $199 (or is it a little over $200?). (EDIT: another comment suggested $195 is the student discount—ouch!)
[1] https://www.arduboy.com
> A handheld device that Just Works and creates an authentic experience is worth a lot.
yeah, it's worth around $64.79 current price
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1x_PmVHiQNHyw5t05peED...
...
It's not the format, there are cheaper, more open and more easily shared formats. It's the Developer Experience of the Playdate.
The only downside is that there are still relatively few people with Playdates, and that puts an upperbound on how many people get to play your games.
God knows how much I wanted to use and love it but it just started gathering dust in a closet after a week because of this.
This seems to be the ideal target audience for a device like this, however at around £250 including delivery here in the UK it's wildly expensive and falls well outside the 'frivolous expense once in a while' range for most parents (I'd say it would be a stretch at £150). I find that really strange, are these just economies of scale or is it a business decision Panic has made and now likely regrets?
It's always struck me as a bit silly how so many schools use some very niche tooling as part of "simplifying" or "adding constraints". I would have thought that such stuff was kept at the undergrad level. Even DigiPen (where the "famous" undergrad CS-like degree has you writing your own engine (though used to also have an elective for GBA games)) has a separate newer game design degree that had classes mandating some crappy in-house engine or in later years joining teams with students from the other degrees and using someone's custom engine. When I was there, a friend was able to get a professor's exception one semester and allowed to use a mobile-first engine that got out of the way and let him design while also making it easy to add polish, easy to playtest and develop (it used Lua) and show or give to others since everyone has a phone, etc. The crappy in-house engine stymied the efforts of everyone else, and only ran on Windows. It took a while longer before the formal curriculum had other students allowed to move beyond the in-house crap to consider things like the entire field of mobile games and mobile design, VR games and design, and eventually learning industry-standard tooling that employers will expect familiarity with. (I think the courtesy of using an industry engine was extended to the main degree program too vs. continuing with a custom one; I'm not sure what ratio Unreal/Unity/Godot/other/custom have there these days.) And while last I've heard an in-house engine is still used at the beginning (and even replaced the second semester "make a game in pure C with only the Windows text console for 'rendering'" project), it's a rewrite of a successor and apparently isn't as crappy now.
For the Playdate itself, I've never seen the appeal... I have no interest in going back to that sort of screen. My Game Boy Color, besides having color, also allowed me to have a wormlight attachment plugged in to make up somewhat for not having a backlight. I don't think the Playdate has support for that. And the price...