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.
Buying a game system is the least of your problems there
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
In any other industry they call this corruption, but in academia it’s apparently ok.
Knowledge is the only resource that only becomes greater the more is shared because people share back what they learned. Mind you this only works if people are paying it forward. But often the educator gets more from teaching than the student does.
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!)
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.
I suspect any developer whose game gets picked for the "free" games will get a compensation, but I have no idea how much that would be. This link https://x.com/playdate/status/1757478578491732486 suggests that two years ago, all Catalog developers (so not the free games) earned about 500K total / shared amongst each other.
TL;DR: by all means make games for the Playdate but not if you want to make it your livelihood. Personal grumpy take, not based in up to date facts.
There are a number of little handheld gadgets that you can use with MakeCode—scroll down on the homepage and there’s a section that shows them all:
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.
https://play.date/games/the-moon-is-our-friend/
I also discovered the Mirror app and it turns out it's a big deal for me! I love the form factor of the device and I'm fine with a black and white concept, but the combination of screen size and the lack of a backlight does take some enjoyment out of it all that Mirror gave back.
It fits, in my head, very much in that same toy niche as Teenage Engineering's Pocket Operator series of music making devices: https://teenage.engineering/products/po
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 does not feel like good value for money. But then, it's positioned as a niche / quirky device, manufactured in batches once a year or so, not a mass market device.
I do hope they build a follow-up some day though - make it twice as big (at least), add a backlight, make turning it off more obvious, and give more clarity about the availability and cost of games.
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...
You can choose not to look up which games are included in the season and just be surprised by new games every week, and that kept the console feeling fresh. But the really brilliant part is that you got to experience the new games together with other people who got the season at the same time as you, similar to people watching the same weekly broadcast of some TV show. I find this community aspect of the experience most interesting.
[0] .kkrieger (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NBG-sKFaB0) is my favorite of this genre of constraints, but it's mainly impressive for being possible at all (and you can read up on some of the developer notes for how much effort was put into satisfying this constraint). It didn't actually advance the design of FPSes or anything, and FPS design ideas could be better learned by making and iterating on an FPS without the tiny size constraint. If students want to impose extra constraints on themselves, like developing for the Playdate and making use of its crank for game control, go for it, but it's a bit different when they're imposed from the outside for no real reason other than "hey, it's some constraints, and constraints breed creativity".
As I said however, it depends on when in the timeline we’re looking. For 3-year bachelor’s programmes, there’s significantly more focus on producing graduates who can move straight into the industry, having already learnt the tools they will use. For theoretical 5-year master’s programmes, knowing specific hardware or software is secondary to the general reasoning, maths and planning that’s expected in research or R&D industry work.
Using more limited or restricted tools, if thought out well, can force students focus on the parts that matter. I haven’t actually used the Playdate, but for first-year students I would think the most important thing is to actually get to designing games. The core ideas you’d want to teach do not require fancy graphics or platform support, rather, that’d just be a time sink. Learning industry tools can be done in later courses or on the job. While being able to work efficiently is important - I don’t want to discredit the handiwork of the process, learning what buttons to push in eg. Unreal is arguably much less ephemeral than learning ”game design”.
However, using limited tools in teaching must be well motivated. Forcing old, obsolete tech onto students might be a learning experience just as well as a time sink.
I agree it all needs to be well motivated. I'm often suspicious of attempts to teach things indirectly, but of course a lot of indirect learning happens anyway. And a lot (direct and indirect) is done in parallel and I think it's useful to look for places to usefully exploit that, especially when it comes to the conflict of college for pre-job-training vs. study. Do you really need a limited or obscure platform to teach or practice most things about debugging? printf and any debugger tool that supports break points and stepping would teach a lot, with modern (even graphical) tools having a lot less friction while not dampening what is learned. Bonus points if you actually teach more advanced debuggers so another generation of developers isn't released thinking only-the-basics console gdb + printf are the extent of what's available to help in the practice of debugging. A danger of only teaching limited or restricted tools is that students end up thinking that's all there is. This happens at every level from sorting algorithms to programming languages to whole ways of thinking about things. By artificially constraining the box in an attempt to focus on something basic or avoid clichés of other boxes, all too often the result is just that thinking doesn't generalize and is now crippled in the constrained box.
Timeline is important, I wonder if we're both interpreting Master's program quite differently here. In the US, a Bachelors program is typically 4 years while a Masters is typically 2, and many Masters are industry-oriented (no thesis, just classes/projects) rather than being like a stepping stone to full PhD research. The Duke program here seems to work as typical: 2 years + capstone project (and even seeming to require a summer internship). A longer program is in some ways a bit more forgivable for less than ideal teaching efficiency. (At my old school, the game design undergrads had a course that required designing physical board games. There are plausible arguments that board games as a medium make it easier to teach or focus on important things in design that are harder to teach with digital video games. But even if that's not really true (as I'm arguing here applies to the Playdate not being particularly useful over just normal PC/mobile development) at least it's just one course in many for the whole program. And at least there's a >$10bn market for board games.)
The Playdate features a mic, accelerometer, and crank as unique inputs, as well as being portable, that can suggest interesting game design ideas on their own. In one sense, if you want to use those features, it's simpler because you can count on them being there. In another sense, except for I guess the crank, the other two inputs are part of ~every phone and widely available on any PC/laptop. Developing for PC or mobile gives you access to even more interesting input and output for design consideration too: keyboards, mice (with/without scrollwheels), cameras, haptic feedback, gyroscopes, touch, light or temperature sensors, weird whatever devices over USB or wireless (Nintendo wiimotes, steering wheels, arcade sticks), networking... and making use of these things has never been easier, with drivers widely available and especially with the engines that let you click around to configure things. I would think that if your goal is to learn game design, you would want to prioritize doing your design on a platform that is as open and flexible as possible to allow exploring as much of design space as you can. Perhaps the teacher thinks it's useful to add artificial constraints to narrow the design space or focus from a certain perspective (like: let's design a multiplayer game, but with the constraint that you have only one device, no networking or multiple controllers), fine, but they don't need to start with a platform where those constraints are baked in to start with and can't be lifted.
Similarly Unreal as well as any of the other popular engines, along with any of the libraries like DirectX, SDL, raylib, pygame, or even just the web browser with HTML Canvas, are all open and flexible in what they allow you to explore in design space. Some are more limited than others (like you're going to have a hard time using a 2D-focused library or engine for a 3D game) and some are easier to express ideas in than others (you're going to have a better time using a 2D-focused library or engine for a 2D game) but they're all pretty easy to express basics in, and they all are pretty good at letting you rapidly prototype and playtest and iterate. If you artificially impose on yourself the same constraints as the Playdate has inherently, they can be even easier to use, and even easier yet if the teacher provides a template. Like browse the games on itch.io tagged with playdate, I don't think any would be particularly harder (and some may even be easier) to do in <random other tooling>. The article mentions it taking "months" to learn Unreal, which is true in some sense (it can be longer, especially if you don't already know C++), but false in another sense in that getting up and running is quick, any competent introduction will have the student getting something on screen and responding to their input within an hour. For the very basic stuff a typical Playdate game does it won't take that long to learn to do it with Unreal.
Another way of looking at it: take the "Owl Invasion" example from the article, "an endless wave-based action game with tower defense mechanics." Unlike the other game, there's no mention of using any of the unique inputs of the Playdate, so is there anything fundamentally unique about the Playdate that suggests such a game would be easier to develop for it vs. using an arbitrary other tool? Was there anything learned about game design from the experience that wouldn't have been learned otherwise? What if you had mandated the same visual constraints for resolution and (lack of) color but artificially? Was it useful to be forced to incorporate an owl somehow, vs. a rat, vs. a pirate, vs. having no restrictions? (This one perhaps, even creative writing workshops like to require something to incorporate, but this is more about trying to unblock creativity and avoid decision paralysis rather than directly learning some principle.) If the impact of using Playdate vs. something else is fairly arbitrary for accomplishing the teaching goals, then unless the student is particularly interested in Playdate on their own, it's more beneficial among several axes to use something else.
I bought an ODROID-Go Ultra a few months ago for about $70. This can emulate the NES, SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, and oodles of other consoles, and can play what are arguably some of the best games ever made. The Playdate is three times that price, and while I'm sure that some of the games are fun, I would have a hard time believing that any of them are beating Donkey Kong Country or Phantasy Star IV.
It might be an apples and oranges comparison, but in my mind they still occupy a similar niche.
I do think it's beyond "impulse buy" for sure, though.
Even better, the creator supports educators super cheap
https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php?page=schools
Yea, it's not custom hardware, but you can share your creations with everyone since it runs on Web, Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS and there are lots of cheaper devices that will run it if you want a handheld.
https://www.lexaloffle.com/picotron.php
With no technical upper limit on file size (as well as being able to export for other OSes) you could, in theory, publish a full game from this.
I bought mine pre release so it was like $50 cheaper even with the cover I think, but I would still pay the increased price for it. I thought it would collect dust, but it really is a great way to pass the time on the train. It scratches the original Gameboy itch for me without the needless stares from actually carrying a Gameboy.
I just wish they would release the docking station for it. I charge it next to my bed, so it could serve two purposes.
And not everyone on HN is in Duke, or North Carolina, or the USA.
yeah if you're aiming to make a proper professional game with aims of making profit... the playdate probably isn't the way to go. But then I recon that's part of what makes it an awesome platform. It hasn't been captured by capitalism yet.
The business strategy class I took in college in Ireland used the same book for two or three years, even though the book was reshuffled every year, just to enable some spreading of the financial burden on students.
I LOVE that he gets to code in Scratch but can jump into Python or JavaScript at any time without the IDE changing. It’s a clear stepping stone.
Don't get me wrong, I think that college education is due for reform.
There are examples of finding better ways to do it. My son's textbook costs were very low. The regional state university that he attended had some kind of thing where you rented your textbooks and turned them back in, often with a nominal or zero fee.
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.
Playdate's SDK is free.
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.
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.
So is teaching them assembly, even though most people no longer directly code in ASM. But a constrained language that's close-to-the-metal gives them an interesting view of how computing really works, etc
So I'd say it's actually much better for a class teaching coding and creativity
If students sign up and pay for a class you teach called "Data Structures & Algorithms", and you just read from Hamming's book every lecture and don't actually attempt to teach any data structures and algorithms, expect to not have a teaching job for long.
It was a two-sentence writing assignment. Before you could describe your project, you had to state the idea in one sentence (the soul) and the concrete form in one sentence (the body). Kids who could prototype a working medical device in two weeks couldn't articulate what they'd built. The constraint forced the thinking the tool couldn't.
Jach's argument—"you could impose the same constraints on Unity"—misses the point. You could. Nobody does. The tool shapes the behavior. An engine that can do anything invites you to do everything. Or, for young people, nothing. A 1-bit screen with a crank asks you one question: what's the game? That's not an arbitrary constraint. That's a design decision about where the student's cognitive effort goes.
The expensive tool teaches the tool. The constrained tool teaches the thinking. They're both necessary but they serve different stages, and most programs only do the first one.