Discussion
How a Tiny Yellow Handheld Changed How Duke University Teaches Game Design
throwway120385: 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.
chip_franzen: Very cute, but $229 is a WILD price point.
AFF87: I was thinking the same. Read the article, thought about getting one and then thought again
hyperbolablabla: 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)
oidar: 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.
rtpg: If its any solace the screen is very good and the build quality is very high. You also just get a good set of games "for free" as part of the system.I do think it's beyond "impulse buy" for sure, though.
testfrequency: Bought mine for $179 when they were new, hadn’t realized the price went up so much.
tombert: Yeah, I've thought about buying one in the past, but $229 is kind of rich for my blood.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.
bigiain: You say that like it's a bad thing...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
Loughla: It's actually worth it if you have any kind of a commute. There are a lot of very fun games for it. And it's nice having a thing that isn't connected to the Internet to avoid the temptation of doom scrolling.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.
AFF87: Any game recommendations? You may have convinced me
crtasm: we enjoyed Lucas Pope's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_After_Midnight
nosrepa: Not to mention that they just announced season three of games!
flobosg: Teenage Engineering designed the Playdate, in case you didn’t know: https://teenage.engineering/designs/playdate
fn-mote: Re: price pointHN 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.
AFF87: Ok, this is it. Consider me convinced
Waterluvian: My 9 year old is doing a game dev course in town where they use the BBC Micro Bit, an retro arcade peripheral (buttons, screen, sound, handheld), and some Microsoft game dev IDE. It’s incredibly compelling and feels a lot like this. But on the surface it feels like a better choice: it’s far cheaper and more extensible.
omoikane: 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.
qrush: My playdate has been collecting dust since I got it and the initial few games I tried didn't stick. Any suggestions on good games for it?
nekooooo: tariffs!
smallerize: How do you do the screen casting?
sssilver: It’s a wonderful device and I own one but lack of screen backlight makes it practically unusable, and at its price point almost vulgarly expensive.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.
Jtsummers: https://help.play.date/games/mirror/ - probably this.
socalgal2: Yea, you could get a similar experience (for some definition of similar) with Pico-8 which is also a constrained system.Even better, the creator supports educators super cheaphttps://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php?page=schoolsYea, it's not custom hardware, but you can share your creations with everyone since it runs on Web, Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS
galleywest200: Also mentioning Lexaloffle’s most recent project the Picotron which is a fantasy workstation instead of just a console.https://www.lexaloffle.com/picotron.phpWith 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.
dabluecaboose: > Read the article, thought about getting oneOf course you did, look at the domain. It's an ad.
christophilus: That sounds rad. I’d love to get my kids into this. Got any links to your particular setup?
jmcgough: 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.
nickloewen: The game dev environment they’re talking about is MakeCode Arcade. I’m also a big fan of it.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:https://arcade.makecode.com/
Waterluvian: Yeah that’s it! I recognize the Micro Bit Arcade Shield and the Retro Arcade as what he’s been using when he shows me demos.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.
gangstead: 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.
adampunk: It’s for Gen-X dads to buy and pay themselves on the back about “productive constraints” while they play games that suck.
jubilanti: A $200 textbook should absolutely be out of line
somebehemoth: Checkout playdate season 2 roster of games. Each one is the kind of game I hoped would be in season 1. I did not dislike season 1 though.
stevewodil: You'd farm more aura with an ereader on the train
Spinfusor: If it had a backlight, I would have bought one by now.
stevewodil: Sometimes I concede on this point with certain devices, but the screen on the playdate basically requires light at a specific angle for it to be at all discernible, so I don't blame you and can't recommend it as a result
stevewodil: In the end, my personal favorite game was selling it on ebay
chirau: Was that with Lisa Huettel?
chirau: In my time at Duke, we used iPods in Pratt. And then in CS, we used Alice for complete beginners. This was in '06. Fun times.
Wololooo: As an educator I always make a point to give the resources to the students and or give avenues to it that are not paywalled.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.
sssilver: Do not buy one. You will regret it. Without backlight, it's a gimmick.
fragmede: Anna has an archive for students who can't afford books.
Jach: I love Anna but it's also a poor school that doesn't have its own library that has at least a few copies of every textbook used by classes + inter-library loans. Can be a nice way to make friends by sharing a physical book to study and do exercises from in a shared workspace.
Doxin: you can run playdate games on the desktop using the emulator included in the free SDK. It won't be as fun as running it on an actual device, but nothing stopping people from actually messing with making playdate games without a playdate.
shermantanktop: In that game, the house always wins.
boogieknite: your last sentence makes me think Duke has a thing for monochrome displays and spinning interfaces
bigfatkitten: Professors making students buy the textbook they wrote for $200 is especially out of line.In any other industry they call this corruption, but in academia it’s apparently ok.
tclancy: Hey man, I was just trying to invent an excuse to buy one and you had to do that. Well … played.
Jach: 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...
oulipo2: The article makes it quite clear as you read that the appeal is the constraints, it allows the students to think outside of the box, and ask themselves a lot of interesting questions
oulipo2: The article mentions you can use the free PC/Mac simulator which doesn't require a device
grufkork: For teaching, it depends a lot on what you’re trying to teach. In some courses I’m involved in we’re intentionally using old, limited, obtuse or otherwise just strange tools and equipment for the sake of practicing debugging, reading specs approaching an unknown system. The point of those courses is not to learn the tool itself but to learn methodology that can be generalised.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.
albertodenia: I'm genuinely curious: do you mean successful as "played a lot" or as "commercially successful"? Do you think Playdate is a viable market for indie devs? Btw it'd also be great to check your games, if you'd like to share some links!
Jach: That's the intention, sure, and as long as prospective Masters students know that's what they're getting into and paying for, and are looking forward to it, then it's fine or whatever. But it still strikes me as a silly constraint, just as it would be to require an in-house engine that sucks, or requiring students to develop for some old Nintendo hardware, or requiring students to fit everything in under 96k.[0] Anyone can add arbitrary constraints to anything, and lots of interesting questions will arise from figuring out how to deal with (or work around) such constraints. But is the constraint to develop for this specific device (and all the sub constraints that implies) actually a good one vs. any other set of constraints, especially for the purposes of game design? I doubt it. Especially how some of the constraints like only using black-and-white graphics are easily enforced without also requiring such a specific niche device.[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".
latexr: That’s a very limited US-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.
sbcgamer: > A handheld device that Just Works and creates an authentic experience is worth a lot.yeah, it's worth around $64.79 current pricehttps://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.
nosrepa: I'd imagine they know as they developed games for it. Their point was the audience size due to it being niche, not that it's hard to test.
nosrepa: Diora, Carte Blanche, Devils on The Moon, Match-O-3000, just to name a few off the top of my head.
nosrepa: Unfortunately, that type of screen cannot be backlit. There are frontlit versions, but they are thicker and would consume a bit more power.
thenthenthen: Agree with the niche-ness, for me this would be big red flag, especially in education.
smith7018: Duke University is, in fact, in North Carolina, USA.
latexr: 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.
tapoxi: A Playdate is $229. A Switch 2 is $499 and a PS5 is $599
Brendinooo: I am using mine WAY more now that I know this app exists.
Brendinooo: I just got The Moon Is Our Friend and I think it's a perfect Playdate game, at least for the kind of games I like to play on it (I don't care much for the more RPG/story-driven stuff). It's addicting, and it uses the crank in a way that makes the crank feel indispensable.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.
globalchatads: 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.
latexr: 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.
Brendinooo: He's wrong. There are some great games that I've played on it. And I'm a Millennial dad. AND I think Panic is a cool company that's worth supporting, AND I think that, if you have the money sitting around, it's probably good to support weird niche hardware projects by indies.
martijn_himself: 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?
Jach: I've thought something like a software archeology class would be really fun as an elective. I agree that it can make sense to use intentionally limited things especially if something is hard to teach otherwise. e.g. Learning to parse datasheets and probe things with an oscilloscope is best done by actually doing it, but starting off with an n-layer PCB instead of a breadboard would be pretty crazy. A benefit to using old things can sometimes be useful simplicity but also sometimes just being cheap.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: 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.
wincy: 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)
JKCalhoun: I'm not familiar with their marketing/ecosystem. Do they gather together the best games and have a whole "season" you purchase? And repeat this every year?
JKCalhoun: A kind of tintype display.
