Show HN: Akedo – Retro gaming and coding platform

Lots of activity in this space recently, there are more at https://github.com/paladin-t/fantasy

Looks super-cool, would love to try it. However...

> All from your web browser. Your project is stored in the cloud, accessible from anywhere.

I don't want that. I want my code on my machine, not someone else's. And I most certainly don't want to create an account. :-(

Thanks, that's a great idea!

Thanks, I spared no expense!

It's a very deep sense of humor, too, as actual 8-bit sports games were unironically marketed as "highly realistic" or similar. In fairness, those copywriters were probably referring to the simulation code, and not necessarily the graphics, being realistic for the standards ofnthe day.

This is such a fun idea, actually. Sprites in general (not just 2D 8-bit style) could be really useful for DALL-E to generate. There are a good amount of tilesets and sprite packs for sale online created by pixel artists. But having sprites and tiles generated by DALL-E could really invigorate the indie game community.

Maybe for placeholders...but honestly it takes very little time to be able to whip up rough pixelart sprites and animations yourself. And they'll probably be better in many ways.

But a game's quality is honestly mostly art & music & other non-automatable creativity rather than the software. I highly recommend treating art and music education as core to indie gamedev education.

According to the help page:

> Akedo uses a beginner friendly language that is similar to many professional languages but is aimed at producing readable and understandable code.

It's a language I designed myself heavily influenced by Python, Lua, and BASIC. I wanted something that was as simple as possible to get started with and could grow with the user.

> 1. Is the language for this open source? If not, is that planned?

It's a language I designed specifically for this platform and is not currently open source. If it proves popular I'm certainly open to it.

> 2. Is the language compiled or interpreted, and what targets? Is it the execution environment a VM that runs in the browser similar to Scratch?

It's interpreted. To improve the performance at some stage I'd like to compile it directly to JavaScript rather than run it through my intermediate layer.

> 3. Is this a charity or for-profit? If the former, how will it be sustainable (i.e. donations, premium memberships, etc.)? If the latter, what are the plans for monetization?

It's for-profit. I'm planning a freemium model so there would be additional features (when I build them!) and access to more advanced tutorials.

It's actually the Japanese translation of arcade (as in shopping arcade). I wanted something short with available domain names.