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The Diorama Engine

dioragame.com

129 pointsgrzm38 comments

This is for the PlayDate [1], which is a fantastic handheld gaming system.

Aesthetics really hit a lot of Monument Valley notes and would pair well with the systems crank to rotate the world.

After reading the devlog and rest of the site I'm not entirely sure what the gameplay is, but looking forward to seeing more.

1. https://play.date/

As far as I know it's a puzzle adventure game.

What is fantastic about it? It looks cheap and has a low resolution black & white display. Sure, the screen is reflective, but so what?

As far as I can tell, what this project has going for it is just slick marketing. But for me the marketing video is over-produced, form-over-substance, and I can't stand the voiceover or overall tone. It's saccharine.

I see some Cortex-M7 SBCs on AliExpress for $5. Add the rest of it and it's probably like $20 worth of hardware/enclosure and $5 for assembly labor.

They are selling it for $200. So it's like a 700% markup.

> What is fantastic about it?

    * The screen is crisp and clear and especially playable in bright light
    * The crank is nifty and enables a lot of player interactions that you don't see anywhere else
    * The device itself is a design delight. It doesn't feel premium, so much as just the right amount of quality and playfullness. It's cute and fun.
    * Panic created an IDE that makes developing games for the Playdate super easy and fun. I've built a few (terrible) games and it was a blast
    * Panic is throwing a lot of weight behind game development for this. You get a ton of great games for free with the device, plus access to a storefront that's filled with so many other games of all genres
    * I think games are being priced sustainably. They aren't expensive, but they also aren't so cheap that the designers need to rely on ads or donations. I don't know if it'll last, but they're certainly heading in a good direction.

>The screen is crisp and clear

Most reviews I see do not like the displays because they are not clear due to their not being a back light or even a front light. The screen holds the device back needlessly.

The display is fine assuming that you have a decent external light source. It is pretty crisp.

I like the PlayDate but the display is horrible.

The most notable feature is the crank, which enables some games that are quite unique, but it really takes some hands-on experience to appreciate how smooth it is.

I also like the "new games every Monday for 12 weeks" experience, which is a great way to keep the console feeling fresh. I have been trying to make games for it while waiting for new games to arrive, and that has been a rewarding experience as well.

I wonder how well the crank works for left handed people.

There is an option to flip the screen upside down. I currently have a tendinitis on my right wrists so I use it a lot depending on the game and it work well.

I believe the screen is relatively expensive, and the crank and many other parts are custom.

Part of the cost is that it comes with about 24 game season where 2 of them are released each week. These are original games and not pirated games from either Nintendo or Sony consoles

The build quality is also better than the random junk that you’ll find on eBay, ali express,or Amazon. Plenty of people have cracked cheap screens on their ambernic portables

> But for me the marketing video is over-produced, form-over-substance, and I can't stand the voiceover or overall tone. It's saccharine.

Wow I just watched it and it's hilariously outdated. I feel like it would be a satirical one in the TV show Silicon Valley or something. Very early 2010s

That video was created by Sandwich[0]; Adam was hugely influential in early 2010 startup advertisements[1], so your comment makes sense.

Personally, I love his style. It's fun.

0: https://sandwich.co

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Lisagor

It’s a delightful product with attention to detail you don’t tend to see other places. You don’t get that by buying the parts from AliExpress.

If you are interested in retro game consoles, search for Miyoo Mini Plus or Anbernic. These consoles cost only £50 - £90 and allow lot more customizations and roms etc. Playdate on the other hand is an expensive device. I learned about these consoles very recently and waiting for Miyoo to arrive.

Sadly these don't run Playdate games.

The PlayDate is actually pretty terrible. I got one as a gift so I didn't even have to pay the absurd price for it. The game selection is very poor and the crank gimmick is lame. In general there is no reason for me to mess with it and it sits in a drawer. That's pretty bad considering I have other handheld consoles I happily pull out and play regularly, some decades older but with a lot more interesting games!

The playdate is very well made actually. It's just also (intentionally) very niche, so it's no surprise it doesn't click for everyone.

Have you played any of the games for it?

Yes. In case it's not obvious from my previous comment, I own a playdate.

I see it was designed in conjunction with Teenage Engineering which explains the look of it. They're famous in the music world for making quirky and interesting synths and music equipment: https://teenage.engineering/

Which explains the fairly steep price, Teenage Engineering is also famous for being quite expensive.

It also effectively bakes in the cost of several games for the season one set.

Looks incredible! I was thinking about how to similate a 3d effect on an arduboy at one point. Great job, fun project, love the writeup.

I'm pretty thumbsdown on the playdate as a disposable good, though.

I have a Playdate and I think they did about as well as they could to try to keep it from becoming disposable:

- the device doesn't require any network connection or service and works great offline

- games are generally offline only

- games are easily sideloaded via USB

- intentionally anachronistic aesthetic and tech is a sort of guard against obsoletion (it's ... already obsolete?)

So even if Panic stops selling and supporting Playdates tomorrow, people can continue to build fun things for them for some time to come, and if you find a 10 year old Playdate in a draw and power it on, you should still be good for a few rounds of Whitewater Wipeout!

IMO the constant sortings are nearly useless. It just needs to have 4 list of sorted blocks, one for each 90° angle. Then it just re-sorts them all when an object moves (which would be very cheap), or if few objects move it can just paint them dynamically at the right time (also cheap). So at all times it has 4 presorted lists, and it chooses the right one depending on the camera position.

I have a feeling you're onto something but also something feels off, like there's a catch we're missing.

> Then it just re-sorts them all when an object moves (which would be very cheap)

Given player input and moving enemies this is every frame anyway, and your solution sorts four angles instead of one.

Wait, do you mean "insertion sort the moved object from its original position"? I guess that would be cheap if it's just a handful.

EDIT: if he is using an adaptive sort it shouldn't really matter should it? Although using one sorted list per axis seems smart (you don't need four, symmetry means one sorted list is the other in reverse)

Moving your player means only changer its relative order to a few blocks, so even a bubble sort will do at most a few swaps (typically 0 or 1 swap per frame unless it moves many blocks per frame) so yes, it should be inexpensive.

And you don't need to run the full bubble sort on all blocks, just on the 2 blocks adjacent to the player (in the sorted list), and repeat until stabilized.

Edit: I'm not sure about the symmetry thing though. You're sorting into a cone, so maybe there are cases where you're not symmetrical at all.

It's an isometric game, so the viewport is not a cone projection but a cube.

add "for PlayDate" or something to the title for clarity

Estimated ship date for Playdate is end of 2023 (per website). Have there been any updates from the company on this?

They ship in batches. I got mine 3 weeks ago in Batch 5 that I ordered in March 2023.

Are you happy with the device - looks pretty cool minus the grayscale screen. Curious if that was chosen for battery life or cost?

LCDs are very inexpensive commodities; the Playdate has a Memory-in-Pixel display that I would guess costs a little more than an equivalently sized LCD.

So I think it's partly the battery life thing, and partly an intentional aesthetic choice -- this little thing is meant to evoke nostalgia for the days where the compute and display limitations defined a genre of games (see early Game Boy).

Would definitely suggest looking at videos showing the display at various angles before purchasing one. In the right light it is incredibly bright, crisp, and readable, and like any reflective tech it gets better, not worse, in sunlight. However, it really needs light coming from overhead to do its best -- if you are in dim or diffuse indoor light, the screen can be nigh unreadable, especially since it's so tiny!

This is Panic's first foray into hardware and it really shows; while the device itself is very handsome and feels great, they really underestimated demand and have had a tough time getting the supply logistics under control. I ordered mine in February and got it 7 months later.

I think they're (finally) catching up on orders, but I wouldn't take their word for it on ship dates

They conceived, built and delivered production units, all the while pyra has been "almost there" so I think they did OK. For a super niche product I think they did great.

Very nice aesthetic.

Phenomenal, even. I can imagine this will look fantastic if color and particle effects (transparent pngs on planes?) are added. Maybe they won't be added. If not, this art style still reminds me of black-and-white movies. It's effervescent, visceral somehow. It tugs at my hearstrings for some reason that I -- as yet -- cannot express.

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