YOYOZO: How I made a Playdate game in 39 KiB | Hacker News Reader

YOYOZO: How I made a Playdate game in 39 KiB

blog.gingerbeardman.com

154 pointsmsephton58 comments

Just want to say that I love everything about this. The Playdate itself feels like a beacon of hope in the current world of pessimism. We could all do with more of these type of projects! ♡

Thanks! I agree 100%

A similarly interesting story is regarding the NES homebrew game, Micro Mages.

The goal with Micro Mages was to get a full-featured game into the same footprint of the original, "Black Box" NES releases for the North American launch, where a fair number of games fit in 40KB of ROM or less.

Video, but it's a good summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWQ0591PAxM

Morphcat has done other great NES games as well, such as Space Gulls and Bobl.

I loved Bobl, thanks for the video link I'll watch it.

Video was great, thanks!

> If you don’t own a Playdate, well, what are you waiting for?

Waiting for them to start shipping to my country, actually :( They're shipping to three neighboring countries though.

It's also not clear if they're actually in stock. "Shipping Late 2023" it says.

IIRC they ship in batches, and the current batch are receiving their shipping notifications right now.

I was in group five and got mine in mid august

I ordered mine in February and got it in September. A painful wait, but very fun once it came.

Consider yourself lucky, I ordered mine November 2021 and didn't get it until August 2023.

I'm loving everything I see about the Playdate. This is how gaming should "feel". Keep up the good work.

Many thanks! It's an absolute joy to develop for Playdate (mostly because of the fixed, limited spec) and as much of a joy to play games on (mostly because of the screen and form factor).

You might also enjoy PICO-8, a virtual console in glorious 128x128 16-color graphics, with bleepy sounds, and chiptune music. The community is lovely and pretty active.

I've dabbled in PICO-8! Great fun. A small claim to fame there—I was its first public user: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?uid=6

or its open source cousin TIC-80: http://tic80.com/

It looks distantly related to the old CrystalQuest on the compact Mac, especially in the indirection between movement of the mouse (or whatever play date has) and the differential movement of the playing piece. In CrystalQuest, the mouse affected velocity, here it looks like a spring function.

You're the second person to mention that game! Somebody else mentioned it on social media. I'm a hardcore Macintosh software nut and simply have no idea why I've never played Crystal Quest. Maybe I thought it was Crystal Castles? No idea. Anyway, I watched some videos last night and I do see what you're saying. I can't wait to play Crystal Quest when I get back to my Macintosh Classic. :)

gosh seeing the gameplay unlocked an ancient memory ( read: 2007 ) of playing an indie game called xWUNG that had the same yoyo-ing effect.

https://www.tigsource.com/2007/09/24/xwung/

https://www.mobygames.com/game/30068/xwung/

Oh, nice! I'd not heard of that one, but judging by the first TIGSource link xWUNG takes inspiration from the same game I did: Japanese cult classic Pendulumania (2000, CANO-Lab) https://www.mobygames.com/game/17800/pendulumania/ with both of those being mouse controlled. One of the challenges I had to "solve" was how to move from analog to digital control.

awesome to get a little bit of insight :) thank you!

I went with one of these: https://www.reddit.com/r/SBCGaming

Cool devices, I have one, but sadly they're not capable of playing Playdate games.

Small nitpick about the website: I'm one of those people that randomly select chunks of text as I'm reading it. It seems that your website make the selection background and text the same color (#fff in the CSS) making it unreadable when doing that.

Therefore I must here control my weird urge to select text, which may be good in the end, but I don't think that's what you intended!

I've made some changes to address this. Thanks for letting me know!

> If you don’t own a Playdate, well, what are you waiting for?

Waiting for Panic to actually support something longer than a millisecond. Panic is small time Google - you can’t trust anything they create to be supported.

I would put a lot of money on them dropping PlayDate support before they fulfill any of their promises.

They already completed their first season and the play date itself is well made. For 229 including the cover I was quite pleased with it

Unfair, I think. Playdate has been out for over 18 months now, released April 2022, and is still available, selling and shipping. There are over 400 games available, 100 of which are on the official Catalog store. The device and infrastructure has been in development for over a decade at this point.

> If you don’t own a Playdate, well, what are you waiting for? A backlight, for one! It's not a cheap device and I don't generally play games in bright spaces, so I might as well sit this version out until they change their mind.

The screen technology that is used (Sharp Memory LCD) cannot be backlit—it's technically impossible because it's an opaque screen unlike most other type of LCDs which will let light through. It could be front lit, but then it would be further from the surface, so there would be a big trade-off. Personally, I think they made the right decision because as it is the screen looks like some sort of magical material from outer space.

I have a playdate but unfortunately rarely play it because without a backlight, I'm rarely in a situation where it's comfortable to play my playdate...

Maybe you should sell it then? Given its scarce and all..

The last two times I've tried selling something on ebay, I was scammed. So I'm not really that motivated to bother with doing that.

If you’re a gadget head I’d implore you try and establish a good eBay routine. I find it cathartic to sell my old gadgets there. It’s not just that there’s money to be made but it’s guaranteed that someone gets a use out of your beloved gadget for a bit longer. I recently sold a 13 year old Asus netbook for 50 bucks. It still ran and browsed the internet. I’m sure it’s of some use to someone still.

As a Yoyo enthusiast, you got my curiosity and it looks quite fun !

Thanks, great to hear!

My playdate arrived a few weeks ago. Lots of good fun little games. A lot of the catalog games look nice, but most are just outside of the impulse purchase to me.

Understandable, and I hope one day to be able to offer a demo so people like you and I can make more informed purchasing decisions. To give you the developer point of view: after all is said and done (cuts/taxes/fees/fx/etc) I see just under half of the list price. I'm trying to make a living doing this (it's my one and only job) and I have no idea what price is "best" so I make a decision and have to stick with it. If I may ask, what is the impulse purchase price limit for you?

Mine would be $5

Just a friendly post about if you're after what the kids are calling an SBC device, you can get much better performing handhelds for a fraction of the price that support NES, SNES, PS1, etc.

The Playdate is a niche.

They are cool consumption devices, and I have one myself. But the important thing, at least for me, is they don't run Playdate games. And they don't have any easy way for developers like myself to make a living making games for them. I wish they did because there are a heck of a lot of them out there! You're right that the Playdate is a niche, but it's a nice one that I can make a living working on.

How much money can one make from selling a playdate game?

Of course, it depends. Here's one take: https://www.reddit.com/r/PlaydateConsole/comments/17p8pdp/co...

Curious if you’re expecting to make a living solely off making Playdate games?

It doesn’t seem like $30k is much, and unless you’re cranking out at least one or two of these every year (at minimum) — and that’s assuming the Playdate maintains its current momentum — it seems like you might need something else to augment the income you get from Playdate games.

Of course, it could depend on your expectations and what you need to earn a living.

Again, just curious, as I once considered/attempted to earn a living off of a side-gif, but there was no way it would’ve been enough, nor would it have sustained even if it reached enough in a single year.

Just to be clear the figures at the link are not mine. It's not my post.

Anyway, I've been making Playdate stuff, on and off, for a few years at this point. And since April this year I've averaged one game every month or two. It's not my side-gig but my only gig, total focus.

YOYOZO took me 3 weeks, and was waiting in the release queue for a longer period than it took me to develop it. You can read it's development timeline: https://discord.com/channels/675983554655551509/114934947132...

My next game releases on 5th December. Here's a blog post about how I created that in a week: https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2023/06/26/ball-und-panzer-g...

Good read as always, Matt.

Just a friendly note to the editors to mention that the game title is YOYOZO, all caps. The reason is aesthetics: it visually echoes the audible repetition you get when saying the word. A single capital Y and lowercase rest of the word ...just doesn't hit the same way.

Fun fact: YOYOZO is a word I invented, a portmanteau of the words yo-yo (as in the toy) and yozora (a Japanese word meaning "night sky"). So new I got the hash tag all to myself on social media. Almost a Googlewhack!? Cheers!

Hacker News submissions automatically title case all-caps and sometimes all-lowercase in submissions by default, particularly if it's the first word in the title (e.g. when you submit a post about the graphics library ggplot2, HN corrects it to "Ggplot2" which is definitely wrong: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ggplot2)

A workaround is to edit the title after submitting it, which will not be automatically be corrected.

Interesting, because it was OK (as I typed it for submission) for a while and then ...changed... not just the capitalisation but also removing words and changing the units from 39KB to 39k. The original correct title is preserved in automated posts on social media at the moment it hit the top. Anyway, I think it's far too late for me to edit it now. :)

This is unfortunate. I find "39k" to be a lot less clear than "39KB"

I first thought the title meant you had a strict budget of $39,000

Tell me about it! (also: I wish) the 39KB was describing file size.

I also thought the "39k" was confusing. I thought it meant "lines of code" at first.

I would suggest changing it back to 39KB as this title isn't clear at all.

I wish I could, but only the mods that changed it can change it back.

Moderator changed it :)

I didn't understand what 39k means. Money? I realized it was about bytes when I clicked to read the article.

Note that despite the always more common use, KB is not a thing. The correct unit is kB. Kilo is a lower case k. An upper case K is Kelvin. KB, Kelvin Bytes, does not exist.

See the list of prefixes on the site of the Bureau international des poids et mesures (English) https://www.bipm.org/en/measurement-units/si-prefixes

I'm a 1024 kind of guy, so I should have used KiB. I like your attention to detail.

Yeah, I also always think in multiples of 2 when there are bits and bytes into play.

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