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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

Might be a nice way to get into WASM development, but 4 colors sounds very limiting. Ok, I know the original Game Boy made do with only 4 "colors" (but that was on a black and white display where you probably couldn't have told the difference if there would have been more "shades of gray"), and the Game Boy Color showed these games using a palette of 4 colors, but actually even that device could show 56 colors at the same time!

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It's a little bit more complicated than that. The system is limited to displaying 4 colors at once, but the palette can change at any time. Check out what Phantom Shift does with a dynamic two color palette.

https://wasm4.org/play/phantom-shift/

The idea of the 4 colors and 160x160 screen is, from my pov, to focus on the gameplay more than the graphics. A lot of people get stopped from attempting to make games because their art skills suck, this removes that element from being an issue.

> A lot of people get stopped from attempting to make games because their art skills suck

As a developer with no art skills myself, I can sympathize with that. But I think that is already taken care of by the low-res display - making pixel art is (in my experience) a lot easier than higher-resolution art. I don't think having 8, 16 or 32 colors instead of just 4 really makes an impact on the art skills required for a game...

The play date doesn’t even have shades of grey and has plenty of good games, arguably because of similar constraints

OTOH, the PlayDate is a hardware device, so using a monochrome LCD makes sense for cost saving and power consumption reasons. But, even for a hardware device, once you decide you want to have a color screen, in this day and age there is no real (technical) reason anymore to limit the number of colors.

> so using a monochrome LCD makes sense for cost saving and power consumption reasons

The Sharp Memory LCD used in the Playdate is more expensive than a similarly sized IPS LCD. Whilst power consumption was probably a consideration, the main justification was to impose a deliberate game design constraint IMHO.

I agree, I think it’s more of a novelty reason, just a constraint for the sake of encouraging creativity / not just being another place for the same things we already have.

4 colors is still 4x as much as the Playdate or games like Return of the Obra Dinn has (or twice if you consider 'off' a color).

Heh, citing the Obra Dinn is cheating a bit. Most people aren't going to do this: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg136374...

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