Playdate’s handheld changed how Duke University teaches game design

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.

Re: price point

HN 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.

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.

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)

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?

My 9 year old is doing a game dev course in town where they use the BBC Micro Bit, a retro arcade peripheral (buttons, screen, sound, handheld), and some Microsoft game dev IDE. It’s incredibly compelling and feels a lot like this. But less than 1/3 the price and much more extensible and well-featured (the screen is colour!). I’m not sure I really see the value of the Playdate.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Not to mention that they just announced season three of games!

I've been interested in these cute little things since they were first announced, but I still haven't pulled the trigger on the 229 USD price tag. Apparently with the education discount they're 195 USD, which still feels steep. But hey, given that the dev tooling is all free (including simulators), it would be fine to play around with game development even without buying the hardware.

Very cute, but $229 is a WILD price point.