[HN Gopher] Making "LCD, Please"
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Making "LCD, Please"
Author : kvnhn
Score : 142 points
Date : 2023-11-04 04:16 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dukope.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (dukope.com)
| bertman wrote:
| Related discussion about the game from 3 months ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37052622
| robocat wrote:
| Discussing the playable version of the LCD game on a browser:
|
| https://dukope.itch.io/lcd-please
| wkat4242 wrote:
| That game is so much fun. I wish they really made this handheld
| lol
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Do you mean the original? (I haven't played it.) Because LCD,
| Please is missing any meta-game that AFAIU made the original
| interesting - it is really just about comparing faces, and it
| has no goal or end either. I gave up after half an hour of
| comparing faces. Reading the blog entry about it was much more
| interesting than playing it.
| rvbissell wrote:
| It's about more than comparing faces (which you do every day
| IRL, it's just not as effortless in the game because of low
| resolution.)
|
| The game is about how far you are willing to compromise your
| ethics to help yourself and your family escape oppression.
| Sharlin wrote:
| The _original_ is. But the GP was talking about the "LCD,
| Please" version which doesn't have any kind of narrative.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah I didn't realise. Not so interested anymore.
| agys wrote:
| For a personal project I also tried to have a custom segmented
| display produced... It was an amazing journey!
|
| The PCB is being updated for a new ultra low power MCU (vs the
| current ESP32).
|
| The only online document is this brief clip where it appears a
| few seconds in the very beginning:
|
| https://twitter.com/andreasgysin/status/1525544668808749060
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| There's also been a series at EEVblog on getting a custom LCD
| manufactured[1]. (Not that expensive, surprisingly--if you've
| got the expertise.)
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA5vlDdpbkw
| agys wrote:
| This was exactly my starting reference for the project...!
| yonatan8070 wrote:
| For those who don't have the time to watch the video, how
| much is "not expensive"?
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| It's more or less in the video title in this case ("$100
| Custom LCD Design") :) but he in the video itself he says
| it was $138 for five prototypes. Does not exactly fill me
| with joy, but even prototypes of CNC parts are usually an
| order of magnitude more expensive, from what I can see.
| Simple custom PCBs (which you can have for an order of
| magnitude _less_ ) are an outlier in this respect.
|
| (Like the guy or not, but he's not the filler type of
| YouTuber, not even from the enjoyable-filler variety. The
| LCD videos in particular may not rise to the level of a
| lecture series exactly, but they're not far away from it,
| either.)
| donatj wrote:
| I would love if there were an actual physical device released.
| Not for me but for my wife. It would make an amazing gift.
|
| I never got very far in "Papers, Please" and found the experience
| very stressful. For my wife though it was kind of an introduction
| to gaming. She saw me playing and thought it looked interesting.
| She ended up being immediately really good at the game and got
| kind of obsessed playing through it umpteen times. This lead to
| her getting into Overwatch (RIP) and many other games to a lesser
| extent.
|
| A little device as a commemoration of this would be incredible.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Is this to gauge interest for an actual product?
| xnzakg wrote:
| Wonder how hard it would be to implement in Shenzhen I/O[1].
| There is functionality for importing custom LCD designs so that
| part shouldn't be _that_ much work (although the game logic
| probably would).
|
| [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/504210/SHENZHEN_IO/
| pard68 wrote:
| Haxe has always intrigued me. I would never have heard of it if I
| had not tried to figure out how a game written in Haxe was doing
| a certain mechanic. It crops up now and then and is always so
| nonchalantly referred to, unlike something like Rust in which
| case the author /has/ to tell us about Rust for a few paragraphs.
| (no hate on Rust, I love it)
| Waterluvian wrote:
| For me, the most frustrating part of trying to publish games that
| run in the browser is how poorly Phaser and Pixi handles
| different resolutions.
|
| There's no comfortable way to say, "at this ratio, fill as much
| of the page window as possible, and then scale the in-engine
| viewport so that we always show the same game area and same
| coordinate space. Just different sized graphics."
|
| You can kind of do it but you keep running into the fact that the
| engines want to work in a pixel space and you end up having to
| re-compensate for your zooming by rendering shapes, fonts, and
| other non-sprites at excessive resolutions.
|
| Unfortunately I can't get LCD, Please to run on my phone at all,
| which is another challenge: realizing actual browser and device
| compatibility.
|
| I just want a really solid environment to ship very well-polished
| tiny games via browser so people don't have to download and
| install anything. Ideally I'm not making users download 8MB of
| WASM as a wrapper around Unity or Godot (neither of which are all
| that reliable yet in a web context) Itch.io almost kind of
| sometimes gets us there.
|
| Sorry, I'm not trying to complain. Just just really want this to
| work and I've tried so many times and keep giving up. Mini web
| gaming needs a killer engine, still.
| schobi wrote:
| I understand the goal of LCD aesthetics and going down the rabbit
| hole of "how would that look like" in this post.
|
| But if you want a long battery life handheld console, why not
| consider e papers? You could keep the original game experience of
| judging text+image. No need to restrict the random faces. But I'm
| not understanding the epaper pricings - this seems a viable
| option for a self made printed game with BOM 50$, but not a mass
| market consumer game for retail 10$
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