bmalicoat

Building a gameboy speaker from scratch. Kind of like a record player or mini disc player, but using gameboy and gameboy color games. Trying my best to document the process https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MQ16pvz3xeQ

Lots of fun and novel problems to solve across hardware, software, firmware, enclosure, legality, manufacturability! It also got me collecting random carts just to hear the incredible music locked away (some samples at the end of this video https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7naKAga8hAE )

Learning how to make custom PCBs and 3d printing. I really like Radio Taiso (daily calisthenics synced with music), so I made a dedicated speaker (https://www.taisospkr.com). It was fun to add new tools to my tool belt (ESP32, remote firmware updates, embedded website, streamlined wifi setup). Already have a new project based on a very similar architecture that I'm super excited about! Making PCBs and hardware has never been easier as a solo developer.

That's cool to see. I made a mobile game, Downwordly, that has the same mechanic in its puzzle mode. It came out almost five years ago and still has a decent set of versus players.

I'm more proud of a later word game that you can play free at https://wellwordgame.com/en If you give it a try, let me know what you think!

As a mobile game dev, this is a bummer. I have been fortunate to get review and preview coverage on a few of my games from TA. There aren't many sites doing what that do. I get that the market has moved and now discovery happens in the App Store and via advertisement dollars, but growing up reading EGM or IGN.com and seeing people excited about a game just from a few screenshots colored me for life. I'm sad mobile game players don't have that opportunity.

You can see a bit of the Walled City in the old Van Damme movie, Blood Sport [1].

There used to be an incredible multi-story arcade outside Tokyo, あなたのウェアハウス [2], with two of the floors being themed as KWC. The weathering on all the elements (including the escalator and crane games!) was fantastic.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smGHdOU4Qu4

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warehouse_Kawasaki

I first heard of this project here on HN when I shared a project I finished with a friend to accomplish a similar goal for iOS widgets[1]. I still use a server-delivered JSON file for a live widget on my iPhone. I think there's a lot of value to this type of delivery even if you can't fully customize the UI.

[1] https://wd.gt/

Awesome article! None of the videos played for me on mobile Safari, but the text descriptions were enough. I do a lot of Unity development and typically just lerp things with different easing curves. It's great to add PID to the toolbox for elements that are more procedural. Thanks for the sharing.

While I was in college, I made a half dozen games and apps for the danger hiptop (branded by T-Mobile as the Sidekick). We had a Microsoft recruiter on campus at Michigan State and it was right after Microsoft acquired danger and lost a bunch of customer data. I think the recruiter liked that I was asking about this issue and not begging for a job. They brought me back the next day to interview and then flew me out to Redmond for an on-site. Not only was the hiptop dev scene a formative experience for me skill-wise, it indirectly led me to Seattle and gave me the chance to work on Xbox, HoloLens, and more.

I was in a similar boat. It helped me to find a collaborator who could inspire me and advance the projects without everything being on my shoulders. It's easy to be paralyzed when you know every single detail of all the work that you alone have to do.

Xbox doesn't provide a game engine, just lower level APIs. Unity is a popular way to get games on Xbox for folks who can't build their own engine. Further, things like HoloLens run Unity as a first class dev environment.

I used to work on both Xbox and HoloLens at Microsoft, but this is all public info.

I agree that there are lots of poorly made games that predictably flop. However, it's also worth noting all the bits of a game that matter outside of the executable. Knowing where your audience hangs out and how to reach them, having the ability to make compelling trailers and screenshots, having press contacts to help promote your game, crafting a viable monetization strategy, etc. All these things matter more than most observers would think when differentiating between known and unknown games.

It also really depends how you define "successful". I've put out 3 mobile games in the last few years as a solo or mostly-solo game dev[1]. Each one has been game of the day on iOS and received other prominent featuring. From a critical and editorial standpoint my games were successful. From a "is this a sustainable career that supports me financially" standpoint, not so much.

[1] You can find my games at https://birdcartel.com Let me know if you think they fall into the unfun/janky bucket.

> "There is nothing bad with any of this."

My experience has been that once a small business is snatched up by a firm, customer service goes out the window and the focus on efficiency leads to a marked decline in overall quality. I'm sure it's all gravy for the people making money though.

I found this super frustrating too. Luckily you can disable it: https://www.reddit.com/r/appletv/comments/116mtfp/how_to_hid...

Definitely a strange default setting to have it enabled.

Thanks for giving it a shot! I used to automatically show the tutorial but then some folks would play on a phone versus their computer and have to see the tutorial again and skip it. I probably swung too far in accommodating that scenario and left new players confused when I removed that feature. I'll try to improve it, thanks for the feedback.

I mentioned it in another comment, but the mobile version (also free) is where I put most of my energy. If you liked the web version, please give it a try and let me know what you think. Appreciate the support!

At its core, Pine Tar is about making poker hands (two pair, full house, etc) with five cards using up to two extra deals. You can choose to keep cards around and replace other cards on each deal. There are usually ~12 hand types you can score, if you can't score anything the game is over.

As you play, you can use your winnings to buy items that give you an edge and transition your play from pure luck to more skill based. Along the way, you can have your fortune read to unlock puzzles that reward you with magick runes that can transform cards to allow you to score hands that at first glance are impossible.

Here's the trailer which shows some gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuLh8Ft4Uhg

I haven't yet tried an ad-supported game (with an IAP to remove ads), but I think those perform the best overall. Personally I'm opposed to ads for a number of reasons (privacy, bandwidth usage, ad quality), so I'm not sure I'll ever try one of those.

I was lucky to get my first game, Downwordly, as Game of the Day on iOS. This plus other sustained featuring (Essential Word Games) led to 50k+ downloads. Unfortunately I did a bad job with the IAP value proposition (both explaining it and what it actually is), so the conversion rate is abysmal (<1%). Pine Tar Poker was also Game of the Day a few weeks back and had some sustained featuring (Best New Games). That let me ship a few hundred copies over a few days but once the featuring dried up, the sales did too.

Well Word is currently featured under Best New Games and is getting decent download numbers in the mid 100s and has a great conversion rate of ~15%. I'm hopeful that it can continue to spread through word of mouth and the built-in score sharing.

I have made next to nothing on Android. I've never (that I know of) had any featuring and the Play Store doesn't have as many editorial pushes in my experience. To be honest, the download count and revenue from Android is such that I only release games there because it takes less than an hour or so (thanks Unity) and my brother uses Android.

I'm currently working on an expanded version of Pine Tar Poker for console + Steam so I'm interested to see what I can learn in that space! Let me know if you have any other questions. I hope hearing about my experience so far was helpful.

Really appreciate the feedback, thank you. Truth be told, the website is kind of an after thought version of the game. The Android and iOS version are the real deal. If I haven't lost you entirely, and you like word games, please give it a shot on your phone.

I'm slowly building some success in Android and iOS games (most revenue comes from iOS!). I've got a paid game that is a yahtzee-inspired poker game with just a touch of cosmic horror [1] and a free-to-play word game [2].

I've been fortunate to get some featuring by Apple which has driven most of my sales. I'm hopeful the daily word game, Well Word, will start to take off because it's the best game I've made and I'm really proud of it.

I started working on Pine Tar Poker while I had a different job about 13 months ago and I've since switched to trying my hand at converting my side project into my full-time gig [3]! My short-term goal is to be able to pay my mortgage with the proceeds.

[1] https://www.pinetarpoker.com

[2] https://wellwordgame.com

[3] https://www.birdcartel.com

Great notes! There was a challenge mode where you could copy challenge "seeds" from the mobile game to the web and back. It checked your clipboard for that. I have that mode disabled so great call to disable the creepy clipboard check!

If you like the web version, please try the mobile one. It's much richer and has more modes :)

Edit - Should no longer ask for clipboard access.

I've noticed this too. It's mentioned in other comments below, but I definitely think it's easier to see the human behind something if it looks like a hobby project. I'm not sure what camp my games fall into, but I've had limited traction on HN, even though I'm just a lone human trying to hack it at full-time indie game dev.

Ironically I just launched a new word game today so we'll see if it makes the front page! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35184884

I needed a break from the last game that took 12+ months of nights and weekends so I built a daily word game. Site is in React and mobile apps are in Unity. Happy to answer any questions!

Done! Thanks for letting me know, I totally missed that section.

Great suggestion. I couldn't find an audio source I liked. I'll take a look, thanks.

KanjiVG is awesome. I used it for a free kanji app I made for iOS and Android. Figuring out how to write an SVG parser + renderer wasn't as tricky as I thought when I set out to do it. https://www.bjmalicoat.com/projects/kanjibook

Hah, sorry to hear it didn't meet expectations! I love Capy too so you've still got my support :)

Love that they handle images too! Something I haven't needed yet, but can see the need for. Your point about causing more problems than it solves is why I had a knee-jerk avoidance to the official loc package. Seems like I was wrong about that.

BTW Love the style of Aztez.

Thanks for the tip! I've updated the article (and I'll soon update my game!).

Nice! I'll take a look at that. Loc is funny because there are clearly tons of tools (both paid and free), but it's not that hard of a problem so it's easy to have the "not invented here" mentality and just do it yourself! I hoped by writing it up in a very Unity-specific way, I'd save some people some time even if they use another tool or write it themselves.

I love stuff like this. Around 2008 or so I was working on a Java game for the T-Mobile Sidekick (aka hiptop). The platform let you register url scheme handlers so I registered "drod" (the game was a from-scratch port of Deadly Rooms of Death, a classic shareware game). Since the game was a 16x16 grid-based game with 3 layers, it was super efficient at expressing levels, including monsters and locks and keys, with just a limited number of bits. On my website I had "DLC" in the form of drod://[base64 encoded level here]. It always filled me with joy that users already downloaded the levels when they navigated to the website. Clicking the link just opened the game with the data they already had on their device.

9+ is the age rating. I released it in the middle of December.