Making "LCD, Please"
dukope.comI 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.
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:
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.)
For those who don't have the time to watch the video, how much is "not expensive"?
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.)
This was exactly my starting reference for the project…!
The esp32 has a low power coprocessor; have you considered keeping the main processor off most of the time and utilizing the coprocessor for more logic? The tooling is kind of bad for the base model but it gets better with the more modern variants.
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).
Related discussion about the game from 3 months ago:
Discussing the playable version of the LCD game on a browser:
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.
That game is so much fun. I wish they really made this handheld lol
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.
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.
The original is. But the GP was talking about the "LCD, Please" version which doesn't have any kind of narrative.
I was answering that commenter's question about the original, which they stated they had not played.
But I could have made that more obvious, in my reply.
Yeah I didn't realise. Not so interested anymore.
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$
You can actually get really good battery life out of LCDs nowadays. Sharp makes a memory lcd (that the playdate uses, which Lucas is also making a game for) that is very low power.
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)
Is this to gauge interest for an actual product?