[00:00:05]
>> This is great but I know that there. Were tough part is I get to rely on the record right. Which the high. Or the top of the title. You know all the focus really on your job you should be when. You are really. Right and it really works well mysterious I mean the fact that.

[00:00:53]
It's not that hard to find love. On the part of the it loads of work. The software for. Writing out. For my. New year we're. Going to mention I think we have one screen working there. So I wait for that to. Get settled. Just start Ok All right I'll just start you guys can smoke this way a little bit.

[00:01:42]
So this is what we're talking about this is play date this is a handheld console we introduced in May of this year and it's gotten a lot of attention it's by panic Incorporated that's the company I work for it's a very special company with the term i Phone here so I can do my presentation.

[00:02:01]
Here we go. So panic we are based in Portland Oregon and most people think panic is a startup because we're pretty small we have about 26 people but in fact we've been around for a long time it's been around for 23 years it was founded by 2 guys named Stephen Frank and cable Sasser they.

[00:02:25]
Went to high school together then dropped out of college together to start writing Macsoftware and they worked on a couple of applications of the most famous one is called transmit. Is a file transfer client the other one is coda which is a web development environment and these are sort of boring activities in a way but the thing that really distinct distinguish Panix apps is they had a real flair for design so they took these kind of Monday in tax tasks and made them interesting and that's kind of were panicked made its name all these years and so they did mac apps for a long time and.

[00:03:04]
This is the picture of our office here and so many caps were the primary thing we got into. But on a 15th year with I joined in 2010 and right after that we were looking to do something different we had done software the whole time and we thought well what would you do what if we do kind of this weird hardware project something for our friends and family in our kind of oil customers that we could do this kind of a celebration of panic now we've been around for a while and.

[00:03:35]
We thought of a bunch of different ideas we thought well maybe we'll do a desktop clock maybe a calculator or something but we decided it was a update to an old Nintendo Game and Watch style handheld video game and this is an example of those these were popular in the eighty's they used calculator technology to enable a handheld video game but that was about the only way you could do it back then and I don't know if you can tell by looking at this but the gimmick here.

[00:04:04]
Is that they use kind of a stencil to display the graphics on the screen it's not what we would call it a bit mapped or pixel map where you could draw anything anywhere you can basically turn on and off little segments of them splay and if we. Look here you can see that this is what the display looks like they have the stencil and everything's pre-drawn on there for the game so we thought well let's do a game like this this is a really cool idea so we started designing our own game what we do is we turned transmit into a game this was our concept so you're going to go down the road here in your transmit truck and pick up different kinds of files as they came down the road and this is kind of what it looked like and so we thought well this will be interesting maybe to do to build this thing now that we have a prototype of it.

[00:04:51]
And so from here we sort of looking for technology that could make this possibly happen and we found this thing screen that looked like one of those screens in the game and watch game. This one happen to be used pixels it instead of being a stencil but it looked close enough to kind of resemble that it's from Sharp It's called a memory l.c.d. and it's very low power almost like a kilo it isn't quite as well power as that but it kind of looks like that is very reflective.

[00:05:22]
And we had the idea it also can do cool stuff and it looks like it can do shades of gray but in fact that's just black and white this is a test we did early on to see what it could do and we successfully portable game onto it and so there we go we have our device now what we started realizing unfortunately is that these old style game and watch games actually aren't that fun they're too limiting now intend to do a couple fun ones they had like 3 that were really good but I think there's only 3 good ones that can be done so we decided to instead of just restricting ourselves to this old style of stencil game we would just open it up and any kind of thing was possible that you could do on this screen.

[00:06:04]
So moving. Forward now we're going to try to make this thing real we started talking to a company that could help us actually design what it was going to look like and so we spoke to a company called Teenage engineering very Swedish design firm very well known for their high end audio products and music synthesizers as well they make just incredibly beautiful stuff they are most famous for this this is the Opi one it's about this big and it is just an amazing product it's like $1300.00 So it's expensive but it's totally worth it and they have this great u.i. that didn't sort of geek out.

[00:06:45]
For a 2nd describing it. On their screen they use color so they have orange things green things blue things and white things if you want to with just the blue thing you turn the blue dial if you want to just the orange thing you turn the orange dial and I don't know why nobody has done this that I've seen but it works really really well and there's all sorts of cool interfaces they have anyway just a great product and all their stuff is beautiful I'm going to show a few more things here these are what they call their pocket operators these are little handheld synthesizers that are $50.00 each they can all linked together via cable to make really complicated cool music together.

[00:07:25]
This is an awesome stereo they designed for Ikea. This is a really cool disposable digital camera they did for Ikea you can notice the u.s.b. port on the upper left where you can plug in your computer and then download the photos that you've taken. And these are some cool analog synthesizers they've done as well so they do great stuff so we wrote to them and we said you know we have this idea for a handheld video game and we love the stuff you make would you like to help us with this and we got an email back that it was one sentence that said Yes absolutely which kind of blew our minds because they do great stuff why would they want to work with us but they did and so we started we sent them our design for what things look like right now it was a little square that you saw before it looked like this actually this was our very sophisticated 3 d. printed case with the game running on it and so we sent in this picture among other things and what they sent us back was this and we had several reactions to this one was it has a crank on it and that seemed amazing actually it was immediately my 1st reaction is like we have to do the crank the crane sounds not only that that's a key to not being a Gameboy actually Otherwise we're just a d. pad and 2 buttons but this is something really cool and different that not only such as a product but also could really actually be fun so it seemed like a really great idea so we love that the other thing was overall we just love the look of it and the 3rd thing was like holy cow The thing is really finished we finished and we thought it was going to be we were shooting for I think 13 or 14 millimeters thick and this was 8 and we were like How are we ever going to do this but we love how it looks we went through a few more interation it's design here.

[00:09:22]
This is one of the kickstand on the side. This was a really cool yellow one that I still kind of look back and like that's really cool and we knew that. This one has kind of a dial on the side instead of a crank. They made some wood prototypes.

[00:09:43]
And then here's some other designs with this cool crazy deep add style thing the deep end of the directional controller and they have this weird star configuration that never seen before and probably will never actually see in real life but it was a really interesting idea. And so one things are working on also is what the color of the thing was going to be the design was orange but.

[00:10:07]
One of our founders cable Sasser is a big collector of old Nintendo technology he's really into that old stuff and he buys it all off of the Japanese version of e Bay constantly. The original N.E.'s system intended system in Japan had a disk drive that could go with it that you could go to your local convenience store and download games onto it but there were happened in the us but they did it in Japan and so he had one of these and he held up the disk and he said this is the color I think it should be and it was a really good color so that was sort of the end of the base yellow that's why it's yellow today we went out and looked for yellows that match that and we found this particular one and that's what we're doing.

[00:10:54]
So one of the things about. Play dates is games so a lot of things we've seen things like this on Kickstarter before where you see someone develop some cool piece of hardware and. They finally finish it and they say well we can't wait to see what you guys do with it and the problem is that nobody ever does anything with most of them there's just nothing to do with them and so we want to make sure we delivered playdate with things that were actually fun to do and so we went out and commissioned a bunch of developers to write games for the saying and that was a interesting process because we were like no one's going to want to write games for this this is a black and white screen and a crank is going to do that.

[00:11:38]
But amazingly like almost everyone we approach was really really interested they were really intrigued by the idea of black white graphics one it's it's really easy to do black and white graphics relatively speaking but 2 they just like the fact that this was a different platform for them different than a Playstation different than an i Phone and they were really intrigued by kind of the small scope of it and the fact that it.

[00:11:58]
Felt very different and so one of the developers we got on board was. Kate to talk a hotshot who did the game Katamari Damacy if you played that game with the rolling ball we were trying to collect all the things it was a very big deal several years ago very well known and so in his game that you use the crank to control the flow of time to try and meet your girlfriend time you never get your date on time by the way that always it never works out she's always just pleased with you but you could use the crank to go forwards and backwards in time and it's a really clever nice use of the crane.

[00:12:38]
Anyway that's one of the titles of that's one of the titles that was developed for it and so we didn't want to just we treasure how many games we're going to do and we decided on like 1213 something like that but then we also decided. We don't want to dump all the games on the device at the beginning and have you noticed people kind of like looking through them and playing them you know for 30 seconds and going on to the next one we want to have like time for people to savor these games and so we decided on this concept called a season of games and what we did is we with the 12 games that we've commissioned we deliver one week to your device every Monday morning there's an l.c.d. on top that will light up and say hey your new game is here and for a week that's the game and then your device and they accumulate as they go along so you keep getting more and more games but that way they don't you don't go through them in 5 minutes you have some time to kind of look them over to play them concurrently with your friends to have that experienced that shared experience of surprises because you don't know what's coming up on the next Monday so that was a weird concept for game distribution.

[00:13:44]
Meanwhile back on the side of the design one of the things the original teenager in concept had was a slider beneath the buttons and I dunno if you member in the Orange tribe there is like a switch that could slide back and forth and that was going to be a controller as well that developers could use in the games and we kind of decided that too weird controllers was one too many and so we kind of got rid of that one they eventually are showing here is they converted to a touch controller after a period of time they're suggesting what if you just kind of slid your thumb along that the dots right here on the screen that could be another way to input and it say it does some cool but we kind of we didn't want played to be this weird grab bag of bizarre control schemes we wanted it to be very much a game thing that had a crank basically and so that was that was going to be our simplified story of what's going on so we got rid of.

[00:14:41]
The dots here the little nubs. And yeah let's see so and then we also were looking at various other weird ideas I mean playdates was going to be. It surprises the surprise games that are delivered and so we thought well what if we go crazy with surprises like what if we have the whole thing covered in l t D's inside of the case and like all of a sudden halfway through the season like the whole thing just lights up like a Christmas tree we didn't do this but these are the kind of ideas were tossing around to make the device feel special to make it feel like it was always going to do something different and unexpected.

[00:15:19]
One thing that we spent a lot of time talking about was the control scheme if you remember on the previous Well I'll get to in a 2nd just there's really no consensus in the industry about how this is supposed to be done this is the x. box controller and they use a b. for their primary controls intend to use this b.a..

[00:15:41]
And then Suni do something completely different where they use shapes to distinguish an x. strangely enough is their primary button even though x. to us means reject for them it means except Anyway that's what they do and so we debated endlessly about what this should be we talk about all these different ideas we had x. and 0 and 12 and filled in hollowing a b. And so we debated don't we actually literally did every one of these for some period of time just endless debates in the company about what it was what would work and what was best.

[00:16:16]
Some of the coolest ones that looked really nice like I like the fill dot and the empty dot for example but when you're telling somebody how to play a game saying fill dot button an empty dot button like it just gets very cumbersome after a period of time so we kind of ditch the ones that you couldn't explain very simply and we ended up settling finally.

[00:16:37]
On an a.b. but with one exception they are not on play date the right button is just simply easier to press than the left button it's just in a nicer spot for your thumb and so we use that as the primary button the button that takes you through the u.i..

[00:16:52]
Unless you select things and I couldn't quite stomach our primary button being be so what we did is we flipped them and we went to a instead which is in fact exactly what Nintendo did on their very 1st controller and I always wonder why did they make it be it always seemed so weird to me but then all of a sudden it became very clear.

[00:17:15]
Another problem we had to deal with. Is that Ok so we have on the top we have a lock button that works for like your i Phone lock button. And for most people it feels like a power button but it's not really a power button that doesn't turn your iphone off for example and likewise this doesn't turn the play it off it puts it into kind of a low power mode where it's still doing wife I stuff and Bluetooth stuff in the background.

[00:17:42]
But there are times where you still need to turn the device off. If the device crashed or it's in some state where it can't get out of hope with doesn't happen often but it's possible you need to be able to turn it off and so what we did is we added a little reset button that's inside the crank storage area and by that I mean the crank itself is collapsible it can open and close and when it's closed it goes in there we take it out you can use a paper clip and then push it in the little hole that's inside there and then reset the device.

[00:18:14]
And a lot of electronics have something like this now we ran into a problem though this is the bottom of our device you're looking at the edge on and so we have u.s.b. c. to power it and send data we have a headphone jack and then we have a microphone right there at the games can be used as audio input and we sent these out to developers and told them they can reset the device by using a paper clip some of them were shoving a paper clip in the microphone because it looked like a hole where I might wear a paperclip should just go it's just that's what you think you're thinking when you see this thing and so.

[00:18:52]
I thought about how we're going to fix this and we could like to label that microphone for example. But then we thought well what if we just try going with a different design just a different set of holes that might look make it look not like a reset hole but also like a microphone and so we debated these various different alternatives and finally came up with this we just added 2 more dots 2 more holes in the side of it and no one seems to do it anymore so that was kind of a nice use of design a sort of solve this problem or maybe and being too gracious there was a bad design before and we maybe made it except the pull with the 3 dots.

[00:19:32]
Another thing that we have really struggled with is. The deep at this is what playdate looks like internally and the jihad is really tricky because in most game controllers most of them are very thick They're like the stick a few inches and so there's a lot of room for the g. pad to depress and give you a lot of very satisfying feel as you depress it but we have barely any space at all we're only 9 millimeters thick plus the battery is right behind a deep Pad So there isn't much room and so we've gone through I think 6 iterations now in the deep pad to try and make one that can feel good even though there isn't much space for it and we've settled on one that where it feels very great cliquey it doesn't depress as much as what most people are used to but the quick in this kind of makes up for that and makes us feel like it's a still a satisfying experience.

[00:20:28]
Now separately panic one thing that happened about this time was some friends of panics came to us and said hey we have this game that we wrote for p.c. ups so I went too far here going around the way. It's going to play it's a movie it's supposed to play that's why I'm doing this.

[00:20:54]
So there you go Ok the movie of the game called Fire Watch and so this these friends of ours came to us and said hey we need some money to finish this game off and we need some help marketing it and so panic got into this other weird business of publishing games in addition to doing our mac apps we hadn't announced play date yet so nobody knew we were doing that yet but we started doing marketing for fire watch and fortunately for us the came out about 3 or 4 years ago and all the Playstation x. box and p.c. and mac and it did really really well.

[00:21:29]
And the only reason I bring that up is that it gave panic some credibility in the game space which is something we nobody knew what panic was in relation to games we don't need a mac apps before and so the fact that we had this game published. Helped a little bit when we launched playdate.

[00:21:47]
Stuff here this is the box that we've designed for play date using some nice transparent film on the top to give it some gloss we started doing a lot of testing. I'm played as well so we have like 50 of these that we we had a big crate that we put on top of our roof we have access to a roof at our office and so on the hottest day of the year we put them all up there and run them as hard as we can only launch to make sure the screens still work at the end of the day and that's actually gone pretty well.

[00:22:20]
Yeah just a lot of play dates and the crank has been a really hard one to to crack it's always worked very reliably in terms of like protecting the position of the crank but making sure that the handle doesn't break is been really hard and making sure that the feel of the crank is right it needs to be not completely loose we want when you let go of the crank that we want to stay there we don't just flop down.

[00:22:48]
But we also don't want to be too tough either and so that's been a struggle and so we're actually in the midst of a hopefully final crank redesign they're going to be trying out in the next prototype hardware and I hope we cracked it then we're close we're still we're very close but not quite there yet.

[00:23:05]
And one thing that happened so I mentioned before the black and white screen we have a sharp memory l.c.d.. About a year and a half ago I kind of had a nervous breakdown about it because I was playing it one night at home and I actually a very bad light next to my bed but I was kind of freaking out because like I can't see the screen very well now in fact I can't see anything very well there I can't read books there either very well but I was like no one is going to buy this thing the screen is not good enough like people expect their i Phone screen they don't expect this weird different reflective screen and so I talked to cable one of the founders and managed to convince him that we maybe had a problem also.

[00:23:49]
And we started looking for alternatives I went around looking for old lead screens which are the screens that glow. And I'm in my eyes we are already really far in the project and to minimize changes we wanted to get one that was the same size and same resolution and there's in fact there's nothing remotely like it in terms of size so that was a dead end there is a technology that.

[00:24:13]
You can't backlight this display because it's opaque on the back and you can't light it from there but there's technology somebody makes that is from the side it will light it on the side and then a film that has laser etched and so it causes the light to kind of reflect in the screen back into your eyes and we tried that out and the unfortunate fact is it made it look really cheap it made it look like you know the gas pump at a Chevron station like that kind of like sort of weird kind of washed out bluish gray sort of thing it lost the beauty that the screen had now you do need to see the screen in decent light to enjoy it that's fair enough but when you do it looks really beautiful and really different.

[00:24:59]
And so after trying these things out not only panning out we decided well we just have to own this experience it's going to be a we're going to classify it as a premium black and white experience which it is it is it's beautiful but which side to own it.

[00:25:14]
And so we moved on from there and the screen to be fair is really nice I mean this is compared to the original Gameboy which in our memory is looks better than this photo in Ford's but it's very greenish and very smeary. And the plate it's green is super sharp and bright and so it actually is pretty cool.

[00:25:34]
So. What happened next so one of our. Edicts all along was that we were not going to announce play dates until the very very end when it was completely done because we didn't want to have this we didn't want to couple things One we didn't want to have a big public failure with this weird thing that we were trying but the other thing was we didn't want to announce a prematurely and then like have it like drag on for a year and then 2 years before it actually came out we want people to forget about image when the time we announced it and it came out and so.

[00:26:09]
We're going with a variant now. This is Edge magazine this is one of the most prominent video game magazines in the industry in fact they're a magazine only they don't even have a website it's just print only and a lot of industry luminaries read this thing Edge magazine we give the preview a playdate and they unexpectedly adored they really really loved it and they said we want to put you on the cover of the magazine which is something we in a 1000000 years did not think was possible.

[00:26:39]
The catch was we had to announce it a month left later in this past May which was kind of terrifying because we are not done yet we're we still have a little ways to go and play date but. We debated and the slate actually and we eventually decided Ok We're going to make the plunge we're going to do this we want to cover story also one of the founders has been collecting Edge magazine sense that came out in 1980 has every single issues meant a lot for him to be on the cover of ads so we decided to do it and this was our edge cover that came out in May when we announced it and it made a huge splash people really got into it and the fact that we announced with Ed gave us a lot of credibility to believe people believed it was a real thing.

[00:27:27]
And so it's been a mixed blessing one I mean it's a mainly good and it's been extremely motivating to hear all the positive response we've gotten from people. About the device and it's also motivated us to like make faster quicker decisions there is no more redesigning anything now it's like time to like actually be done and ship this thing out of it's out in the world so on balance it's actually worked out to be a really good thing.

[00:27:56]
And so like I said we announced it and the reaction was super great like people loved it way beyond what we expected so we had we're not selling them yet but we have a sign of on our website where you can be in the mailing list to be notified for when the device becomes available and my hope was we would have like maybe 20000 sign ups after like 3 or 4 weeks and we had 20000 I think after the 1st 36 hours and then now we have I think 140000 sign ups.

[00:28:30]
More encouraging. Mention this for a 2nd big surprise was how you covered in all these mainstream publications to like variety Hollywood Reporter c.n.n. like I was not at all expecting that so that really blew us away really seem to be resonating with people of this device had this word crane had this weird stream had this weird concept of games coming to you over time that were going to be a surprise that all seem to work pretty well these for most people.

[00:29:01]
So yeah so there's a lot of good natured humor about the crane This is from the games who did know man sky which is a huge Play Station game but this was some of their ideas super butter churn we've heard of Hafiz ideas before we have had a lot of these ships going on hyper organ grinder the create products promises a lot of sort of weird concepts for games.

[00:29:22]
But then like this guy in Japan made his own play date. Now. It's an Android tablet with some sort of weird attachment to the u.s.b. port but then he wrote The game also I mean his record of what he interpreted the game being based on the video he released but.

[00:29:42]
There was a lot of stuff like this the kind of shock that says well this material is I think within like 48 hours after we announced it. And there was a Lego version of playdate that we saw very quickly and then. I can see there was moments holding a play date.

[00:30:05]
All sorts of play to cartoons and animation and played 8 characters animated in 3 d. the song blew our minds we were not expecting this and one thing I forgot to mention earlier we also got this weird tweet from this guy in Japan. He's like hey I saw this coffee machine at the 711 and if you look closely this is actually the play date screen this is the only other application that we're aware of in the world using the same screen as us or in the Japanese 7 eleventh's they have the same thing and to be fair it looks really nice so that's kind of nice but I don't know why.

[00:30:42]
I don't know why they use it I don't know why people are using it but here we are. Now we expect hoping that a certain kind of crowd of people were going to get played ate and they were probably the kind of people that like Max the like games like fire watch they're a little more into a creative experience to something it's a little different and unique but we also knew there'd be a crowd of people that would not get the idea at all like this saying this is so pathetic compared to a Play Station Why would anybody want this this is dumb and so I get this perverse pleasure out of looking at these terrible comments about about play date I would like bring them out loud in the office and then cable gets mad at me it's like stop reading them.

[00:31:25]
But. I kind of love them this way because I know that they're not people who are going to understand the concept they just kind of knew that going into it. Yes This guy's going to wait until it's on sale for $30.00 the sad truth is that it cost us $95.00 to make a play date so this guy is going to wait a very long time before that's going to happen it's played will be expensive to make we're going to sell for $150.00 with the games but can't go to 30 it's not going to happen.

[00:31:56]
So this is one of the points we get a lot of the crank is a gimmick that's what's one play to get actually the biggest complaint we get is that why doesn't the current power it like every people actually get mad that doesn't power the device and it's like well we have u.s.b. which is a way better way to power this thing than a crank and the crank is a cool controller but like that doesn't with certain people and so the fact is we made a power device that had to be like this very grindy motion have to be like a much bigger device it tried to crank for a couple of hours to get it like charged up but anyway so some people are really hung up on that aspect this is another good one.

[00:32:37]
Would be gobsmacked with some of the ways a smartphone in front of them. And this is what happens when hipsters get the sign things that's a good one also. But to be fair with the people that did get it we got a lot of very good responses also I think it I think in response to these people this guy Gary when I wrote this tweet which I really grates it's a little it's a little over the top but but I appreciate it.

[00:33:08]
And then this next one I'm going to show I mean what hasn't the show because it's so over the top but just kind of shows the level of enthusiasm that played it generated this is from John Gruber who did during fireball it's a very prominent tech blog and is coming here the story is about played it the most amazing and exciting product announcement for me since the original i Phone and we got a lot of flak for that because White and John did 2 for like well how could that possibly be true and I don't think that's true either but.

[00:33:39]
Fort The key phrase there is for me it seemed to touch a nerve with him that a small company come out with a cool device that was interesting and fun. I love this one to this guy Mike Rundle search is from a design perspective I love this one I'm going to think more about what played it for x. is meaning a simpler expression of x. that most thought would not be viable viable but it's so it's really designed with focus on Joy that surpasses expectations and other X.'s in the market so I thought it was a great concept the one I could think of was the we from the intended.

[00:34:19]
That. The we didn't amazing job of taking existing technology that was already out in the market in fact old technology there graphics are way behind like what Microsoft and Sony do but. They we combined it in a cool way to make something different to offer a different experience and.

[00:34:37]
There's still plenty of time for us to screw up playdates So I hate sounding like I'm declaring victory here we are a long way away from that and it's. Not going to do that but. For the people that seem to like playdate it seems like we tapped into that same sort of thing.

[00:34:55]
Another one just nice and nice to eat as well. So as I mentioned before we're not done and so we still have a ways to go we're still working on the crank we're still working on the games to make sure we have enough fun really fun games to deliver in the season.

[00:35:17]
And then when I go to faster. Which openness Yes Ok so. We've had a lot of issues over the years we do mac software and then we did i.r.s. software as well and I o. s. is obviously very locked down system. And that's been frustrating for us we want to be there stuff we want to release that we can't because we know it will go through the App Store be Apple's control of it.

[00:35:44]
So we did our own device we're going to make sure that it's completely open so we're going to have a public development kit the developers can download and write games for and the key thing is they can disturb the games without our input they don't have to go through us they can release play games and put them on the market without our intervention that's a really key part of what we're going to be doing.

[00:36:08]
Accessibility is something we're working on also we were just recently at Microsoft talking to them about their accessible controller they came out with for the x. box recently we want that to ideally work with play or at least will do some things that will make it easier for play to use in different environments for different different abilities.

[00:36:28]
And the key is that play date has limitations to it that you don't see in other platforms. That I don't want to make it's like a bad thing Play Station x. box and switch can do amazing things they're incredible I love playing those games but what seems to have resonated with the developers and I mention this already we have a lot of developers setting up for this we have about 10000 that signed up to write play date software.

[00:36:56]
Which is way more than we expected I expected 50 and so that people have really really resonate with people but the limitations play it seems to seem to inspire that kind of creativity I used to work for Disney I work with a guy named Tim Delaney who was a really prominent Imagineer there and he was going to tell me a story about how when the guys who work in real estate at Imagineering buy land for a theme park they always buy the most pristine perfect flat piece of land.

[00:37:26]
Possible and then he was saying you know what I want them to buy something with this huge cliff in the middle of it like something that I have to work around and think about I don't want to I want to have to like start with like some preconditions and like get me thinking give me some some restrictions I have to work around and I think playdate feels like that to developers.

[00:37:52]
Let's see here if you want to find out more about playdate you can follow us on Twitter at playdate or you can also go to our website play got date and sign up to be notified for when it comes out when it or when it goes up for presale.

[00:38:06]
And then this is my information here we go back read one of his my Twitter and then that's my e-mail address so you can write me about and ask anything you want about a playdate and. That's the end of my talk I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have about playdate about how we developed it or or anything.

[00:38:34]
It's. Like. That's a great question we're still trying to fit so we asked about how has the response impacted our production plans and we've had to scale it up but the big problem is we don't know how up that is we were actually I would go goal was like if we could sell $10000.00 play dates that was going to be enough to satisfy us that that would have made it worthwhile for us to do this project.

[00:39:05]
But we were going to somewhere than 10000 now but how many more we don't know but we're scaling up our production now we can make about 500 a day currently and might need to increase that further and we're trying to think of different ways to sell it like maybe we're going to like have orders in batches so you kind of like buy into like the batch that the liver is on December 12th.

[00:39:26]
And you buy into the batch that the liver is on February 13th or whatever something like that so as we can afford because they're $100.00 each $10000.00 is a $1000000.00 I think. And so we can't afford to be building a lot of play dates that don't get sold so we're probably going to have to match orders very closely to making the devices now that's fine except for there are 2 things it takes some time to make them and the big thing is it takes time to acquire the parts some of the parts have 6 month lead times to them which makes it really complicated to figure out because we have to make predictions on the most expensive parts in order to do that and one thing I forgot to mention one of the big ironies of playdate is that our screen is so much more expensive than a color screen it turns out we didn't know this when we started we didn't really look over screens so we didn't even price them out but I think a good l. led screen is like $3.00 or 4 dollars and our screen is $12.00 I think it's just because it's us and $711.00 that are using them so anyway we're stuck with it which is fine but our costs are high and so it's an expensive device that's one of the reasons we want to be $30.00.

[00:40:36]
Already. Or. I'm sorry there's 2 things going on One is that we went out to a bunch of indie game developers prominent names in the industry. To mention a few like I mentioned kit mentioned kit to talk a hotshot but also a guy named Zack Gage Bennett Fati these are you may not know these but they're sort of in the indie community like they're well known.

[00:41:02]
And then more that we haven't announced yet to get them on board to do the initial season of games so when it came out we would have games ready to go and so the the 2nd effort is releasing this public s.t.k. development kit to to the public and seeing what comes out of it our hope is that will get a lot of good games that we can either.

[00:41:22]
See and then fund or use our season mechanism to elevate them and get them out to more people so that's a real that's what we're looking at right now. I think. That's a great question one thing that we are about to start trying is an upside down mode where you flip it over and all the controls go upside down and then you can twist it with your left hand and that might leave some of that but it's a concern and we were thinking about it but and we're going to find out if it actually works or not.

[00:42:01]
So. All. Is. This is what. It's all or. What. We originally kind of Fabia want to off that was the original concept it was going be a fun thing we do but we put so much effort into it now and it seems to be resonating at least so far that we're hoping it can be a sustainable business or something we're going to find that out and we put it up for presale and see how it goes it's still an open question will there be a play to at some point in the future I mean it all depends how it goes we haven't thought about that at all yet.

[00:42:48]
But that's our hope I mean if we can make this into a business that could produce this kind of interesting hardware going forward provide an alternative I mean my hope is that the video game market is so big now they can contain this niche inside of it I think it can but we'll find that out.

[00:43:10]
Yeah I got one I forgot. That's it right there it's a very tiny. And it's exactly the size of a postage no. Strangely we only found that out 3 weeks ago I just set it on top of a post and it's a it's that size that we've always been describing it's like it's smaller than you think it's this is it's a post and finally realize that it's him and the crate comes out like that and let's see here Gregory we have had some issues yes it's and it's been it's been hard to get a reliable we think are we have a final design it's going to going to fix that but yeah absolutely here.

[00:43:53]
Yeah so it's kind of a speaker. To actually. Say. That's how it works that's the crazy sound to go with that crank in game that I showed you early earlier. Yeah it's got a u.s.b. port headphone jack and that's the 3300 microphone that I mentioned before. And the power button with the idea that lights up when you have a new game on the device and yeah so that's what it looks like.

[00:44:27]
Yet. Nobody's better Nyad it gets a bar actually they just I just well I got pre-check and so they're not that they're not that discriminatory they're they just kind of like got you through with most things and so I keep I kept in the back and they were fine actually we I wonder I did have a problem he had I think 20 of them in the bag and I think I did raise some questions about what it was there wasn't a serious problem but it did make them look twice as good one of things that we don't probably 500 so far all the various finishes and different buttons strengths and crank tensions and so on and so all of us have like 30 of these just kind of like stacked up on our desk at work so there's a quite a few of them around.

[00:45:13]
Here or. It's that's a good question. We're trying not to push on the style or that hard we want to feel like something new even though it's got Certainly. Aspects of the old it looks kind of like a Gameboy at same time it looks like an updated Game Boy it's thin it's tiny and the games that we're coming out with have sort of have a more modern sensibility they aren't retreads of like what you played in the eighty's it's and there's no emulation mode that you play old intended games it's all new stuff so we're going to try to take this line where we want to make it feel new I think what we're trying to push the newness of it in the marketing and let people feeling the nostalgia on their own and not but I really emphasize that point so much and we're targeting actually kind of the more indie gamer scene more than kids and they get like 2020 year olds 30 year olds that kind of range.

[00:46:16]
And kids can play it they can deflate the games we're going to come out with there should we not inappropriate for kids but like one for instance is kind of a film to our should venture which won't resonate with a 5 year old so much so it's not really targeted for them not inappropriate for them that we're we're targeting a little bit older.

[00:46:41]
Yet not not currently now you know it was going to be the one color for now we wanted to make it the purchase process simple and make our manufacturing process simple Also So it's just yellow. That's a good question. No not really what do you thinking of what does that when you ask what do you what are you thinking of.

[00:47:10]
Interesting Ok yes I did that's a good idea I mean one of the things we thought about while we were developing it was do we have a companion app on your phone that you download games through that or a high score here manage through out or something but we wanted it to be a standalone experience we didn't want to be dependent upon some other piece of technology you had.

[00:47:30]
All right that's a that's a dog I think. So we kind of tried to stay away from. From parent having to pair with your phone for example but certainly there are inching ideas that yours is one certainly and then we talk about also like adding like support for like a u.s.b. controller so you can plug in an x. box controller and use that to control the games for people that that would feel better to them.

[00:47:56]
For accessibility reasons so there are things like that we're looking into but we're certainly open to a lot of ideas it does have a wife I am Bluetooth built him so there are also opportunities to kind of do cool community communication stuff with other devices over those interfaces and that we may try to interface with.

[00:48:14]
Teenage nearing synthesisers through this as well. Yeah sure it's running our customer with us but it is you can develop games currently in one of 2 languages you can do it in Lua which is a scripting language which is fairly easy to do a little slower in performance but still it's very nice and then see also if you want something that's a little more hardcore performance or you can mix the 2 so right the easy part solution and the performance sensitive parts in c. And we're also a lot more than one out in the future we're looking at ways to make it really easy to program for people who have never program before who so they can get their game on there and so they will have more to announce when we actually ship the device.

[00:49:13]
Is a good question so it kind of hands and how we end up doing game distribution certainly for the season games the ones that come through us those are all going to have to meet our our. Codes for what's appropriate and what's fun. We may also have a game store possibly And in that case we may do some moderation of that.

[00:49:35]
At the same time because we want to enable complete openness somebody could put out again it's inappropriate in the same way they can put it on in pregame for your p.c. or your mac for example that's the thing that can happen and so you know that's part of what you get when you enable that kind of freedom but so we haven't really faced that yet certainly and it will happen some day or something going to write something we don't like.

[00:50:00]
That's kind of what we're going for in a way even though we won't want it but it's part it's part of what you get. We're still figure that out we want to distribute them as far and wide as we possibly can and I think the quality question is whether Cit shipping charges in some countries might be prohibitive or not but we're going to try and ship it everywhere.

[00:50:41]
We're going to use ability testing. The question was what kind of usability testing have we conducted and the answer is not a lot it's mainly been I wish I could say that we had done a more formal process but we didn't really do that we were using our guides trying to sort of figure out does this feel right to us and also going through friends and family and developers also the people writing the games have been the most insightful in terms of like you know it's.

[00:51:06]
It's hard to like push the buttons when I turn the crank at the same time and so we've sometimes moved things around or done various things to make it easier to accomplish that but there's no real formal process we've gone through. Yeah the question is have we applied for any patents No we have not we looked into that initially we're not a very.

[00:51:40]
Patent the company I think where it we kind of I don't know we're not that concerned about it I guess. It does have wife I am Bluetooth it uses the wife I connection to download games each week. So it. Is. The way they do it currently is they way you deliver them on via u.s.b. cable so you don't do you can do your computer and put them on you mount the you plug this in then drag the file onto there there might be ways of things we can do to streamline that to make that a better experience but that would that's sort of the default side loading experience was.

[00:52:27]
It shows up as a hard drive and then you just drag the it's a p.d.f. file and you just drag the game on there and then you eject it and then it's on there. Or. Yeah it's an s. team Microelectronics and 7. Cortex and 7 it's running at $180.00 megahertz which is slightly.

[00:52:54]
Lower than max to save power. There is also in a stress if e.s.p. 32 wife I slashed Bluetooth chip some audio codec chip that I can't recall what it is off the top of my head there's 2 gigs of flash storage and 16 megs of ram. And. I can't think of what else is good to know about it anything specific that you're curious about.

[00:53:26]
2 gigs Yeah. That's interesting because you have. The code compresses very small the graphics compress really small the audio does not so like in a game file the audio is by far the biggest part of the game which is really weird so it's probably shipping about partially depending on how many how much audio a game has the biggest one we have I think is 50 mags and so you can store I think 20 of those on the device most games are a couple of mags and you can store $100.00 of those on the device so it'll vary but it's already there that's the German factor.

[00:54:12]
So. There's. A record. So it's like. It's a concern. Especially if the thing is low quality that they're buying. We are Hope all is that people will want the one from us because it's a nicer device also that the software comes from us so we get money off the off the software off the season also their device probably won't work with their season mechanism because of the way that we encrypt the communication that goes between the 2.

[00:54:47]
There will be very much stuff for 4 games that come from us. It's no. It's been really important something to kind of hang our hat on actually literally I guess but it would be a very good place to hang a hat but it. It's given something notable to the device Now that said.

[00:55:21]
For the good developers we've hired we've told them explicitly you don't have to use the crane but we don't want to force them to use this the worst thing would to me would be to force the crank into games in places where it doesn't feel natural that would make it feel.

[00:55:36]
Like an obstruction to having fun and we don't want that to be true so some developers don't use it all and the one of the game I showed you use it exclusively they don't use the buttons at all and so it's kind of all over the map but I think it's been really important to make it something distinctive.

[00:55:51]
It's. Just. Yes that's right 1st groups did not it wasn't until we got the rendering from scene engineering they gave us the idea to add the Crake So that was one of the light bulbs that lit up and we got that red green was like we have to have this crane thing on here because that gives us something distinctive and even though it was a game the key thing is no being around it but it also seemed like it could really be fun and so it seemed like it could be a little more than just a gimmick and that that made us think it was probably a good idea.

[00:56:31]
Yes I think we just I came over why now I mean certainly that was completely desirable I think it was just maybe difficult or expensive or something we also don't have any. Vibration in the device either which I would have loved to have have all the vibration Motors we looked at were just like the kind you find in like a 1999 Nokia phone that just would not be on or off which to me doesn't cut it anymore you want to have a very subtle kind of very.

[00:56:58]
Shaped. Vibration that you feel in your i Phone or that you feel on the Nintendo switch that are really beautiful and feel can be really fine tuned and we can figure out how to do that cheaply enough so we left it out even though I think that would have been an incredible addition.

[00:57:17]
Well be the one that. It's a good question. Because it changes all the time because the firmware changes all the time and it's doing different things and we haven't fully added in the wife I capability yet to figure out like it's going to sort of how often is going to check for y. 5 so the answer is we don't know yet we think it's going to be pretty good and we'll certainly announce it before before we put it on sale so that was a question of the battery life by the way.

[00:57:47]
But that's it within the thank you so much now be up here to answer questions afterwards but. For right.