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The idea of the 4 colors and 160x160 screen is, from my pov, to focus on the gameplay more than the graphics. A lot of people get stopped from attempting to mak

• lucasban 2y ago
  The play date doesn’t even have shades of grey and has plenty of good games, arguably because of similar constraints
  • rob74 2y ago
    OTOH, the PlayDate is a hardware device, so using a monochrome LCD makes sense for cost saving and power consumption reasons. But, even for a hardware device, once you decide you want to have a color screen, in this day and age there is no real (technical) reason anymore to limit the number of colors.
    • lucasban 2y ago
      I agree, I think it’s more of a novelty reason, just a constraint for the sake of encouraging creativity / not just being another place for the same things we already have.
    • tredre3 2y ago
      > so using a monochrome LCD makes sense for cost saving and power consumption reasons The Sharp Memory LCD used in the Playdate is more expensive than a similarly sized IPS LCD. Whilst power consumption was probably a consideration, the main justification was to impose a deliberate game design constraint IMHO.
• rob74 2y ago
  > A lot of people get stopped from attempting to make games because their art skills suck As a developer with no art skills myself, I can sympathize with that. But I think that is already taken care of by the low-res display - making pixel art is (in my experience) a lot easier than higher-resolution art. I don't think having 8, 16 or 32 colors instead of just 4 really makes an impact on the art skills required for a game...