deʃhipuYesterday I received the order for the last µGame on Tindie. That makes it 111 units sold on Tindie (and maybe a dozen more sold elsewhere). Since I don't plan on making any more of them, that was the last µGame being sold.
The project is not finished, of course — I will continue to improve the firmware, and I want to write a few more games for it. I won't be making promises, though — reality has a way of getting into my plans.
If you want to try developing such games with CircuitPython yourself, you can now get the PyBadge board from Adafruit — apart from a slightly bigger screen and much more powerful MCU, it's compatible, so all the games should work on it.
I have certainly learned a lot with this project, and I hope there will still grow a community of users for it.
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I share the sentiment of an "oversaturated" market for handhelds and if I remember correctly your goal was to have a "python"-able handheld for everyone and in the best case someone from China will clone that idea? :D Even better that there are companies like pimoroni and adafruit who work on something like that, because then there will be even more tutorials and examples out there.
Congratulations, I think 111 is a very good number and I will always be a proud owner of one :)
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Well, yes, that's another thing: Adafruit's pybadge and displayio in CircuitPython pretty much solve that problem for me, so there is no point continuing (unless I get really frustrated with their hardware and revive µGame Turbo, which is always an option).
Thank you, I hope to make them a bit more useful in the future too.
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play.date is an overpriced toy for hipsters which costs 6 times as much as your µGame, and has only a monochrome display and a crank nobody needs. Different target audience I would say.
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it's also a subscription model for games and that's what you're paying for as well. It's not just for the console. That crank is a nice gimmick, makes people think about how to incorporate that into games. I like that more that just having the plain old d-pad + abyx, gives some inspiration to some. Display looks crisp and the console is nicely designed, I can't complain there either.
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I hate to admit it, but µGame was also supposed to be for hipsters. It was probably a huge mistake on my part to not contact a few indie game devs and contract them to make some games for it.
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If you don't make new µGame, then the community can't grow. PyBadge is out of stock as well:
https://www.adafruit.com/product/4200
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There is also PyBadge Lite, PyGamer, and a whole onslaught of other new consoles, like blit32 or play.date. I don't think I can compete on that market.
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