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Show HN: Akedo – Retro gaming and coding platform

138 points| yrandom | 3 years ago |akedo.app | reply

25 comments

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[+] yig|3 years ago|reply
This reminds me of microStudio <https://microstudio.dev/>. I used it for a game design class this past semester. All the editors made it easy for my students to jump in and create. It has really great debugging tools now, too.
[+] hansword|3 years ago|reply
Looks super-cool, would love to try it. However...

> All from your web browser. Your project is stored in the cloud, accessible from anywhere.

I don't want that. I want my code on my machine, not someone else's. And I most certainly don't want to create an account. :-(

[+] cubano|3 years ago|reply
In this highly realistic tennis game...

Its always a plus, in my book at least, when the dev has a solid sense of humor...thanks for the work and I hope it helps a youngster get into game programming.

[+] yrandom|3 years ago|reply
Thanks, I spared no expense!
[+] bitwize|3 years ago|reply
It's a very deep sense of humor, too, as actual 8-bit sports games were unironically marketed as "highly realistic" or similar. In fairness, those copywriters were probably referring to the simulation code, and not necessarily the graphics, being realistic for the standards ofnthe day.
[+] arecurrence|3 years ago|reply
This is a platform where a DALL-E like bitmap generator would be really useful. Boom... instant assets.
[+] whateveracct|3 years ago|reply
Maybe for placeholders...but honestly it takes very little time to be able to whip up rough pixelart sprites and animations yourself. And they'll probably be better in many ways.

But a game's quality is honestly mostly art & music & other non-automatable creativity rather than the software. I highly recommend treating art and music education as core to indie gamedev education.

[+] taftster|3 years ago|reply
This is such a fun idea, actually. Sprites in general (not just 2D 8-bit style) could be really useful for DALL-E to generate. There are a good amount of tilesets and sprite packs for sale online created by pixel artists. But having sprites and tiles generated by DALL-E could really invigorate the indie game community.
[+] qsort|3 years ago|reply
What language does it use? I can't match it with anything I know, is it something custom?
[+] yrandom|3 years ago|reply
It's a language I designed myself heavily influenced by Python, Lua, and BASIC. I wanted something that was as simple as possible to get started with and could grow with the user.
[+] kevsim|3 years ago|reply
According to the help page:

> Akedo uses a beginner friendly language that is similar to many professional languages but is aimed at producing readable and understandable code.

[+] freedomben|3 years ago|reply
This looks like a really neat educational platform! A few questions I couldn't find answers to (although didn't do a ton of digging beyond exploring each page/section):

1. Is the language for this open source? If not, is that planned?

2. Is the language compiled or interpreted, and what targets? Is the execution environment a VM that runs in the browser similar to Scratch?

3. Is this a charity or for-profit? If the former, how will it be sustainable (i.e. donations, premium memberships, etc.)? If the latter, what are the plans for monetization?

[+] yrandom|3 years ago|reply
> 1. Is the language for this open source? If not, is that planned?

It's a language I designed specifically for this platform and is not currently open source. If it proves popular I'm certainly open to it.

> 2. Is the language compiled or interpreted, and what targets? Is it the execution environment a VM that runs in the browser similar to Scratch?

It's interpreted. To improve the performance at some stage I'd like to compile it directly to JavaScript rather than run it through my intermediate layer.

> 3. Is this a charity or for-profit? If the former, how will it be sustainable (i.e. donations, premium memberships, etc.)? If the latter, what are the plans for monetization?

It's for-profit. I'm planning a freemium model so there would be additional features (when I build them!) and access to more advanced tutorials.

[+] colinjoy|3 years ago|reply
How'd you come up with the name? Does it stand for something?
[+] yrandom|3 years ago|reply
It's actually the Japanese translation of arcade (as in shopping arcade). I wanted something short with available domain names.