The pcb on the card is just a charge pump that the display demands in order to regulate its voltage. If I shipped that off the card and onto the base, I'd need more contacts.
Those flat flex displays are awesome, though way pricier. Then I'd lose the nice stiff pcb board which allows all the contacts on the back to mate. I could go wireless, but then the power delivery needs to charge a capacitor and the delay between button press and display refresh will go to 30 seconds or beyond
I've done a little bit of that, but not as much as I should. I took it to a boardgame convention and a GDC event, but not much came from it. If anyone has introductions or advice there, I'd appreciate it.
Wyldcard creator here, thanks to HowToWare for the interview.
Since the intention is a children's toy, I'm trying to get the price as low as possible. This display size is cheap because it's intended for grocery store price tags ;)
Flat Flex e-paper displays are available but much more expensive. Plus, the magnets in the cards which let them mate to the base take up most of the thickness. I'd have to rethink that physical interface entirely if they needed to be much thinner. My next step will be to design an actual game and then I can come back to size for a v2.
Wyldcard creator here, thanks to HowToWare for the interview.
It's a link cable to connect your base to your friend's when you play against them. I link it into itself just to keep it tidy and it doubles as a strap to carry it by.
Hi, Wyldcard creator here, thanks to HowToWare for the interview :)
The cards can store data, and I imagine that things which happen to the card during a game leave a lasting impact, which is carried from game to game. The cards grow and change over time, and so when you trade one, you're trading an entire legacy :D
That sounds more like a legacy style board game than an actual trading card game.
Which seems to me like the better implementation of this technology, anything else due to its digital nature just feels like it is going to be exploited making any value disappear completely.
I think this would be an amazing idea for a legacy style game, especially since it opens up the possibility of resetting the game and it really simplifies picking up and playing later.
Ah yeah. TCG is just a quick way to explain it to people so they get what I'm going for. I personally dislike the whole "rarity" aspect of TCGs, though it was fun when I was a kid. Living Card Games like Netrunner are more fun to play IMO.
My elevator pitch usually goes something like: MTG meets Yu-gi-oh meets Pokemon (the RPG) meets Tamagotchi.
These were originally implemented as buttons that you could pin on your shirt. There was a game convention long ago where sometimes you'd find two random people wearing them have a "hey! Let's play a game" moment since it also advertised playing the game. Break out the dice that you've already got, sit down and play in a minute or two (with no weird rules you everything ran real fast).
Likewise, you could have the "this is the game" clipped on one's shirt and then playing a digital game with your selected character.
Could you do a janky version of "Street Fighter" where your dude (and assistant/second character) both had permanent stats + inventory + needing to "rest" or "heal over time" to recover after the battle? Same, but it's more of an RPG "character card + inventory card" vs. "opponent character + opponent inventory"?
The concept of 1x$100 base, and 4x$15 playing cards seems approachable (vis: MTG booster packs).
Definitely look to have some sort of replaceable / lay-in play mat (see the little cards on this toy: https://www.amazon.com/VTech-80-178200-Drill-Learn-Toolbox/d... ). You could have a "Street Fighter" 2v2 playmat, or "Texas Hold-em" flop/turn/river mat. "Scan the QR Code, bluetooth connect to the base, load the 'game' into the device's memory", and then you're phone-free (forever) to negotiate between the base and the cards.
You're "missing" some sort of cover/door on the cards themselves (eg: configure the base station for texas hold'em, and how do you "shuffle" the two player cards w/o revealing their values to others?
Actually, what you should do is to put some sort of pin-pattern on the top that can be accessed from the front or the back (eg: four pins "as rivets" on left and right sides, two pins on top/bottom), so you could "load" or "shuffle" the card face up or face down.
Face-Up + buttons 1/2/3 => the display changes, you take your action, etc.
Face-Down + buttons 1/2/3 => the display changes, but the result is "hidden until revealed".
Being able to have some sort of dumb switches or a rotating selector on the cards themselves that are then "read" by the base station will let people do their thinking and take their turns "in their own hand" is super powerful (eg: let people select punch/kick/block on the cards in their hands vs. having to "dock" the card and only then being able to select punch/kick/block) is super-important to enable a smooth-flowing game instead of a novelty toy.
One of the ideas I’ve been chasing for a decade as a personal project is a set of figures, not unlike SkyLanders or the Disney Infinity figures. They would operate in a Pokémon-like game but retain memories of their interactions I haven’t ever quite gotten it done, but it remains one of my favorite projects to tackle.
Leave it to the capitalists to insinuate that something that doesn't make you money has no value, no matter how much fun and entertainment it provides to people.
In 2018 I managed a team at a marijuana startup and was evaluating Triplebyte for recruiting. One evening, after sampling our own product (post-deploy smoke tests), I went through the Triplebyte quiz to see what my candidates would experience.
A couple years later I was job hunting myself, and went back to my Triplebyte profile. I sheepishly admitted that I didn't bring my A-game to the quiz, but was told I couldn't retake it, even though it had been a few years. Odd to me that there wasn't a provision to account for candidate's skills to grow over time. Got plenty of interviews anyways >.>
I used Triplebyte successfully for recruiting as a manager at two companies, and was sad to watch it decay and die while working at a third :(
I hired some of the best people I've ever worked with on Triplebyte.
Finding the balance between OO principals, Fluid coding capabilities, separating the data, grammar, parser, and world model and then constructing a standard IF library of common IF "things" is like juggling 20 kittens and 10 chainsaws.
Some things are confounding like do I define a container with a boolean property on an object or is a container a subclass of the base Thing? How does that extend to the underlying graph data store? What will queries look like and which solution is more meaningful to authors?
Seriously, 95% of the fun is figuring all of these things out.
Those flat flex displays are awesome, though way pricier. Then I'd lose the nice stiff pcb board which allows all the contacts on the back to mate. I could go wireless, but then the power delivery needs to charge a capacitor and the delay between button press and display refresh will go to 30 seconds or beyond