[globalchatads]

The constraint-first angle matters more than people give it credit for. A 1-bit screen and a handful of buttons forces students to stop hiding behind art and sound, and actually solve readability and mechanics. Honestly surprised more programs do not do this instead of dropping students into Unity on day one.

[wincy]

Nintendo is the only mainstream game company that seems to understand this.

A good example is Elite Beat Agents was a fantastically fun rhythm game that could have only existed on the DS and 3DS with the little stylus pen.

You might think “the iPad has a stylus!” But it’s expensive (whereas my friend kept losing his DS Styluses so bought a pack of them for $10) and it doesn’t come with each iPad, so you’d have a fraction of a market, so no such game exists.

Having a CONSISTENT interface for your users is super important. A lot of game devs seem to go for fun second, or maybe never. It took years but just having a game controller seems to be a given for a lot of mainstream Steam games and it helps a lot with games that aren’t really great with a mouse and keyboard (Hollow Knight Silksong sold millions of copies at release)

[pfg_]

Elite Beat Agents lives on as osu! which can be played using a mouse or drawing tablet

[GuB-42]

If it is constraints you are after, you can look at fantasy consoles like TIC-80 and PICO-8.

They are designed to emulate the experience of 8 bit consoles: limited storage, memory, display, palette, etc... While at the same time making developing, distributing and playing games easy: high level language (LUA), built-in development environment, games are tens of kB sized "cartridge" files.

[wat10000]

It's very difficult to overcome the push to teach the tools that will be used (or that out-of-touch people think will be used) professionally. We see the same issue in non-game programming where a lot of places start by teaching Java, which is an atrocious language for a beginner to start with, but it's not chosen for its suitability for learning programming principles, but because it's a big-name professional language.

[AlexeyBelov]

Wow, this is an LLM comment and people ate it up.