Do not open this suitcase: devlog

I took some good photos. Perhaps next time I will make some videos. Overall it was a very useful experience, not least just to demonstrate how many things I had to improve. I was quite proud of being able to make many small changes whilst people were playing (I had my laptop so was able to build different APKs and zap them straight over to the phone inside the suitcase using Google drive). I actually went from version 1 to version 5 over the course of the two days.

I am on the train home now. I’m going to build version 6! Later, or possibly tomorrow, I will write more.

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Top notch, I’m working on a suitcase game too, it started as defuse the dalek, but has morphed into retrain the dalek to be a useful member of society. I’m running the code on arduinos and a ras pi, didn’t even occur to me to use defold … now you’ve got me thinking… and I love the slide viewer

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so with Defold I assume? This makes is the best engine for suitcase games =]

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Believing that you have an original idea and then talking about it on the internet is such a surprising activity. It didn’t occur to me that “suitcases” could even be a genre of game. Of course, creating real-life versions of KTANE is such a common activity that there’s actually a kit, as well as a large number of people who have already done this. That’s cool, but also, i do value originality. Luckily most of the people i meet in real life find the game as impressive as I do.

@rob I absolutely love the logo and industrial design of that. Raspberry PIs are cool, and I actually thought about using that in a couple of situations, because I have one that I have barely used… How easy would it be to get a defold game running on a raspberry pi? Is there an OS that just automatically boots a HTML5 file (or other)? Can you install android on it?

Defold (and mobile phones/tablets ) are perfect for this because you have

  • a screen,
  • speakers,
  • a battery, which is absolutely vital and would be a pain in the ass to do any other way, and
  • a USB port (with a USB-OTG adaptor)

all automatically connected with zero effort. You even get a motion sensor and many other things, bluetooth… the possibilities are endless. I actually ended up using a bluetooth speaker (battery powered so it also fits within the suitcase) as well to make it louder, the phone speaker sounds really loud in my flat but in real life situations it’s not enough, especially if you need the explosion to be loud enough to surprise people.

I should also say that the support from the Defold team has been absolutely incredible (just in case anybody coming from elsewhere comes across this thread).

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A raspberry pi usually runs Linux. Can’t you just bundle a Linux build of your game and run that on the pi? Or hmm, that would probably not work due to different CPU architectures?

I have only done some experiments with a custom OS on the pi, I didn’t realise that it was possible to install a version of Linux (well, I mean, I knew it was possible, but I had never considered it). I might look into that at a later date.

Raspberry Pi CPU has arm architecture, our Linux binaries expect x86_64. However, you might be able to install some version of Android, then use our Android binaries (which are armv7)… It would be very interesting to know if it works or not! :slight_smile:

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Just out of curiosity, what would be the most likely way of getting that all to work? Android? Or Linux and then HTML5?

There were some projects aimed at getting Android to run on the first gen RPi when it came out but I don’t believe any of them were successful. And I haven’t heard of any projects like that for newer Pis either. Linux and HTML5 is probably easiest.

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Hi Everybody!!

Another update: yesterday I was lucky enough to go to a fair called Arduino Day Zaragoza, where I was able to get a stand to let people play my game.

About 90% of the people who played seemed to enjoy it, which is good. It was my exact target audience of geeks, though, so that helped!

I made some useful contacts, a few businesses and some other creative people who might want to work with me. I wish I had taken business cards.

One thing that was surprising: so many of the ideas there were very boring (sorry to complain). Copies of star wars robots, super mario stuff from the 1990s, 3D printers making toys worse than those of a McDonald’s happy meal… there was nothing really interesting, considering that we are now capable of making literally anything. However, I think I just found it hard to accept that it was essentially an event for children.

I am going to make business cards and more promotional material, and start offering my bomb as a service. i.e. for parties, corporate events, etc. I am sure there will be some people who are interested.

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bomb as a service! <-- may not pass quite a bit of modern chat/fb/internet filters…

Congrats on your first Suitcase show. And cool, that your theory works. Maybe people like suitcase games indeed =]

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Also, I have decided on a new art direction for the game, which i think is more modern than the green on black atari feel:

55

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here’s a little different take at the suitcase games: the jar games!

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Nice! This is the level of creativity that I like!!

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Are you bored of me yet?!

Just wanted to give you a little update on the business end of things: tomorrow I have a meeting with a company who provide gamification and other technological solutions to various companies. it’s run by an old colleague of mine (we worked together on a different job). he has been working with a few others as a company for probably 5 years now, more or less, and whilst I don’t really understand what it is they do, they were excited about the bomb and could potentially see it as part of some human resource hiring process. I’m going to take the more extreme jokes about death and dismemberment out of the manual and see what they think!

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Did they tell you they thought it was… the bomb?

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You’re going places! Amazing where a single idea can take you. Good luck with it all!

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MY PROJECT WAS ACCEPTED BY THE COMPANY!!!

Next week I’m officially going to start working with their product designer to make DO NOT OPEN THIS SUITCASE 2.0! It will almost definitely have a different name, but I am going to do the programming, and the overall design of the deactivation process (including the game elements not controlled by the computer). Their product designer will design the actual suitcase and how the game will look, and then they will rent the game out to businesses.

I couldn’t be happier. Also… I have a lot of work to do :confused:

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cool stuff!

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Good for you! I love reading about this. Keep us posted if you can :] .

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