Welcome New Members!

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Hi @rayman22201,

Welcome to the community! Dev Kits ordered now and going forward are the same hardware as the final production. The Bare Bones Dev Kit ships with a single Blank (Blink without a game or game art on it) and the 6 Blinks Dev Kit comes with 6 Blanks. Note that all Blinks are reprogrammable with the Dev Tools, Blanks are just nice because they allow you to label them as you wish :slight_smile:

(btw, this question makes me want to post a picture of all of the iterations of Blinks… sometimes I forget just how many prototypes we built :nerd_face:

best,
Jonathan

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22

Hi @ExpoExe !

So glad you stopped by at PAXU, I had such a wonderful time, and we were overwhelmed by the incredible response we received. Looking forward to getting you’re dev kit in your hands as soon as possible, and in the mean time don’t hesitate to ask any questions about our documentation or post game ideas for feedback :smiley:

p.s. when I moved to NYC, I picked up rock climbing and it quickly became my favorite hobby (perhaps it was the stark contrast to the city itself) either way, still love that kind of physical problem solving and when the weather permits, a good excuse to be in nature :evergreen_tree:

best,
Jonathan

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23

Hi!

My KS Blinks just arrived and I spent the evening playing all the stock games included with the base set and the expansion set. The build quality and consistent behavior of the individual Blinks is frankly astounding. I’m so glad the dev team took their time to refine the product and didn’t cut corners rushing it to market. The time and attention paid is obvious, and I’m thrilled with the end result.

So, now I’m here and excited to see how the open source community evolves Blinks going forward! To that end, I’m a seasoned IT generalist and a tinkerer by nature. That said, I have very little aptitude (or passion) for programming beyond basic bash scripting. But I am a game designer and have done quite a bit of QA, UI/UX design over the years. So if anyone’s interested in a collaboration, hit me up. I’d love to see my Blinks game design ideas come to life, and I’d happily help you iterate and refine yours in trade. :slight_smile:

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24

Hey all! I’m Carol Mertz—a multidisciplinary game designer based in St. Louis, MO. I’m a full-time indie game designer who’s been making games in various capacities for about a decade. I’ve worked on tabletop games (Kroma coming next year, Pass the Buck: A Game of Corporate Responsibility Management released 2016), video games (SmuggleCraft released 2017 for Steam/PS4/Switch, We should talk coming to PC/PS4/Switch/Xbox this year), and experimental hardware games (Hellcouch: a couch co-op game, which is a playable sofa game that toured a bunch across the USA last year). I’ve also done a big ol’ handful of small personal games, many available to play on http://carolmertz.itch.io

I’m working with @marymck to work on our Blinks design concepts as Move38 collaborators. I’m super excited to be a part of the community, and I can’t wait to dive deeper into the development process! :sparkles:

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25

Hi there! My name is Mary McKenzie I’m a game developer based out of St. Louis and run a small studio called Volcano Bean. My background is in costume design but I have slowly fallen down the rabbit hole of alt control/experimental hardware since joining the games industry. I have been collaborating with @Carol on a few games and I’m really excited to keep exploring visual design with the Blinks hardware!

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26

Hi @Carol & @marymck :wave: :smiley:

Psych’d to have you join the forum. I’m now obsessed w/ Sasquatch, say cheese! and Sleepy Kraken, and I’m sure I’ll dig into the others in your porfolios as well :stars: :night_with_stars::telescope:

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27

Just discovered Blinks through a friend last week. I’m a Scala software engineer, aspiring jewelry designer, and aspiring game designer. I hope to make it to the NYC GGJ for a couple of hours. Fun fact, I live literally a block away from Move38 headquarters. How am I only just now finding out about Blinks?

https://aethyrx.itch.io/
https://www.shapeways.com/shops/aethyr

Another fun fact, shapeways is just another two blocks from Move38.

Can’t wait for my devkit to arrive.

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28

Welcome @AEthyr!

Looking forward to having you join the community and you’re welcome at the HQ anytime (advanced notice preferred :slight_smile: We took lots of advantage of being neighbors with Shapeways in the early days, imagine we will continue to as well.

See you at GGJ!

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29

Hi, friends! I’m Brett Taylor! I made the indie puzzle game Linelight and I’m currently a puzzle designer at Playdead.

I’m now collaborating with Move38 to design some Blinks games! I jammed with the team at GGJ 2020, and resultantly have a dev kit as well as a heap of Blinks game ideas. :smiley: It’s a fun design challenge, as well as a refreshing change of pace from what I’m used to.

I have a dog named Zorro! He is a black lab, and my treasure. :paw_prints: :heart: We currently live in NYC and will be moving to Denmark in April!

Zorro and I are looking forward to making some cool stuff. :call_me_hand:

EDIT: You can find all my games/code here: github.com/BATzerk/Arduino-BlinksGames!

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30

:yum: :fork_and_knife:

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31

Hi my name is Lee I am in the UK, I am 38 and into Board games, Electronics, Model Railways those are my main hobbies. I am here to learn to make my own games but also see what others are making too.

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32

Hi Lee!

Glad you’re joining us here on the forum. Excited to see what kind of games you’re interested in making. Let me know if you need any help getting started!

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DanKing222,

Thank you your help when needed would be great, I will be interested in making simple games and puzzles to start off with and go from there I think. By the looks of things I have seen the hardware is basically an modified Arduino Uno so should not be too hard for me to move to Blinks.

34

Hi, I’m Scott. I received my Blinks dev kit a couple weeks ago and am slowly coming up to speed with the environment.

I’m a dev for a mobile game company in SF. I was drawn to Blinks because I love the blend of digital gaming with the physicality of the tiles. A while back there was another tile-based gaming system called Siftables. I did some development for that as a side project. It was fun, but sadly the platform didn’t survive.

With Blinks, it seems my dev kit is different than others I’ve seen talked about around the site. I was given the six production Blinks, the programming rig, and a blank Blink for debugging. No magnetic enclosure to hold the programmer in place. I’m finding it quite cumbersome to hold the pins onto my Blink every time I want to program it.

It is also cumbersome to teach the sketch to my group of six other Blinks when I want to test en masse. This involves reinserting the battery in the blank, flipping it over, connecting it to the hive and programming the others. This debug cycle is long and I hope to discover some way to streamline this. Anyone have clever solutions?

An ideal solution for me would be a rig that securely holds the blank with the programming pins against the contacts, but does so with the tile face up so that I can program the other tiles without having to do the battery/flip thing. (I’m reminded of @Brett’s GDC talk about tools to remove pain points :+1:)

I’ve also been challenged by the inconsistent, or missing documentation. For instance, datagrams are referenced a couple places, but are not in the API Docs nor the Glossary. Thankfully this post describes them, and looking through the Darkball source code gives me enough information to use them.

I have also seen mention of using the serial port to print debug output, but haven’t seen a post describing exactly the hardware required to do so. I think part of the problem is that I’m new to Arduino in general.

Anyway, I’m excited to get to work on something! I plan to focus on single-player experiences. I have a couple ideas for games, but just today I struck on an idea that I really want to build. Excited!

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35

Welcome Scott!

Thanks for these great comments, I can answer a few quickly

The original dev Blinks from 2018 were an early design of the hardware designed only for developers. There are pros and cons to the old and the new, but the goal with the new is that developer Blinks and consumer Blinks should simply be the same thing.

Do you think a 3D printed Jig would do the trick here? I’ve been wanting to introduce something like this, but want to also make them in low volume at first while we iterate and get it right.

We’re putting team effort on the dev documentation this week. Would love to connect with you and get your feedback/help in bringing our documentation back up to speed. There has been some evolution in hardware and the API since we launched. (datagrams were a relatively new addition, and I believe there will be a couple more minor API additions as well this year)

Going back to my first comment of pros/cons, at the moment, only the 2018 dev Blinks have a serial out connector, but a few weeks ago, I validated our latest prototypes and we’ll have Blinks this year that have that capability as well. I’ll be sure to let you know when that is available and will make sure that is easily accessible to devs in the forum that want that feature.

Looking forward to having you in the forum and play testing your games :slight_smile:

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36

Thanks for the clarifications, Jon.

Yes, that is what I was thinking, but I’m unsure how to do this while keeping the blank Blink at desk level so it’s easy to attach the others for sketch sharing. Maybe the jig/blank would attach to the edge of a desk and hang off the edge with the programming dongle dangling underneath? Or prop the blank vertically and the others can be attached up and out for sketch sharing.

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Hi,

my name is Carsten 48 and from Germany - my DevKit is on the way. I want do develop my own games but I have no skills in development so it is verry hard for me at the moment to understand all the Tutorials and to go on - so any help is welcome :slight_smile:

Greetings

Carsten

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38

Hi Carsten, welcome to the forum! We are always working on new and updated materials, so keep an eye out for that. If you have specific questions, don’t hesitate to send me a direct message on here and I should be able to answer.

39

Hi Everyone,

I’m also a coding noob, but this time, I have a different question.

5 of the 6 blank blinks, (other 6 not tested, these are the ones I’m using to test my baby-steps code/upload new games on), I just received on Saturday 5/2 and have barely been on, using the battery, for no more than a few minutes are giving me the low battery indicator. Darn annoying red blinky light! I read some Articles about some updated stuffs, but I’m not sure if those are related to the battery indicator. I don’t have a battery tester, so I can’t confirm the battery’s power. It just seems odd that so many would be bad when shipped.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Dawn

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40

Hi @WillowDreamer, if you are getting 2 red flashes, that is low battery (which would be surprising) if you are you getting 3 red flashes, it is a failed transmission, ie just need to push the button and it reverts to the game it knows. Let me know :slight_smile:

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