Straight question to the community: Patreon and other things

I concur: I’d love to have a Pokitto plushy haha

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I agree with the swag thing, one of my favorite possessions is my pink hat with the next thing co doge patch.

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I’m so sad about what happened with them…

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Does anyone remember the „bar code battler“? Imagine a little accessory reading barcodes e.g. from your cereals to summon mighty monsters or loot into columns and coffins…

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I’d so buy that

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I could have sworn I mentioned this once a long time ago,
but I can’t find anything so maybe it wasn’t here where I mentioned it.

A barcode scanner hat would be a great use of the PEX.

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@jonne: For me, the thing that you need to get Pokitto to the places you described in the original post, isn’t merch or donations or accessories. It is a simple and clear development workflow for game developers!

Once you have developers flocking to the device, then I believe you will get exponential growth in players, and a steady stream of new purchases (no need for donations, etc). That’s what I see happening with things like Pico-8 (or game consoles in general). It’s super fun to make games for, and so lots of people do! And so there are lots of great games to play.

From there, I believe you will need to focus on a more ‘player-friendly’ launcher app, so that noobs can enjoy consuming content without it feeling like an engineering project.

The hurdle Pokitto has is that players need to pay up front to play games (where as Pico-8, only devs pay), and there is no killer app to warrant recommending the purchase to players. Once the workflow is simpler, and documentation clearer, I believe those apps will start to pop up. People like myself are really excited to make great games for the platform, but I found it extremely confusing, tedious and time consuming to work with.

I think your goal of having people programming for Pokitto 10 years for now to totally doable! I’d love to see Pokitto become a sort of “open source gameboy color”!

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This is interesting, as I feel it is easy to develop for Pokitto. But I understand that it is because I visit Pokitto forums almost every day :wink: I am very interested to hear details, what is not easy and how it could be improved.

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Personally I think VSCode + PlatformIO has a really easy development workflow.

Write code, compile (for me, Ctrl+F6), copy firmware.bin to Pokitto.

(I’m sure that second one can be automated, but it’s more effort to figure out how to automate it than it is to do the actual copying.)

What exactly would this look like, and how would this be an improvement over drag&drop files to SD card and/or drag&drop files to mounted Pokitto?

This I agree with.
Library documentation is still one of the biggest problems.

(But I’m hesitant to improve the library’s documentation because I keep hoping we’ll eventually replace the library with something better.)


The biggest hurdle for me is still finding the time and motivation to write games.
(And partly knowing which function in the library does what.)

Totally agree with everything you’ve said.

I’m trying to steer my time and work towards things that will clear such hurdles.

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Same feeling here. Honestly I’d prefer donate to better tools than a game. Little time to play but “making game” it’s a great hobby where I like to invest.

This exemplifies the problems I am talking about. You mention this nice workflow with VS Code, but if you go to the tutorials section, it is never even mentioned!

This happened to me quite a bit with Pokitto dev. I would follow the tutorials, get a little hung up on something, and spend hours trolling through old forum posts trying to decipher what the current, and proper way of doing things is.

I would recommend taking a look at “splore” for Pico-8 if you haven’t before. It allows you to explore the entire library of games available in the db, sorted into “new, top rated, favorites, etc”, and download them on demand over wifi. Since wifi insn’t available for Pokitto, I would imagine something similar running on the desktop, with a one click “add to library” which would copy it over to the device for you. Like Netflix or something.

Flashing your Pokitto to the latest launcher would ideally be a 1 click operation from the app as well.

I agree and I’d like to change this, but it depends on whether we can agree to deem a certain technique as the ‘official’ way of doing things.
At the moment there are many options but nothing “official” as such.

Also, in all honesty, a lot of programmers are terrible at providing documentation because it’s tedious.

If in doubt, ask. There are a plethora of humans (and some non-humans) floating around the forums.

It reminds me of the Pokitto Loader.

We might one day have something like this.
Jonne’s recently announced the POP programmer which will hopefully evolve into something like that,
but it will take time.

That won’t be true forever, we hope to have some kind of solution to that at some point,
but there’s so much to organise and coordinate.

In all honesty, I have never even seen Netflix’s UI, let alone used it.


Please remember that the Pokitto is only around 1 year old,
the business side is being run mostly by one man in his spare time (who simultaneously works another job),
and many of the other contributions are also from people contributing in their spare time.

There’s no paid ‘dev team’ behind the curtains,
the forum is running entirely on Pokitto sales, coffee and good will.

I’m not disagreeing with you as such, I agree with a fair but of this,
but what I am saying is that unfortunately there’s only so much we can do.
Voluntary contributions are what keeps the wheel turning.

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On that note I could see eventually a larger scale pokitto for little kids tougher shell sealed memory card bigger screen and batter with loads of super kid friendly educational games.

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Please don’t make a launcher like the pocket chip had, where it is dependent on a chrome plugin and a remote server lol!

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Yup of course! All totally reasonable, and great actually! I’m not complaining or trying to be overly critical; just providing an answer to @jonne’s question with ‘no minced words’ :smiley:

Probably the healthiest path forward is this project it will continue to operate on the charity of a small, but dedicated group like yourself for the next year or so, until eventually the API is well documented, the best practices are established, and the launcher is idiot-proof and exciting for an end-user. At which point things can move into the realm of self-sustaining, and all of us that were here at the beginning can reminisce about the good old days before @jonne sold out :wink:

… a key chain, tiny 2x3cm (or whatever) pokitto would be cool. it would even automatically have hole to attach the chain to!

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That’s exactly what I want. Thank you.

i can only improve things if people are brutally honest.

Like you.

(goes back to sobbing :wink: )

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How about this merchandise idea? Any progress?

I want my official black Pokitto mug with green Pokitto logo on it :slight_smile:

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