The Fourfold

We switched off a bookkeeping step in the game runtime, hoping for a big jump in speed. Wind Dog went from 22.8 frames a second to 23.7.

That tells us the slow part is painting the screen, so that's what we're working on next.

Builds got longer as the games got better, and waiting 12 minutes for a quick idea felt wrong. Now the console asks whether you want quick, standard, or deep. That's a sketch you can touch in about 3 minutes, a whole game in about 12, or the full thing in about 30.

Every new game gets played by an automated tester before it reaches your shelf. Until now the tester only read numbers, like whether the score changed or the player moved. Now it looks at the screen while it plays, the way you would.

The first long play session on the assembled console, filmed on the workbench. Submarine has depth zones, a shop, and a sea floor with things on it that want you gone. The video is at the top of this page.

A game called Paper Canyon took 5 minutes and 26 seconds to build. The console stopped waiting at 5 minutes, said it didn't build, and moved on. The game finished 26 seconds later, and by then the console had stopped checking. It didn't show up until the next restart.

The console now waits a lot longer, and a finished game always lands on the shelf.

The first game built the new way: 796 lines of code, written, tested, reviewed, and revised before it reached the console. It took 8.7 minutes.

It ran at 20 frames a second. Clearing the screen with the chip's graphics hardware got it to 28.

Two bugs had the same cause. We'd assumed every game runs at 60 frames a second. The screen flickered because we were erasing the next frame while the display was still reading it. Sound stuttered because we fed the speaker one frame's worth of audio per frame, which is half as much as it needs when a game runs at 30.

Both now run off the clock instead of the frame count.

Screen, board, knob, and buttons, all in one printed case, running the home screen. The knob scrolls the shelf. The buttons pick and go back. Pushing the knob in means talk.

The board had no spare pins where we needed them. It did have a camera we weren't using. We unplugged it and ran the knob and both buttons through its connector, with a ribbon cable and a small adapter board.

Games now save to the SD card, so your shelf is there with no network. The console also got its own Wi-Fi picker. Before this, the network name was baked into the firmware.

The first printed front with two buttons, a window for the screen, and the knob.

The first case only held the screen. The home screen already had its shape: a shelf of games, with a card at the front for making a new one.

This is also the week games became small programs the console runs, instead of settings files it reads. That's what lets a game do something we never planned for.

I soldered two buttons to a scrap of prototyping board. They're ugly, but they were enough to find out how the buttons feel under a thumb.

We settled the layout before printing anything: screen in the middle, two buttons on the left, one big knob on the right. The orange is where we'd like to end up.

The console is supposed to wake up when you say its wake phrase. It woke every time the laptop's computer voice said it. It never woke for me, all day.

We couldn't retrain it, so we swapped the phrase. With the new one, the first spoken command from a real person worked. I said "bigger" and the Pong paddle grew 7 thousandths of a second later, with no internet.

The whole loop works for the first time. Say what you want, and about 50 seconds later you're playing it. Say what to change, and the new version is ready in about 10.

These first games are simple. Pong runs at a steady 60 frames a second.

The build starts on an Espressif ESP32-S31-Korvo-1 development board: a dual-core RISC-V chip with Wi-Fi 6, two microphones, speaker amps, and a microSD slot.

The first thing we learned is that loading new firmware at full speed fails partway through and leaves the board unable to start. At the slowest speed it works every time, and a full load takes about 15 minutes.