Just like we talked about last month, the second season of games for the Playdate handheld is starting now with 12 more games coming out weekly for $40. This week is already off to a good start. I’m excited to check out Fulcrum Defender from Subset Games and Dig! Dig! Dino! by Dom2D & Fáyer along with whatever Blippo+ is.
Might try and stream some of them in the next day or so.
Besides a variety of card games, Coincidence is also developing a more Zach-Like game in the form of Kaizen: A Factory Story. It’s a factory automation game where you play new-to-Japan David Sugimoto who is put in charge of developing assembly lines at Matsuzawa Manufacturing for classic electronics and other products.
On first glance Kaizen might look very similar to the old Zachtronics games, like TIS-100 and Opus Magnum, I don’t have any reason to expect it’ll be significantly different. There’s even a pachinko-themed Solitaire game built-in. I am so psyched.
There is no release time frame outside of the publisher’s 2025 estimate for Kaizen: A Factory Story yet, just a Steam page for wishlisting that claims to support Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Usually their video games are released into a brief Early Access window, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the case here as well but there are no indications of one on the Steam page. There is a post where a moderator gave an estimate of a few months before Kaizen comes out, and that was a month ago, but that isn’t with any certainty. I’d hope it’ll be available this Summer.
There’s so much more to Iraq than what TV, movies, and games have shown us. I really appreciate getting a glimpse of this place and its people from Sarah Teng. She has more about her trip in this write-up at Petapixel.
I’ve been complaining about how Duolingo punishes users for mistakes for a long time now, they’re now moving from hearts that you lose when you make a mistake, to an energy mechanic according to this article from Jay Peters writing for The Verge:
“Under the new system, you’ll spend one unit of energy to complete an exercise, and a mistake will cost one energy. But you’ll also get extra energy back at a randomized rate for completing multiple lessons right in a row. As a result, users should be able to do more lessons, and that’s what’s showing up in the data, Moses Wayne, a senior staff engineer at Duolingo, tells The Verge.“
There’s a bunch of math that goes into this to figure out that it will be similarly punishing for free users as the current Heart-based system. As before, Duolingo subscribers get unlimited Energy.
I’ve also noticed that Duolingo’ve added a Chess course, which I’ve only tried a little bit.
It feels like the Duolingo company is in Emergency save-our-reputation mode with these changes. I don’t believe the change to Energy from Hearts is good enough, it still slows down free users from focusing on learning with whatever time they have available and will likely end-up penalizing people for making mistakes. They should either move to subscription only or just have more ads for free users instead of slowing them down. What is the cost to the company for a free user these days? It can’t be much.
Here’s my sure-fire way to save the company’s reputation:
