The June log promised “less code, fewer bots, smaller bill”. We kept that promise, and then went a step further. Console Labs is a game studio now. We make small, sharp games for Playdate, the yellow handheld with a one-bit screen and a crank. 🎮

Shipped

A store, at console.so 🕹️. console.so used to be our web3 homepage. Now it sells our games. Every game has its own page with a trailer, screenshots and a how-to-play, and there’s search and genre filters on the home page. Terms, privacy and refund pages are up too, so buying from us works like buying from any other shop.

Two titles out, seven on the way. Out now:

• Safu: a safe-cracking roguelike where the crank is the dial.

• Hermes: an agent client for Playdate. Talk to an AI agent from the handheld, Hermes Agent first.

Coming soon:

• Fanlight: a lighthouse puzzle about bending lamplight, one crank at a time.
• Lobshot: an artillery duel for two players on one Playdate.
• Beast Duel: a card duel of beasts. Four sides, nine spots, one crown.
• The Usual Sus: a noir deduction game. Seven suspects, one card table, and somebody is lying.
• Dicemancer: a dice roguelike where the order you pick your dice is the spell you cast.
• ZLab: a puzzle platformer where the crank folds the room between 2D and 3D.
• Stray Walker: a horde survivor where the walker wanders on its own and you only get the crank.

A new face 🐾. New logo, new covers, same flask.

You can find us at linkedin.com/company/consolehq and facebook.com/consolehq, and the team page says who’s behind the games: Han on product, Tono on marketing, Vincent on engineering.

A lighter lab. The old AWS account is gone. What still runs moved to Cloudflare, this log included. The bill is a fraction of what it was, and there are far fewer servers to babysit.

Thinking

Our first chapter was crypto: Mochi and Pod Town. We learned a lot, and some of it worked. But the part people loved most was never the token. It was the characters, the jokes and the small games around them.

So we kept that part. The line we build to now is simple: fun to pick up, deep enough to keep. Playdate fits it well. One-bit art, a crank and a tiny screen force every game to be about one good idea. Then we add the depth: eight bosses, a hundred floors, eleven fighters, thirty-two cases.

The characters are not going anywhere either. Neko and friends will show up in the games, and the worlds that players love can grow into more later.

Next

More games out of “coming soon”, one at a time. Each launch gets its own short note here: what we tried, what we cut, and what the crank ended up doing. If you own a Playdate, come say hi at team@console.so. 🐾