Found and Fixed Defect, Longer Battery Life, & More testing
over 4 years ago – Mon, Aug 19, 2019 at 11:53:59 PM

Hey Backers,

Wanted to keep you all in the loop with progress on Blinks and the team here at Move38. We’ve had tons of progress with some really tricky issues to make sure Blinks are the best experience possible. As you can imagine, we are going to put Blinks in your hands asap, but we also want them to last with you since the first 12 games are simply the tip of the iceberg.

Smooth “Talking”

In our last update, we shared that Blinks were not communicating with the same reliability as our final engineering prototypes, the reliability we will deliver with. We put a concentrated effort on solving this issue, which ultimately lead us to find a single component in our electronics that was defective. Working together with our manufacturer, we had to fix 2 things:

1. Replace the defective parts with non-defective parts.
2. Create a test that finds defective parts definitively so this isn’t a problem going forward.

Finding the issue was not a simple task and required everything to be reproduce-able, since we needed to verify that our manufacturer is seeing the exact same behavior we were seeing. The images below capture a little bit of this process.

Defining the parameters to test for defective parts has been equally if not more challenging. Removing defective components is step 1, but insuring that placed parts aren’t defective is even more important going forward. At this point we feel fortunate that we are working with a diligent manufacturer that is dedicated to creating a quality product with us, even though the road has been longer than anticipated. Since the moment feels like any day now, I had been waiting to send the update to simply say “we did it, they are all ready to go,” but I cannot say that yet, we are working hard every day to get to that point and you’ll be the first to hear about it.

A Big Save for Battery Life

In the process of debugging our communication issue, we noticed our pilot production Blinks had been mysteriously running out of battery. While this could be expected from bringing them to gaming events in addition to all of our testing, but they were oddly losing battery even when not in use. Once measured, we noticed that Blinks weren’t going to sleep properly. In the process of compressing our BlinkOS, one of our systems was not getting shut down properly. Here’s the good news, in the pilot product, our cold sleep usage was at 152µA and our fixed Blinks now cold sleep using only 0.24 µA (yes, this is a >60,000% increase in idle battery life). The best way to say this is that Blinks, when not in use, use effectively ZERO battery life, this is one reason we can ship Blinks w/ batteries included. Blinks gameplay battery life has now been measured to last between 30 and 60 hours of life depending on which games are being played.

PlayNYC + NY NOW

The Move38 team represented Blinks at two local events. We were able to join Playcrafting’s PlayNYC on Saturday and then had both Troxes and Blinks at NY NOW, where we connected with brick and mortar retailers who are excited to carry Blinks and the games to come. The photo below is me with part of the UncommonGoods team (if you aren’t familiar, they carry our other product, Troxes and are just as eager as y’all to get their hands on Blinks)

IndieCade 2019

This is still a ways out, but if you are in Los Angeles or planning to be during October 10-12th, IndieCade is one of my favorite game events of the year with an incredible community. I’ll be leading a panel along with 3 other hardware game designers and founders from. The goal is to demystify the process of taking a concept to production and beyond with new hardware in the game industry. The panel should be a great opportunity for those interested in the road we are traveling to learn more about what drives us and how we overcome the inevitable obstacles in our way. 

Everyone has been incredibly patient while we develop this new technology and game system, and while we are spending lots of time getting the hardware right, we are also fine tuning instructions for the games, constantly testing and improving gameplay, and building infrastructure to support future games and the channels to deliver those games to you. Here’s a play tester for Speed Racer at the PlayNYC event and a diagram that will be part of the Speed Racer instructions.

Looking forward to sending our next update.

all our best,

Jonathan + the Move38 team

Technical Challenges, Production Updates, E3 + More
almost 5 years ago – Wed, Jul 03, 2019 at 10:34:39 PM

Hey Backers,

Let’s start with the bad news out of the gates, we’ve got gobs of good news as well, so keep reading past the fold. We’ll tell you why the gif below is both beautiful and reveals our final technical challenges.

Production Validation Tests [PVT 1]

As you can imagine, we’ve been balancing a lot, not just gameplay. Since our last update, we have received lots of exciting materials from our manufacturer. First, we received our Getting Started Guide proofs, which came out great. They require some slight modification for language and URLs, but other than that, the print quality is perfect.

Next, we made a bold request to attend E3 with an impressive set of samples. This allowed us to put our production Blinks to a public test. We requested 20 fully assembled samples (10 Core Sets and 10 Expansion) in addition to 480 loose Blinks. These are called Production Validation tests (or PVTs), and these Blinks are assembled on the line in the same way future productions are run. It is common for issues to arise when scaling a process (think about your signature on a thank you card after you’ve written 20 of them… now think about 12,000). While the initial 30 Blinks samples perform great and meet expectations, the production units that arrived this past month unfortunately did not.

 
We want you to have the same experience we have with our initial production samples. (i.e. they just work). We have some straight forward items to fix and some less straight-forward ones. To give a little taste: When two Blinks come together for a single connection, there are 36 possible combinations. When introducing a third Blink, there are 216 ways for the 3 to meet in a triangle and with each piece arises an exponential amount of combinations that all need to work flawlessly. From our PVT, we are finding that a high percentage of our Blinks have 1 combination (of the 36 possible) between 2 Blinks that results in faulty communication. 

We’ve already identified some small changes to be made to the enclosures that will prevent unevenness in the field. Now we are working with the manufacturer to isolate and fix any remaining bugs with communications that have emerged in production.

So the unfortunate news is that we are still refining the production Blinks to make sure the Blinks we ship are ones you and your friends go out to buy dozens more of. With respect to the shipping schedule, it will follow based on the fixes we are implementing right now. Let’s move onto some of the good news 😀
 

E3 Seriously ❤️ Blinks

In June, Move38 was invited to join IndieCade and share Blinks at E3. This was our first time to E3, the most anticipated video game conference of the year, and we weren’t quite sure what to expect. The response to Blinks was off the charts and the production test units (despite their inferior communications) stopped E3 goers in their tracks. The LA Times highlights Blinks as 1 of 10 games at E3 making a lasting impression, they “speak to you via a language of lights.” The BBC News anchor stopped by every day and is officially a Mortals fanatic, Unranked Podcast (@ 41:20) totally got the game system angle, and others including Mixer had a literal blast with our forest fire demo.

Not all 12 games were out on display at E3 because one of them was actively being developed. Now’s a good time to introduce and share Speed Racer.

Speed Racer… How Fast Can You Go?

There is no clock to be beat, just you, and the road. Speed Racer plays with as many Blinks as you can muster, but is balanced to be played starting with 6 Blinks. I like to think of this game much in the sense of this Wallace and Grommet gif. 

*Those with the developer kits, pop over to github to try it out. We'll be adding video of gameplay soon, but first we’d love your feedback.
 

We Love When You Share

Our new home for blinks is www.getblinks.com, and it is evolving to share more information as we go. We wanted a place to help your friends and family know what Blinks are and how to pre-order them to be next in line. We recently added short descriptions of the 12 launch games. Feel free to check it out and tell us what you think.

Mailing Addresses

If you are curious to know if we have the correct mailing address, no need to worry, when we send out a BackerKit survey (which we will announce in a Kickstarter update as well), you’ll have a chance to submit and confirm your up-to-date mailing address.

OOOH and the Beautiful Gif Explanation (up top)

The gif is showing the sleeper hold (hold a single Blinks for 6 seconds and it tells all of its neighbors to go to sleep as well) a great way to save battery. The animation to go to sleep is a beautiful blue fade out, and should happen once and then be asleep. What we see in the gif is a couple of rogue Blinks waking the bunch and so we get 3 sleep waves in a row. Not intentional, beautiful, we will get these Blinks communicating wonderfully soon enough. At least our technical challenges result in some stunning side effects :)

If you are in the USA, we hope you enjoy a happy 4th of July weekend, and for our international backers North of the equator, we hope you are enjoying the summer weather!

With love and respect,

Jon Bobrow and the Move38 team

 

Blinks New Game Reveal and Approaching Gold Master
almost 5 years ago – Sat, May 11, 2019 at 02:56:24 AM

Hey Backers!

In April, we hosted some local game nights at NYDesigns and received such useful feedback, including feedback on our written instructions for games. It is a blast to watch people get into character and read the rules and then do a "3, 2, 1 blastoff" chant for one of our newest games… wait for it… any guesses? This one is our Blinks Game Tutorial for next week. 

This week, we are sharing a pensive puzzler. That’s right, while we strive for all Blinks games to have a social component, it is not necessary and of the 12 launch titles, each one reaches a different genre, game mechanic, or recommended number of people. Today we’re sharing the solo, cooperative, or possibly competitive incremental game, Honey.

Honey - optimize your buzziness

Included in the Social pack (12 Blinks included), Honey, has quickly become the solitary puzzler’s favorite or really I should say that any time Dan isn’t coding a game for Blinks he attempts to find a more optimized arrangement for Honey with 12 Blinks. Honey is 1 part cookie clicker, 1 part tangram, and 1 part systems thinker executive desk toy.

What is Honey? How is it played?

As you might have guessed, the game is about a bee ecosystem (or hive) and it is your goal to optimize the hive.  So what does optimization look like and what is the goal? Our goal is to satisfy the queen. There are four classes of citizens in Honey: flowers, worker bees, broods, and the queen(s). They each are able to take raw material and turn them into a resource. 

...Take me to the video already... 

Flowers (green) for example generate pollen with a single click. 1 click = 1 pollen. If you click once a second, we would say that you are generating 1 pollen per second(pps). A flower filled with pollen (all 6 LEDs bright) can evolve into a worker bee, or pass its pollen to a worker bee to turn that pollen into sweet, sweet honey. 

Worker Bees (yellow) are, as you imagined, great at working, and so once you have created a worker bee, you are now really in the game. A flower next to a worker bee will automatically generate 1pps. A worker bee next to 2 flowers will have 2 flowers generating pollen at 1pps. A single flower with 2 worker bees attached will generate 2 pps (1 pps per worker bee). worker bees make honey from this pollen but they needs someone to turn that honey into Royal Jelly for the queen.

Broods (orange) are kind of like Rumpelstiltskin, except instead of spinning straw into gold, Broods turn honey into royal jelly. They can only receive honey from worker bees that generate the honey, so honey does not get passed from bee to bee. (I guess you could say “bee not to bee”)

The Queen(s) (purple) is who we are here to serve, and who will surely be pleased (at the very least) when we make her enough Royal Jelly. There may be more than one queen, we don’t imagine that will work out so great for you, but you should totally prove us wrong, I bet there are some really awesome configurations that make multiple queens totally worthwhile.

So that’s how you play Honey. Make a beautiful hive that keeps your queen happy, or optimize for pps efficiency. What’s the fastest pps you can imagine?

What started a fun single week experiment from Junege Hong turned into one of my favorite experiences developed by Dan King. One more reminder that the games we’ve invented in-house are pretty sweet(no pun intended), but the games that come from our community are really blowing our minds.

Join us in NYC

We’ll be bringing Blinks to Columbia Alumni Association’s Family STEM Day. Click here for more info!

Join us in LA (Blinks are now bi-coastal)

We can’t say anything yet, but it’s possible that if you are in Los Angeles or the surrounding areas, you'll want to mark your calendar for June 11-13th. Blinks are planning to make a special appearance and we want to make sure you are invited to the party.

Getting to Gold Master

Along with our manufacturer we are moving things along. They received our printed instructions insert, which I promise to post next week, as it can’t hurt to have lots of eyes on it before printing them all. We’ve requested a full case of Blinks (20 boxes) packaged to completion to test in-house before giving the thumbs up for 1980 more.
 

Show Us Your Love 

Like our Facebook page. Join the We ❤️ Blinks group. And say hello in person at one of these events. We are working around the clock to lock in firmware, get gold master production samples, find capital partners to grow Move38 and take care of the Move38 mascot, Ernie 😘.

Covered in honey,

Jonathan + The Move38 Team 

Blinks Developers March Update
about 5 years ago – Wed, Mar 20, 2019 at 12:47:09 PM

Hey Blinks Devs!
 

In our last general update, we shared a bunch of the progress, some production delays, and another one of our launch title games, Flic Flop. We wanted to get back into the groove with you devs, as we’ve seen some really cool stuff sent our way.
 

GDC 🚂🕹 Train Jam

The unfortunate reality of building a company means that we can’t be everywhere we want to be at every moment (although we try), however, being somewhere in spirit feels almost as cool! Thanks to Dev-Backer, Keir Miron, Blinks were being jammed on at the Annual GDC Train Jam, a nearly 50 hour game jam where game developers make games while riding a train across the USA to attend the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Crowdsourced Quality Assurance

What’s the fun of crowdfunding a project if we simply do all of the hard work ourselves 😘 The Blinks 12 release titles are fun, seriously, really fun. But don’t take our word for it, try them out with your friends. While some aspects of the games might be fine-tuned to play best with the commercial Blinks designs, the Dev-Kit Blinks should be able to play all of the games just fine (and some of us think the dev-kits look cooler).

So how can you help us? You will receive a message from us with 3 games that we would like you to try out, If you can load them up and get some play time in the next 1-2 weeks, we’d love your feedback. If you are feeling ambitious, we have a few outstanding features from games that we are hungry to code ourselves, they are fun challenges and they are posted as issues in our GitHub repos.

 
Blinks & Drinks – Local Game Nights 

Are you in NYC? Come out for Tech & Toy Play Night or Blinks & Drinks 🍻 as we like to call it 😂Mark your calendar for Wednesday, March 27th 6pm sharp, details are in the eventbrite! 

Blinks Devs IRL

About 1/3 of you have joined the forum, and we’d love to have the rest of you join us there as well. The resource is free, easy to join, and filled with other Blinks enthusiasts ready to share best practices and tips on building the next hot Blinks game. More-over, it is the perfect spot for organizing meetups with other Blinks Devs in your locale.
 

best,

Jonathan + the Move38 team

Production Updates, NY Toy Fair, Game Preview
about 5 years ago – Sat, Mar 09, 2019 at 12:28:21 AM

Hey Backers!

Call us Punxsutawney Phil, it’s been a hot minute since we’ve been in touch and we’re poking our heads out of our Blinks-filled hole to give a big update. To be on theme with the weather in NYC❄️, let’s start with a snowball of momentum.
 

The Flickiest of Games, the Floppiest of titles

A new game included in the Social Pack(12 Blinks), Flic Flop, is ready for the lime-light.

Flic Flop is like shuffleboard and Tron had a baby. Up to 3 teams flic or slide their Blinks to attach to the flopper, a goal at the end of the table. Attaching at just the right time is key. When a tile attaches to the flopper it takes on the color of the flopper, scoring for whichever team's color was being displayed. Tiles that don’t attach remain on the playing field and can be stolen if knocked into the growing flopper base. This game has proven to be just as exciting for our younger audience as it has been at the bar.

NY Toy Fair

Move38 was invited to be part of the NY Toy Fair Inventor’s Day, an event specifically for Toy Industry titans to begin conversations for new product lines and relationships. We raised a bunch of eyebrows and have opened a lot of doors for bringing Blinks to the next level(that’s my gamer speak). While it is too early to announce anything from these meetings, as our earliest supporters, you’ll be in the loop as things progress. 
 

The Hard Part

“A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever.” ― Shigeru Miyamoto

Game designers are familiar with the above quote, and in startup culture, the more common mantra is the following

"If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late" ― Reid Hoffman

In 10 years from now, I will happily be embarrassed by the first version of Blinks, but not now. The production units are, simply put, beautiful. The hands that have held them have commented on how Blinks are unlike any other product they’ve held. We’ve spent endless hours on perfecting the physical form, which is only ONE aspect of the experience. The interface feels like magic and our games are so darn close.
 

Reality of Making Hardware

It is all becoming clear, it is called“Hard”ware for a reason. Luckily we are surrounded by a support network: from the Blinks Developer Community, NYDesigns and Futureworks in NYC, our manufacturer, JETTA, in Guangzhou, and you, our champion backers. The manufacturing process takes time and our production schedule now lays out that Blinks will be arriving stateside in July. We know that this might be disappointing for some, but once again, we settle for nothing less than making your game nights the envy of the neighborhood. 

We thank you for being such a motivating part of our journey and hope you will rally friends and family as we get Blinks out of the gates and into your hands. 

One More Thing… Game Night

Our friends have selfishly😜 invited us over to play test and shoot the video we shared of new gameplay, and we’d like to open that up to our community as well 😘. Are you in NYC? Would you like to join us for a game night? We are collaborating with our startup incubator, NYDesigns, to host Tech Toy Play Night on March 27th.

With some friendly help at Move38 headquarters(yup, our little startup office) we are going to be communicating more frequently, understanding that even the least-easy-to-deliver news is important to share and that together we can accomplish so much more.

humbled with support,

Jonathan + The Move38 Team