AYANEO has officially released the KONKR Pocket BLOCK, a Game Boy-style vertical Android handheld first shown in May. It comes in 2GB/32GB and 3GB/64GB configurations priced at $89 and $109 respectively, though AYANEO is currently offering promotional pricing of $79 and $99. The device features a 3.33-inch 960x720 LCD, a MediaTek Helio G85 chipset, a 3,500mAh battery, Android 12, and no analog sticks, with shipping starting late October in three color options.
androidauthority.com
· 2026-09-29
Simon Sapin, a Factorio player, describes using matrix math to plan factory production and has released a free online calculator tool to model the game's Quality system introduced in the Space Age expansion. The tool helps players calculate probabilities and outcomes when using quality modules to upgrade items through the game's five tiers, from normal to legendary.
exyr.org
· 2026-09-29
An effort to build a version of the Monopoly board game entirely in the United States ran into production problems, including trays that cracked during manufacturing and higher-than-expected costs. Sourcing dice domestically also proved difficult, complicating the push to keep the whole supply chain onshore.
wsj.com
· 2026-09-29
A Show HN project called PacBench evaluates how well different AI models and their supporting harnesses can recreate the classic game Pac-Man from a single prompt: 'Create a Pac-Man game in a single html page.' The benchmark measures how closely each model's generated code approximates a functioning Pac-Man game.
jonclegg.github.io
· 2026-09-28
Discord confirmed on X that an experimental Game Mode, spotted in leaked screenshots over the weekend, will begin rolling out to users next week. The toggle is designed to reduce Discord's CPU and GPU usage while a game is running, and the company says it plans to add more resource-saving features over time.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-28
Ayaneo's budget sub-brand Konkr unveiled the Pocket Block, a compact vertical handheld resembling a Game Boy, priced from $89 with a $79 preorder deal. It features a 3.3-inch 960x720 LCD screen, a MediaTek Helio G85 chip, a 3.5mm jack, microSD slot, USB-C, and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth. Higher storage models cost $99 and add color options, with shipping expected by the end of October.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-28
A developer shared a Show HN project that overlays an animated stickman fighting game onto any website, letting visitors interact with a destructible interface layered over live pages. The tool includes controls for restarting matches, opening new sites, adjusting background and sound, and embedding the effect elsewhere.
destroy.spritefusion.com
· 2026-09-28
Valve has integrated Pyrowave, a video codec built by open-source developer Hans-Kristian Arntzen specifically for in-home game streaming, into the Steam beta client's Remote Play feature. Unlike general-purpose codecs such as AVC or AV1, Pyrowave is designed to cut encoding and decoding delays and avoid chroma subsampling artifacts that cause blurry text, though it reportedly requires roughly 5 to 10 times more bandwidth to do so.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-28
A developer building a 3D polygonal game engine describes using Haar wavelet basis functions to compress low-contrast textures and their mipmaps. The piece explains that a typical 256x256 texture consumes 256KB of RAM, and that a scene with dozens of visible textures plus many more stored off-screen can require roughly 200MB of memory, a burden for typical end-user computers at the time.
comonad.com
· 2026-09-28
State Sen. John Kane has introduced the Protect Our Games Act in Pennsylvania, which would require video game publishers to give 60 days' notice before cutting off access to a title. Companies would then have to offer offline play, a server-independent patch, or a refund based on the game's highest price over the past year, capped at no less than 25% of its original cost.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-28
An online geography game called Borderline has compiled roughly 37,500 crowd-sourced drawings of country borders and coastlines, aggregating them into a visual map that overlays every submitted outline against the real one. The project breaks results down by country, drawing type (land border, coastline, or daily challenge round), and includes median accuracy scores and error rates for each nation.
habibicode.org
· 2026-09-28
A solo developer working on a Minecraft-style voxel game called Block Game (working title) implemented a custom software occlusion culling system to improve rendering performance, particularly on weak integrated GPUs like the Radeon Vega 8. The developer reports the system runs in roughly half a frame at 60 FPS, culling 50-60% of chunks above ground and up to 95% underground, pushing framerates above 400 in cave scenes.
enikofox.com
· 2026-09-27
GoKawiil