A long time in the making

Hot on the heels of Delta Duo Deck, I’ve been on a real Famicom kick. I’m increasingly obsessed with the aesthetic of the original game cartridges, and revisiting some of the very first games I ever played in my parent's basement. While playing a classic beat ‘em up, River City Ransom, I found myself wanting a way to play it on my TV, using my iPad as an arcade-style fight pad.

And so I made Deck Mate!

I’ve been wanting to make a controller like this for a long time, but something clicked recently and I decided to just do it! Based on the gorgeous Arcade Stick from 8BitDo, Deck Mate is an airplay-only console experience for iPad. The goal for this controller’s visuals is to meld the 8BitDo Arcade stick with styling details based on the Famicom, NES, Super Famicom, SNES, N64, GB, and GBA.

When it comes to Deck Mate, the star of the show are the new components I made for the buttons and directional inputs. I’m so happy with how these came out! The new Arcade buttons make perfect sense for this new format, and I’ve been testing multiple forms of directional input

I’m still in the process of figuring out what does, and what doesn’t work in terms of being able to easily use the controller without looking at it.

I do plan on releasing Deck Mate for more consoles with different input configurations in the future, but I feel like releasing Deck Mate FC with the joystick is a good place to start! Right now I’m just gauging interest and seeing what the initial feedback is for this style of controller!

Deck Mate FC is free to download, and available on Gumroad now! Why not give it a try?

Get it on Gumroad

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