Our OUYA Dev Kit arrived yesterday afternoon in the middle of pushing out a Penumbear iPhone build to our beta testers. What horrible timing! I decided to take a few minutes to unbox the thing or I wouldn't stop hearing the beating from beneath the floor boards.
It was shipped in a slick black shoe box, or at least in a box of around that size. There was a nice message embossed in the lid "OUYADEVS: Thanks for believing…". When you opened the box the first thing you saw was a thank you note. Their gratitude to devs for backing the project was apparent throughout the unboxing and it was a nice touch.
Potatoes
Now on to the meat and potatoes… They shipped a neat special edition translucent case stamped with OUYADEV. The actual console was so little! I already knew how small it would be, but I love holding it in the palm of my hand. When I pulled it out of the box I raised it over my head Link-style, but that picture was mysteriously deleted. The back of the device has all the requisite plugs (Power, USB, Ethernet, HDMI).
Controllers
The controller gave me my first WTF moment. I had absolutely no idea how I was supposed to power this thing. Then I noticed the battery compartments, one on each side of the controller. They very thoughtfully included batteries which was great since I didn't have time to dig through my collection of rechargeables to find the ones that were actually charged. At this point I had an idea about how to open the controllers but visions of snapping the entire thing in half swarmed in my head. I broke down and used the power of the internet to watch the official OUYA unboxing and watched them open up the battery compartments.
After watching the video I was able to open them up, but it was more painful than I would have liked. The compartments had a clear tab for easy battery removal. It would be nice if that was colored in the final controller. I expected as much pain closing it as opening it, but was pleasantly surprised how it seemed to magically lock back into place. There was no snap or click, I just placed the cover on and that was that.
The controller has a nice feel to it. The batteries give it a good amount of weight so it feels right in your hands. It is hard to say too much about it before using it to play a game, but my initial feedback criticism would be:
- The joysticks, particularly the right one, would be well served by more texture on the surface.
- The top two trigger buttons feel shifty and I am concerned about breaking them.
- The touchpad will only have very niche uses as it is hard to reach.
- Opening the battery compartments is terrifying.
Overall the controller felt good and I think they have time to address the remaining issues prior to the final build.
System
Let's get this puppy up and running. It was easy to plug everything in, get the console up and running, and pair the controllers. Nothing unusual or non-standard here.
After connecting the controller I was greeted with a nice thank you video starring Julie.
From there there wasn't much else to see. The store and all the interesting areas to talk about are still in the works. The one pain point I had was keyboard input. My wireless network is hidden and password protected, so to connect to the network I had to bang my head against the on screen keys to type in my SSID.
Kidding. I did have to use the touch pad to move an onscreen cursor to the letters I wanted which was liking banging my head against the screen. What a horrible way to do keyboard input. It would have been a million times better to let me use the dpad to navigate the keyboard. Fortunately as soon as I connected to the network and installed the first update, that problem was resolved and they had a new keypad in place that took dpad input.
Conclusions
Overall the dev kit met my expectations. There are a few rough spots that I hope will get worked out before the consumer version is released. Beyond that, there isn't much to say until I have had some time to look through the software side of things. Once Penumbear is out on iOS and OSX, I'll spend sometime coding up a few little demo projects on the OUYA and then start the grand porting experiment. This will take a bit more work than a port for an Android ready game, but I am looking forward to it.