The Stanley was a fantasy console — an emulator for a machine that never existed — for making games under challenging conditions and hardware constraints.

I designed it as a fun programming challenge to myself at a time where I wasn't a particularly good programmer. It's more impressive than it should have been for the skill level I was at when I started it, but never reached a publishable level of quality.

The key to fantasy consoles, like the Pico-8 or the TIC-80, is constraint. The Pico limits the user to some 8192 parser tokens of Lua script, 256 8x8 sprites and a similarly sized tilemap region for level creation.

However, the Pico and the TIC still ship with fully functional Lua interpreters aboard; their constraints are only cosmetic and they are otherwise completely accessible to the modern programmer.

The Stanley is designed with different constraints in mind. There are still artificial limitations like sprite counts and the screen size (240 x 128). Only eight colours — a slight variation of GrafxKid's Rabbit palette — can be drawn.

But the key challenge posed by the Stanley is the language. The Stanley's custom programming language is a serial syntax that lacks higher-level abstractions, inspired by BASIC, the Kenbak-1, and Zachtronics' hack-puzzler Exapunks.

There were a number of limitations to this project, and while it worked and felt fun to play with, ultimately I had the same reaction I had to other fantasy consoles I'd used: why am I doing this instead of programming something real? Between that, and the aforementioned limitations of my programming knowledge, I abandoned it.

However, the idea was not lost: recently, I came up with a better thing — Lena — another game development tool whose possibility space encourages the same thinking I wanted to achieve with the Stanley and which excites me as a designer in the same way, but is delivered as a compact programming library instead of an emulator.

The images above are a series of promotional renders I produced for the Stanley, based around giving the emulator-only computer a real-world design and presence.