The Best Wedding Invites Are Handheld Video Game Consoles
Mo Rahman and his bride-to-be wanted to send their wedding guests invitations that they’d cherish, so he created a custom handheld game.
Like everything else related to weddings, invitations are costly and subject to a whole bunch of weird traditions and conventions. But does 100lb heavy weight ivory cardstock with embossed foil really reflect who you are, or did the magazines just convince you that it does? Mo Rahman and his bride-to-be weren’t falling for it and wanted something more tailored to their personalities. So, Rahman made invites in the form of Adafruit handheld video game consoles loaded with a custom-made game set in the wedding venue.
Adafruit makes a few devices that are ostensibly “badges,” but that are really small handheld video game consoles built around microcontrollers intended for homebrew games. Those are the PyBadge, PyBadge LC, and EdgeBadge. The PyBadge has a SAM D51 microcontroller, a 1.8” color TFT display with a resolution of 160×128, five onboard NeoPixels, an accelerometer, and more nifty hardware. The PyBadge LC is pretty much the same, but omits four of the NeoPixels, Feather headers, accelerometer, and a couple of other little things. The EdgeBadge is almost identical to the PyBadge, but adds a microphone to make it suitable for voice recognition machine learning tasks on the edge. All three boards have an NES-style control button layout.
Because of chip shortages causing stock issues, Rahman ordered an assortment of EdgeBadge and PyBadge LC boards — enough for each intended recipient. He then set out to create the game that would run on the devices.
The game has the feel of a Japanese RPG on the SNES, but takes place in the Northern California campground where the wedding party and guests were to stay for the big event. That’s a high-end campground with Airstream trailers available for guests to rent. In the game, players explore the campground an interact with various characters to learn about the bride and groom.
If you want to try it for yourself, you can play the game in your browser here.
Rahman programmed the game using Microsoft’s MakeCode Arcade and populated it with assets created using online sprite generators. The couple commissioned Jake Lawrence to create the box art and some of that was adapted into additional sprites. The game even contains a MIDI version of Depeche Mode’s “Stripped.”
This was a fun project that gave Rahman the chance to learn some of the tricks and quirks of coding games for low-power consoles. And more importantly, it reflected the couple’s interests more than a fancy piece of paper ever could. Judging by the photos Rahman posted in his write-up, we think it is safe to say that the invites and the wedding itself were perfect.