Retro Gadgets

Retro Gadgets is a sandbox simulator for building, coding, and customising imaginary retro electronic devices. The premise is a workbench in a pixel-art workshop where you assemble video game consoles, weather machines, lightboards, radios, drum machines, and anything else you can dream up.

Components include buttons, switches, dials, gauges, lights, LEDs, LCDs, CPUs, audio chips, video chips, joysticks, speakers, and circuit boards. You solder these together, connect them with magnets, then style them with spray paint, stencils, and stickers. The workbench is tactile — open drawers to find parts, pick them up with tweezers, twist physical knobs.

Lua is the coding environment. Write and debug code for your CPUs, then upload it directly. Programs can be games, weather stations, drum machines, cameras, video players, radios — whatever your hardware build supports.

A Gadget Archive lets you store works in progress and swap between them. Finished gadgets can be uploaded to a global community library where other players can download and remix them, or untethered from the game entirely — a feature lets you bring your gadget out as a window on your desktop. From small Spanish studio Pugstorm and ko-op.