Hackaday Supercon

At Hackaday Supercon 2025 in Pasadena, Alleycat lead engineer Elli Furedy gave a full-stage talk: Sandbox Systems: Hardware for Emergent Games. The arc ran from Conway's Game of Life (simple rules, messy outcomes) to Alleycat's bounty hunt at Neotropolis, where hundreds of players chase each other through the desert with a PDN in hand.

This was a design story for makers, not a product demo. Elli focused on how Alleycat hardware gives strangers a reason to interact in real space. Alleycat keeps the core loop small on purpose. Find your target, jack in, run Quickdraw, then get back to the fiction. Alliances, catchphrases, and drama are player-authored; the device handles countdown, Go, anti-mash logic, and automatic score upload so nobody breaks character to argue about rules.

On stage Elli tied that loop to principles the team actually ships against: people before tech, rules embedded in firmware instead of rulebooks, and LED "greebles" that exist mostly to sell the fiction. She closed with Neo 2025 numbers: 328 active players and 3,767 Quickdraw matches over five days, evidence that a minimal interaction can scale when the hardware stays out of the way.

Hackaday published a recap of the session. Slides, video, and deeper notes are on the dispatch page.