Get experimental with me

I don’t know what it is, but I’m feeling really experimental with the landscape version of Delta Duo NX. The obvious direction is to make the portrait “flip” form factor wider to accommodate landscape and call it a day, but that’s not the vibe for this project.

Back when I made the first landscape edition of Delta Pocket, my head canon was that it was a Japan-exclusive version of the device (hence the Japanese branding on the bezel). For Duo NX, I’m thinking in the same direction.

Landscape mode is envisioned as a wide device with a slide-up display. Sort of like a mix between a Switch Lite, an Ayaneo Slide, and Delta Duo. The layout of this design aims to improve ergonomics over the Standard skin, while keeping true to the theme of lifelike hardware that unifies my skin designs.

I had initially wanted to do a centered bottom screen, but obviously that makes an important interactive element the hardest to reach in a lot of cases. You can see in my first concept for ‘Slide’ that I had intended for the bottom DS screen to be centered on the wide display, flanked by two halves of a the same screen.

This would have allowed me to extend reachability while also maintaining visual balance. Unfortunately in my initial test, I wasn’t able to get the overlapping touch areas to behave correctly, and the reverseScreens button would only swap the bottom display in my JSON file, the right half.

So: I had to take it back to the drawing board.

I looked at what I had done in the past with Delta Duo; adding 'on-screen’ buttons! The bottom DS screen is shown at the right side of the display so it’s pretty reachable, with virtual buttons for Screenshot, Quick Save, Quick Load, Fast Forward, and Soft Reset!

This menu is partially inspired by the Virtual Console menu on the Nintendo 3DS, and I don’t know if this will be the release version of Duo NX- but I’d love to hear what you think about it!

This version of landscape is close to done, but you’ll probably be able to see that it’s not 100% finished. Right now I’m only adding landscape to the Light Orange Special Edition so I can try to make updates faster!

Get it on Gumroad!

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