I hope the tools will be enjoyable. I don't know why most fantasy console developers miss this aspect, but never having to leave the environment is one of the main draws of Pico8 and similar tools, not poking and peeking and doing obscure things that end up just being in-jokes to other programmers. Programming is a craft, yes, but game design is hindered when barriers like archaic programming is put in the way.
Just my thoughts, but I'm still looking forward to this.
I do want to build all of the tools right into the console itself. It'll act a bit like a computer so from a command line OS you'll be able to boot right into the programming IDE, the art tool, the music & sound tool, etc.
The thing about the Athena is I want everything to have a low-level interface, but if you choose to build your game using the high-level language Apollo and its associated IDE, then all of those things will also have a high-level interface on top. For example, you CAN poke/peek at the audio system manually, but it will be easier to just use the provided music and sfx playback library. The goal will be to provide a complete enough library for games that you never actually need to poke/peek anything for probably 99% of games (because I recognize that writing things in raw assembly and poking at arbitrary memory locations isn't exactly the most fun thing in the world for most developers)
