prosthetic knowledge

Vector Exhibition: Other Worlds. @Interaccess.

Vector Games Art festival is about to kick off very soon, and I proud to say I have some (small) involvement with it. The festival itself is both thought-provoking and necessary:

vectorgameartfest:

Other Worlds (co-curated by Prosthetic Knowledge and mrghosty), is an exhibition which addresses digital space as procedural landscapes. Rather than creating games where prescribed routes and narratives directing player movement and action, the works of Other Worlds position the player as a digital flaneur; free to move anywhere within these worlds, while occupying the position of a detached observer.

Other Worlds features the Canadian exhibition debut of The Night Journey, created by Bill Viola and Tracy Fullerton.

Other Worlds features works by : Luis Hernandez, Alex Myers & Jeff Thompson, Lea Albaugh, Arcane Kids, Ed Key & David Kanaga, Alan Kwan, Cyril Lecomte-Languérand, and Axel Shokk.

You can find out more about the festival over at their Tumblr blog here

DUNE II in HTML 5 

Dune II was a real-time strategy game developed by Westwood Studios in the 16-Bit gaming era, and a forerunner to the following Command and Conquer games.

While the controls don’t live up to modern RTS intuition, the game has been successfully ported to play on line, which you can here

Arboration 

Interactive game installation causes changes in a virtual natural environment based on harmonies played on a musical interface - video embedded below:

Arboration from Michael Allison on Vimeo.

Arboration is an experiment in virtual environmental game control that places the wellbeing of a digital forest into the hands of a performer using music (and music theory) as the control interface. Playing a capacitive sensing one octave piano keyboard either grows a forest or burns it to the ground depending entirely how its played. The fate of this forest is in your hands.

The idea behind this project stems from the desire to combine musical improvisation with dynamic narrative control. The physical action of playing the piano-like, touch-sensitive keyboard is translated via harmonic analysis into data that controls a 3D environment projected onto a screen. By analyzing the intervals between the notes being played by the performer we can determine if what is being played is harmonically consonant or dissonant which is sent through the programming to determine the visual output. This process allows music theory to be the core of the control structure, however musical form is not a factor allowing anyone to have the full experience, not just musicians. Music theory is the control, play is the vehicle, and visual/emotional response is the feedback system.

More Here

Paradis Perdus (Lost Paradises) 

High Definition low polygon game world to explore, only your path destroys the landscape - video embedded below:

The game is about not belonging. You are the bad guy, you are killing everything you touch. The world you are in is beautiful and green, but the moment you get into it, you start infecting everything, and the world starts decaying, until it eventually ceases to exist. You can choose to exit the world, and then it will heal itself, but then you don’t get to enjoy it of course, because you’re not there any more.

More information, with links to download the alpha for PC, Mac, and Linux, can be found here

Perspective 1.0 

The first-person 3D game to control a 2D platformer has been released today, freely available:

December 12, 2012

Dear Fans,

We’re excited to announce today that Perspective is available for download, free of charge.

Perspective was put together by some of the most competent, hard working, and passionate game creators I have ever worked with. From the very first line of code pushed to our mercurial repository, up until the moment the final build was uploaded, we poured our hearts and souls into the creation of this game.

None of us had the luxury of working on Perspective full-time. From overloaded six-course semesters at DigiPen to full-time jobs and internships, there were always other obligations pulling for our attention. Despite these distractions, we sacrificed sleep and sanity to make Perspective into what it is today.

Making games is hard, much harder than anyone who has never shipped a game before would expect. We hope you enjoy playing Perspective as much as we enjoyed making it. Thanks to all the eager fans who kept us motivated in shipping Perspective.

GLHF,

Pohung

Lunar Trails 

Game art installation which plots every gameplay of a 1970’s arcade machine onto a wall:

Lunar Trails from Seb Lee-Delisle on Vimeo.

From Seb.ly

Lunar Trails is an interactive installation, first commissioned by the Dublin Science Gallery for their GAME exhibition, running from November 2012 to the end of January 2013.

It features a full size arcade cabinet running the vintage 1979 game Lunar Lander. As you play the game, the path that you take is rendered on the wall with a large hanging drawing robot.

The trails build up to produce artworks that are solely created by the game players, and is a reflection of all their individual journeys to the surface of the moon.

More Here

Pumpktris 

Playable electronic Tetris game cased inside a real pumpkin, with perforations and LEDs as pixels:

More about how and why it was but together at HaHa Bird:

One of my habits is to write down all the crazy, fleeting ideas I have, then go back to review later rather than judging right off the bat, or even worse, forgetting them.  Earlier in the month I was looking through that idea notepad and found “Make Tetris Pumpkins” from sometime last year. My original plan had been to make forms to shape pumpkins into Tetris pieces as they grew, then stack them together for Halloween. Since Halloween was only a few weeks away and it was too late to start growing pumpkins, I thought “Why not make a pumpkin you can play Tetris on instead?”

You can read more about how it was put together here

Adrift by Tom Campbell 

Interactive “non-game” places you in an adrift small boat in the middle of nowhere:

In this boat simulator you have lost your sail and now adrift in the deep ocean.

I chose two themes for this MiniLD. Taking the ‘Not-a-game’ theme and using the boat as more of an experience. While the ‘Real-time’ theme is used in the sun and sky.

The game is set to use your computer’s clock for the sky. Meaning if you start the game up at six in the morning, you will be able to see the sun rise!

Other fun features are weather conditions like thunders storms!

You can download this for OSX and Windows, or play a web version.

More info can be found here

8-bit Evaporation by the flying O.H.N.O. twins 

Stop-motion animation of a Super Mario cloud made from over 5,000 tinted ice-cubes placed as pixels, melting:

8-bit evaporation from the flying O.H.N.O. twins on Vimeo.

In “8-bit evaporation”, 5,500 tinted ice cubes were used as “pixels” to create the iconic Super Mario Bros cloud. It was then encouraged to melt and was recorded in HD. The resulting video was sped up, compressed, reversed and looped. The soundtrack are two audio files sampled from the original Nintendo video game that were sped up, slowed down and overlaid.

CraftStudio 

Described as “a game to make games” … or a real-time collaborative game-making tool for the MineCraft generation. Here is a trailer featuring it’s developer, Elisée Maurer:

Games with user-generated content like Minecraft, Little Big Planet or Trackmania have made it clear that lots of gamers are creative at their heart and that, provided with the right tools, you guys can and want to build awesome stuff.

User-made maps are great, but we can do better! Introducing…

Real-time collaborative game-making, for the masses

CraftStudio is a multiplayer platform to create games and interactive movies. It’s about empowering gamers and blurring the line between playing and creating.

It makes a few trade-offs (a low-poly, pixel-arty look) to allow gamers with no particular experience to:

• Create, paint and animate 3D models (characters, objects) out of blocks.
• Craft infinite maps (think Minecraft’s creative mode), painting your own blocks to create whatever universe you want.
• Give life to their worlds using a visual scripting system.

It’s all real-time, you can collaborate with friends or strangers over the Internet. You can set up your own server or join an existing project.

It’s currently in Alpha build and Windows only, but you can get hold of it and find out more at the project’s website here (and more info at it’s old IndieGoGo page here)

Memory of a Broken Dimension 

Trailer for independent Japanese game which smartly employs glitch aesthetics in it’s game world as part of it’s narrative - video embedded below:

FPS?

The emulator of an obscure computer system propagates across the internet, a signal is established…

There is very little more information about the game … at one point there appears to have been an online playable work-in-progress, but that isn’t working anymore.

There are more screenshots at the website of the developer, Datatradgedy, here, plus more in this forum here

Correction - I mistakenly claimed this was an independent Japanese game - turns out the developer is based in Seattle by the Twitter name xra - my bad …