Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Alt.Ctrl: Amazing Games Made with Maker Tech”.
Hey everyone we’re not in the workshop today, we are at the game developers conference here in san francisco. Normally is not something we cover here at make, but we’re particularly looking at altcontrol.gdc. What altcontrol is is it’s a showcase of games? People have made uh for this. Exhibit and they’ve created custom control interfaces and they’re using all the same sort of stuff that you would find in any regular maker project, so you’re, seeing cnc cut, enclosures custom interfaces, stuff based off of raspberry pi arduino and just creating really interesting, weird, sometimes insightful interfaces To these games – and you won’t see anything like this anywhere else – i don’t think any of these games will ever make it to store shelves.
So this is really the only place you can see them, but there’s a lot of really really cool stuff here, really inspiring stuff. Let’S go check, some of it out so hello, i’m avi, uh romanov and my partner is giada sun and we are students at carnegie. Mellon university, we made a game called too many captains and not enough wire, which is a party game where one person, the engineer, has all of the controls and everybody else is a captain and has all the information and is trying to translate what they see on The screen into instructions, because the engineer can’t turn around and see what’s going on, so what makes our game unique besides the communication structure, is we made a custom controller that uses uh audio plug cables as the primary interface uh? So the engineer is listening to the instructions and trying to wire up shields and weapons and thrusters to try to make the ship go. We built a custom console, so the controller actually has hdmi out going directly to the tv. So there’s no separate computer involved. We built basically a case around an intel nook which is sort of like a little mini computer uh. Also inside the box we have a raspberry pi, which is running all of the hardware, so uh we joke that it’s sort of like a data center inside that box uh totally over engineered, but it hasn’t crashed.
Yet we have a website too manycaptains.com uh, where we have a bunch of pictures and information about the game, we’re really interested in getting the game to as many people as possible. This is our first time showing it uh we’re totally honored just to be here and uh. We actually were a finalist for the alt control awards, so we’re super stoked about that uh. So we’re trying to bring it to other conferences like pat pax east, indicate um and we’ve been talking to some other uh small exhibitors who have little bespoke arcades that might be interested in the game. We’Re also potentially interested in kickstarting it. So if you are interested in the game and would love to buy it then tell us what you’d be willing to pay for it and we’ll try to make something work. So i’m new hall caddy, i’m one of the narrative designers on disco is dead and disco is dead. Is a buddy cop, comedy horror, game that plays with slappable zombie, head controllers and also disco ball controllers, you’re literally slapping zombies? So the way you do it is you slap down left and right on the face, uh, it’s kind of like ddrs.
So once uh an arrow comes up, you have to do it in the direction of the arrow and then making making it’s basically all rigged up to like the inputs on the circuit. So it’s basically simple, like you know, wsad keys, but we just put it like uh rigged it up to the controllers, which is made out of like a styrofoam head wood and door stoppers to get like a satisfying feel to it uh. Well, we have a twitter page that at disco is dead, game, welcome to come and like share your experiences that when you play the game and also we have our hio page up, there um got a bunch of like footage and stuff too it’s great seeing a Lot of people enjoying the game there, [ Applause, ] hi, so my name is henry lamb, uh, i’m here with henry hnry, i did not name the our group after myself, um we’re here with clunker junker that what we brought here to all control g for gdc Culprit junker comes from sort of a lot of themes that we’ve had in the past, so we were here two years ago with crank tank last year, you’re here with beer sphere, crank tank had two large like cranks to maneuver these tanks. Uh fearsphere had a flashlight mechanism, so this year we kind of have a game that kind of is brought from the themes of all those right. So when we were working on crank tank, when we had it here uh, you know whenever you give players a chance to kind of go nuts on controllers, they really work it and things would literally fall apart pieces coming off here and there and we’re fixing it As they’re playing it and that really gave us the kind of inspiration for this piece, because you know our game – clunker junker is kind of about flying, a spaceship has fallen apart and you’re trying to fix it while you’re trying to fly at the same time. So it kind of has you know these large uh oversized? You know essentially oversized flash wind-up flashlights right, so this whole mechanism is kind of what drives uh the interface for the whole uh ship right.
This thing is, it feels like a solid tool, there’s just weight to it, uh and that comes from the dynamo. That’S on this end that actually is producing dc power uh. We have that wire to a rectifier bridge uh, pushing power to dc to dc converter here. So, on the front end, here we actually have a small led, that’s from the pcb of the dc converter.
So essentially we have a very large wine, winding flashlight right window, crank flashlight um. So this is uh driving the input for all the other sort of sensors. That are on our uh, our game piece. Our controllers here photo resistors. You know kind of standard kind of light levels, picking those up to kind of get those readings um. In terms of the fabrication of all this uh. You know, we’ve got uh cnc baltic birch. We got 3d printed parts, uh we’ve got some vacuum formed parts in the back as well and, of course, obviously just hand crafting as well just working our hand, tools and other things like that. Our most recent uh game, clunker junker, is not on our website yet because, basically, this got finished monday night tuesday afternoon. Basically, just before the judging of uh control gdc, you can go to uh. We r henry that will have information about us as individuals and also the two other pieces that we’ve also made in the past. Both fearsphere and cranktank.
We’Ve also got elastic wait. A second looks like i just got an email yeah, so i’m simon manning, i’m actually the fabricator on the team. So i was kind of responsible for all the physical aspect of this and essentially puppet pandemonium is a live performance, art alternative controller game. So what we wanted to do is we wanted to give people a chance to perform, but also be an audience member in in this sort of interactive, arcade, multiplayer kind of experience. So this portion is the the sort of performance, art and then they’re just about to begin some of the simple kind of mini games that we made to showcase the button helmet 9000 they’re wearing and the nice thing about.
All of this is really simple, easy to play kind of fun games, but it’s also audience participation and cooperation. So in this one, if the players were to get knocked out or crash, the audience votes them back into the game. So there’s there’s always this sort of give and take with the audience and the and the puppets as there is with any kind of live performance, so that kind of interaction. So that was essentially the concept behind. Why we wanted to create this game and make something that would give people a chance to get up on stage at a you know, a conference as large as gdc okay, so my name is eric osana and i’m actually a student at uppsala university campus goten in Sweden and then this pump, the frog is like our first year student project, so you need to have like this sick, crazy input and then we like thought like yeah. Maybe we could test it with a pump. We had like a lot of different ideas. First was the pump, then it was like a we call it. Oh, we call it that you’re digging with you know the digging machine, but we ended up with a pump and then, after that, we had to design the whole game around it.
We just wanted to make it feel as good as possible. Okay, so in pump the frog, the only motors don’t have like two inputs, you can become big small and you can like rotate and like interact with the environment around like some some objects that are often described as like animals. Uh can be what they call it can be like interacted by using a pump as well as the frog, and by doing that, you have a lot of fish fish, squishy physics as well, so you can, for example, like climb and like get really squished in and Like pop up and stuff just to give you that extra feedback, how it’s made, it’s actually just a pump, some duct tape and then like a laser mouse with a high dps.
So we can actually censor it and get like get in the inputs by like drawing drawing up the chief, then you’re like getting like the y coordinates and then like routine. You actually get the x coordinates so hi, i’m robin baumgarten, and i make experimental hardware games and today i brought bubble garden to all control gdc, so bubble garden is like a like. A weird arrangement of springs, 36 springs on a table, and i intended to be a platform for different weird little experiences and the springs are all uh capacitive touch sensitive and they have a vibration sensor inside as well and they’re surrounded by led rings.
So they kind of light up to whatever i tell them to my previous project is called line, wobbler, which is a one-dimensional, dungeon crawler and uses a like a spring as a joystick and a five meter long led strip as a display – and i really like this Interaction and people responded really well to it, so i decided to do more with it, so i’m now still working with springs and still working with leds, but kind of going into the second dimension, basically and experimenting with this platform with wobble garden people kind of interact With the springs by by touching and by wobbling, so it’s capacitive touch and a vibration sensor inside and i’m building different experiences that are based on on sound and visual feedback or like little games all right. So the the website for wobblegarden is wobble.garden um and the more general project website is called wobblylabs.com, so i’ve had a really good time checking out this stuff at all control gdc. I hope you have too it’s a little different from what we normally talk about here. On the make magazine channel – but i love this stuff so much and it’s super interesting to see what kind of interactions you can make between hardware and software to create really interesting, unique experiences. I really hope you’ve enjoyed watching this video, give it a big thumbs up.
If you did and be sure to hit subscribe, so you won’t miss the next article for make magazine you .