We love experimenting with new ways of thinking about games and we do it often. Now we want to introduce our methodology to the world. That is why we in collaboration with Click festival have created 4 different workshops. Workshops where we play around with technology to create new kinds of interfaces for games. The click festival is in Kulturværftet in Helsingør.
Our workshops are: Using Node.js on Thursday 9th May 14-20h, Hardware Jam on Friday 10th May 12-19h, Circuit Bending also on Friday 10th May 12-19h, and then finishing off with a Mini Game Jam on Saturday 11th may 12-19h.
image: www.throughmyeyes.de – Merlin Nadj-Torma – merlin@throughmyeyes.de
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Read about the background of this trip here.
We got the move controllers water-proofed and were excited to try our underwater idea. We thought of having an underwater minefield of floating move controllers. If you touched one, a chain reaction would start, and you would hear sounds played from above the water.
Ready to get wet
However, as soon as the move controllers were submerged, just a bit, they stopped working. Apparently the Bluetooth signal from the controllers is not strong enough to send through water. The medium is of course tougher than air to propagate in, but we did not think this would be an issue. Apparently it is. There went all under water ideas!
Luckily we made two new findings.
- The move controllers float and work while floating
- They start working again as soon as they emerge from the water! (As long as they have not been under for more than 5 sec, where the built in hardware disconnect kicks in)
These two findings together we thought was really cool and could be turned around from a bug to a feature. We figured out that we could count for updates in the code, where no there was no activity from the controller. If the duration is longer than a prescribed threshold (for us 0.5 second), then the controller had been submerged.
This got us to think about the games in another way, and even though an under water game would have been beautiful and atmospheric to play, being above water is more fun, since you can communicate and interact more with the other players.
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Read about the background of this trip here.
The last couple of days we have been settling in. Getting to know the “island time” and meeting local people and Amani’s family. All very nice people.
I got to play a game with the locals that they claim is the predecessor of the other games in the same variant. The game is called Ohlvalhu Gondi and is a type of Kalaha/Mancala and is played sea shells called cowrie. The cowrie used to be their currency, so playing this game would have an element of gambling involved. The cowrie is also depicted on their really beautiful paper money as a legacy of their history.
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Many of us at the Game Collective are going to and hosting this Game Jam. We think that it is a great way to realize and to form ideas as well as socialize and build networks. It was at the last exile game jam that we developed Idiots attack the Top Noodle together with many other silly Kinect games (like Bitchslap and Ninjas don’t shoot). This is also where Tim Garbos developed his beautiful and weird game jam-winning photon boy game.
Activities:
Social game jam and playing/making party games (Wednesday)
More Game Jam (Thursday – Saturday)
Loads of social and physical folk games
Presentation and casual award show
Final Party
Presentation of some game developers current projects.
Where:
At the beautiful old folk highscool Vallekilde (Højskole), Denmark
More info:
http://exile.dk/
Signup:
http://vallekilde.dk/ugekurser/autumn-exile-game-jam/
Last weekend we were at the PlayPublik festival in Berlin, hosted by the amazing Invisible Playground. It was a blast, and we got to showcase a new version of Idiots attack the Top Noodle! We also tried to showcase one of our new creations: The Puddle Peddler. I say “tried” because we just could not get it running. Like with any other technology; when you add layers of complexity, the risk of failure increases. But though we didn’t get to showcase it at this Festival, we are making it ‘sturdier’ for the next. Still, read the concept description; it’s quite an interesting game.
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Some weeks ago, a couple of us went to the exile game jam (that we are also hosting). There, we split up and worked on different projects that all came out quite well. I had previously met up with some interesting people from Copenhagen and pledged to make a game with them using their newly obtained Brain Wave Sensor (EEG device), the MindWave. I like thinking about video games in different ways; be it different game mechanics, aesthetics or in this case novel input devices. We felt like this input device had not been utilised very well for games. Until now 
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