While I’ve played my share of video games growing up, I didn’t know much about independent games or game development before I attended IndieCadeEast 2013. Thanks to Diana, we made our way to the Museum of Moving Image in Queens this past weekend to the first IndieCade on the east coast. After two and a half days of intense convention activities, I learned a thing or two about games, crowd energy, creative design, and play testing. Warning: this entry has a lot of media. Proceed with caution.
fancy logo. Link to Indiecade East site
just a shot of the museum entrance.
Five Memorable Convention Moments (more details after the jump)
- Renga AI: "Your fourth harvester looks really useful now”
- Game Design Workshop: Post-It Pirates playtest sessions
- Hokra Play-by-Play Sports Commentary during Sports Friends Session
- Super Shove Shove Ending Screen during CAPY keynote by Kris.
- Three way tie for the three “Well-Played” sessions I attended. All the presenters gave engaging presentations and shed some light onto games that I had not otherwise known about.
1. Renga Rant
http://wallfour.co.uk/
When D. and I first lined up on Sat. night for this game in the main theater (bigger of the two theaters), we didn’t know what to expect. The volunteer who was handing out the laser pointers instructed every row to pass down the laser pointers (1 per 3 people only). Since we sat on the aisle, I decided to skip it and let my neighbor participate while we observed. Later on in the show, he was nice enough to let us try as well.
Game premise: Team space shooter
The Execution: 100-players (total strangers) + laser pointers (aka annoying red things) = crowd ecstasy and/or complete chaos.
The Twist: We are all dependent on each other to build a ship, fight off enemies, and survive!
Side effect: Continuous blabbering about how cool this game is and seeing “quads” and “radial” shapes every where.
The context for the AI comment "Your fourth harvester looks really useful now” came after we opted to built yet another harvester despite being blown to bits by enemies. The ship can build different parts after each round of attacks. A “launch” engine is said to be the primary goal because the ship needs to build four launch engines in order to go home. Then there are “silo” ship units to hold supplies and “harvesters” which are little ships that can grab supplies to bring back to the silos. Harvesters have no offense so they get destroyed easily during attack.
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