IndieCadeEast 2013–Games and Creativity

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)

1. Renga AI: "Your fourth harvester looks really useful now”
2. Game Design Workshop: Post-It Pirates playtest sessions
3. Hokra Play-by-Play Sports Commentary during Sports Friends Session
4. Super Shove Shove Ending Screen during CAPY keynote by Kris.
5. 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.

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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.

Audio Gems for your commute

I got an iphone [blog entry link] a while back and out of laziness did not sync up all my music from my previous smartphone/iTunes. After finally putting on a few albums, I’ve decided to stop syncing and just listen to pandora and podcasts instead. Current favorite Pandora station: Santigold

Back when I interned with NPR, podcasting was all the rage. My ipod (U2 edition) had a ton of music but not as many podcasts. I found out that I was never able to clear the backlog of all my subscriptions. After school ended, the work schedule got hectic and I haven’t kept up with podcasts at all. After getting my iphone I looked into podcasts again and was surprised to find so many good shows that are still around.

Iphone makes it pretty easy to download podcasts. There is a dedicated podcast section under itunes and everything is categorized by content. If you go into settings you can also set podcast as one of the tabs (like what I’ve done). This way you don’t have to keep on going to “more” to get to it.

If you don’t like the browse feature, you can always search for a topic and itunes will bring up various matches, including podcast matches. This is a useful way for looking up music since many stations have podcasts of their live shows etc. See below for an example of search and podcast matches.

While I am still exploring new podcasts, I wanted to summarize some of my favorites for my friends who are new to the podcast scene. FYI if you don’t have an iphone, you can still download them via itunes on your computer and transfer to your device. Alternately you can also browse for those podcast websites and most times they have a straight mp3 link that you can download to your smartphone.

Discover Music
KEXP podcast http://kexp.org/podcasting/podcasting.asp
Mix of live music and short conversations about the band’s music and tours. All episodes are between 20-30min, which is just enough time to give you a flavor of the sound and personalities. Highly recommend the episode on Florence + The Machine and Alabama Shakes.

Learn Something New
Stuff You Should Know http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/hsw-shows/hsw-podcast.htm
If you like wiki-browsing and a good conversation, you’ll love Chuck and Josh, co-hosts of this podcast and the two friendliest guys around. For each episode the two chat about a specific topic and its background and history. Topics range from beer to coffee to shotgun houses. I recommend the episode on beer and zero.

Relationships
Savage Love http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLovePodcast/Page/
If you’ve read Dan Savage’s columns, you’ll enjoy this podcast. Every episode features Dan answering questions submitted by listeners.He tells it like it is, without holding back. Sometimes guests will make an appearance and also answer some questions. Listening to this show makes me realize just how vulnerable people are and all want love, respect, and attention despite their experience in relationships.

Other Favorites:
Almost all NPR shows like This American Life, Car Talk, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, Planet Money, various music shows.

TED Talks: This is not a podcast but an app with videos of past Ted talks searchable by theme, keyword, and length. You can also bookmark or download the ones you like. Some ideas for my own TED talk. Will draft out some entry in the future
-music
-communications (methods, styles)
-dealing with change (moves, immigration, schools, etc)