The 2019 Experimental Gameplay Workshop

[Music] welcome so I came here two years ago and I spoke about my edible tabletop game so it's games you have to eat to play and two years ago I had our six games I now have thirteen games so the key thing about all of them is you have to eat to play and it's not meant to be a gimmick it's meant to be a core part of the gameplay so I've put these 13 games into a cookbook that I successfully kick-started yet last year yes still time to back but we're here to talk about experimental gameplay right and in fact for me that is experimental food game play so since food and eating is such a key part of my games I've had to play with the food itself and playing with the food changes the gameplay of the game of like the game it makes it more difficult sometimes it can be different so these are some of my sort

of experiments and I'm gonna try to talk about what kind of has gone right and what has gone wrong so first up I want to talk about this game called high tea assassin in high tea assassin it's a social deduction game for three players you get assigned your role by eating an item and then you have to work out who you can trust now the thing is that people didn't actually trust their taste buds enough and couldn't trust their flavor so I had to add color in as well so this color and flavor to work out what your role is alright next up I'm gonna talk about a game gingerbread friends in gingerbread friends you asked a group a set of tough questions and then you have to guess how they'll respond what the majority will say if you're right you get to pull over a lid and underneath there might be a prize so let's go to a demo alright so underneath might be a prize here we go so I don't know if you can show that there's a little prize in here so I'm like yay I got a prize hmm but whatever or I might

get information about where there is a prize for example here there's a little piece of paper that says won now you'll notice I've just pulled off two lids and I haven't eaten these I I don't actually need to eat these to play this game so I'm like well that's no good I'm gonna have to change that so I added frosting to the bottom so I'm going to now I'm gonna lick it this actually has turned out alright you can kind of read it well not on that theme but you can kind of see what it says to me it kind of kept getting very smudged when I was practicing a lot so I'm like that's no good so try it another option this one gained frosting underneath here it's a bit difficult to see but is royal icing because royal icing sits harder than frosting so I'm playing with those properties all right back over here then this this is how it

looks in the game there's like a set of symbols and stuff that you use and it's the key alright next game next game is called treasure cake treasure cake is meant as a kid's birthday party game where you use a bubble tea straw to put it into the cake and try to find secret stashes of things the constraints of what this secret stash might be is that it probably had to sit into in a cake for maybe overnight and I wanted it to be obvious to like all of the players that they had discovered something I didn't want kids to lie and I wanted it to be a fun oh my I found a thing alright so demo like pop rocks so I've got back with pop rocks in my mouth seems like a good idea but the problem is you have to store it

and cream probably okay you can't just store a bunch of pop rocks by itself I'm still popping so I won't be able to show you that if I eat this you end up um it won't pop anymore so that's no good so I came up with another solution which is this one so it turned my tongue bright blue and potentially the rest of my face that's what I ended up using in the game it's recommending that you use really food dye alright next game is a game cook flipping stick it's about there's like a bunch of cookies with peanut butter on them and you've got to throw items at them and see what sticks so part of it is like you then flip it upside down and see if all of the items stay on board so the key thing in this game is the glue what you're putting on top to see

how that works so back again to the demo station there we go so I've got a few options here I've got some frosting over here I'm not very good at throwing so we'll see and that kind of worked and I've got some dip over here and some hummus over here and some peanut butter over here so you can kind of see they all sort of stick a bit I mean if I look further away stuff might bounce a bit more it's going over two other spots but the key thing now is like what happens when I flip them upside down so the ball miss works well that's great frost ink here doesn't work that's a fail peanut butter I mean I had that in the picture so you've got to assume this is gonna work dude and then like dip over here that's super goopy oh but it actually works they were always a mystery sometimes with the experiments okay next

up is a game called cookie cruncher and cookie crunch up there are a bunch of different cookies I mean obviously cuz it's called cookie crunch shops and you've got to put them strategically on a board to get points now the catch is that you can bite these cookies to try to make them fit better so what sort of cookies am I going to use let's go over here to the demo station so I am gonna start I've I've put like a drift art with an unlucky and you may not be able to see it but I've put a little line here on this cookie to show where I'm attempting to find it so let's try this that worked pretty well I was able to get it to the point that I wanted it to for what I aim to all right now I'm gonna try one with icing on it let's see what happens with the icing on it I've lost a part that has a point on it so

now I'm losing point because the icing cracks that goes all the way through it now I have some other ones here you can hear this on the mic but they're shaking that's kind of weird all right let's try this one what's happened now is I've got little a whole lot of sprinkles in cider and so if you play with this game you've got to be careful not to get to the center with the sprinkles in it because they'll all fall out so this is kind of how it looks in the book how to make the three-dimensional cookies and I also have a version called toast cruncher which is with like ham and eggs instead o our final game yeah I'm making good progress is a game called flavor roulette in flavor all right there's a bunch of items that all taste the same but one of them doesn't taste like the

other and you need to keep a poker face while eating these now it's coming up with the recipes for this is very difficult you want something that's slightly gross so that it's hard to keep a straight face but not so gross that you have to spit it out because that's not really fair spice is very difficult to deal with because looks people have very radically different reactions to spice like I can't really deal with much more than a mild spice whereas other people are like okay so I am now going to torture myself up on stage the the ratio here is more than one of these being bad and I am gonna try to eat it and then you're gonna hopefully try to guess whether I got a good one or a bad one [Laughter]

okay do we I I think we probably got time for a show of hands do we have who thinks so that was a good one okay and who thinks that was a bad one okay yeah it was bad I've got that was like a bunch of like powdered cinnamon and like my throat is like my mouth is so dry and I'm like I got to get some water Wow so like if you know like if I was standing up here for longer you would notice I would be grabbing water very suspiciously and going okay so that's all the demos I have I'm talking to you about today I've got 13 different games and they're all really different there's still so much more that can be done with food so I hope other people experiment with food as well and yeah hopefully you'll get my book I'm about to hit order on those books soon so thank you [Music] so I'm gonna take a minute here and just

make a comment that when I first met Jen she was working on I think it wasn't was it a mobile title that you're working on yeah we're in a mobile title and I remember having a conversation with Jen where she was like well I'm working on this game I'm worried it for a long time he's not really going where I want I don't know I'm kind of running out of money and I don't know I should do I said just don't finish it she's like well but I'm we're gonna for my time is should we finish I was like you should do what you love right you don't have to put all of your time and energy to something and she's up here eating cookies and licking icing off of peace' game pieces like you [ __ ] did it like congratulations it's amazing there was literally no such thing as edible games when I first met you and now you started a whole category so congratulations Jen you're an influencer now okay so next up we actually have a video so this is a muhammad's game it is

amazing I'm not gonna say much more about it I'm gonna let him talk about it he really apologized that it could not be here but he sends wishes from montreux everyone my name is mom this is Jack I'm a creative director at artefact 5 in a small indie studio in Montreal Canada few months ago a science music video called lucky you by Eminem and join you Lucas where they're followed by these characters are copied their every move so I thought of aquaria to certain project inspired by that called lucky me so lucky me is a puzzle shooter where countless acts copy every move but sometimes you have to use this ability against them to survive the rules are pretty simple you play as the character in yellow on left here and the characters on right to the red eyes just copy you and you got to be the last one standing you can do the basics we can aim move and shoot and of course all

the transitions are tabs of course it's not always that easy sometimes shooting one guy will get you shot by the other so you get a user lack of original slot to get them to shoot each other part of the challenge is to figure out the order of operations sometimes shooting the wrong guy first might get you killed [Music] so sometimes it's worth taking the time to line up the perfect shot so you can win this very spectacular ways [Music]

so these little blobs at your feet are dama you have a new gun and sometimes you need to pick up additional and more to finish the job the main challenge is not just watching where you going what you do you also have to keep track of their movements for example here we're both at a Hamel but he has a bunch on your side they have to make sure yeah voids oh crap

luckily he can think for himself so can waste his bullet and pick up mine from over there another strategy is Sue's environment to face yourself in a better position where you can pick up the ammo and their whole bunch of environmental hazards that can be very dangerous or super fun and of course would it be a puzzle game without some spikes and we can just walk history into it

so this possible uses all the mechanics we just saw we're both out of Hamill he has boots on his side but he has to get there without be running into the spikes in the back so I have to use the environment to block myself while picking up the buttons so Eminem has a warm spot in my heart I've been a huge fan of him since I was a kid growing up in Saudi Arabia where his music is banned I would have to go into underground markets to pick up his cassettes often while running away from religious beliefs actually one time I got caught and arrested but that's the story for another time [Music] [Music] [Music]

and of course it wouldn't be a real M&M game without real Slim Shady mode in this mode you play as the real Slim Shady was standing up but with every shot the new Slim Shady would send up and get a figure out where you are every round and be the last one standing there you go the last time shady standing could be so cool if Eminem got to see this game it's my fan gift to him so if you can tweet at him hold a sign in his concert yell at em on the street would

be a dream come true also if your publisher was interested drop me a line at the website thank you so much [Applause] so um one of the things I wanted to point out about this video in particular is that and I can sense it right there's this question of like cultural appropriation that we always have in the games industry this is a different approach you know thinking about what you make and how you make it and how it inspires you and that not all the things you see are going to be exactly what you expect so next up we have John Liu and stuff they're going to be talking about sorry and Alex introduce the one person talking about Lucifer within us sorry that's okay in the meantime hi my name is John Wood this is Alex we are from Kitfox Quebec games are based out of Montreal and we are here to show you

Lucifer within us which is an experimental mystery solving game this is a project that is currently unannounced and still very much in the middle of development so please try to keep it confidential I don't know how I don't know how we're gonna keep a secret between a thousand people in a room but we're gonna try yeah sure I will technical difficulties always happens so Lucifer within us is a unique kind of mystery solving game because it's not about just solving mysteries in the traditional sense the protagonist is a digital Exorcist in a futuristic theocracy so that gives us a couple tools that normal characters would not have access to so first we're gonna begin by investigating the body of the victim in this case that happens in a graveyard we can see from the the profile of the character that the victim was a art student basically and that the body has a throat slit which is the most likely cause of death so this is where it gets interesting we are going to listen to the testimonies of three

different characters that were present during the events of the crime I would ask you to try and see if you can see any discrepancies between what the three characters are saying so this first character was the victims master Lucius and he claims that he arrived at the graveyard to for a stroll and he basically was scrolling for most of the afternoon he sent his apprentice off the victim Vaughn and Aaron but he doesn't really specify what that is and what's really interesting about the game right now is that you're able to fully control which section of the testimony you see and it plays out in real time in front of you now this is not reality this is a subjective reconstruction of what the character is saying so the cone of vision illustrates what what section of the screen that the character actually saw but even that might not be accurate it's going to be full of inaccuracies omissions and outright lies even anyway so we're gonna skip ahead to the late afternoon and he claims that someone was

passing by and then he strolled into the back fields at which point we he found the body of his apprentice in a freshly dug grave then he called for help at which point he met the other two suspects of the case which is Abraham the grave tender and nearest the embalmer so next we're gonna talk to Abraham to see what he has to say about the situation so Abraham claimed that he was standing and I sorry uh tending to the bushes outside the mortuary for much of the early afternoon from two o'clock to about three o'clock or so and then he headed inside the mortuary to tell Nerissa the embalmer that he was done with attending and that and there is a dismissed him afterwards he headed through the mortuary to the front yard of the graveyard and attended to polish

the headstone that is very prominent there and finally in the late afternoon he heard a cry from the backfield and rushed over there to meet that Lucy is and the other suspect there is Eddie embalmer so there's something a couple things suspicious here like he's the gravedigger but he claims to have never seen a victim or never have dug that particular grave but we're gonna move on to the final testimony and long narrow savvy and Balmer Nerissa claims that the she and Abraham spoke in the mom in the early afternoon about the funeral and asked him to dig a grave and then for most of the early afternoon she was preparing the body for the funeral until Abraham came back to say that he has yet finished digging the grave and then finally she went back to preparing the body until the end of the day when she

heard a cry from the from the graveyard and then she rushed over there to find the other two suspects so it's really strange in that but none of the three suspects have really seen where the victim was after basically two o'clock or so but if you've been watching this carefully you'll probably notice that there are pretty clear discrepancies so we're gonna go back to Abraham and point out something that we just learned there is the claims that they spoke at two o'clock about digging a grave but Abraham insists that you know he was tending to the bushes so we were going to contradict him and unmask his lies at which point the testimony is modified to address the contradiction we pointed out so now he admits that in fact he did speak to nurse Anton mortuary and then he took the shovel and went to the back field to dig a grave all the same he

still insists that nobody came through the backyard he was alone the entire time and beyond that his testimony remains exactly the same as it originally was he claims that he talked to Nerissa went through the front and left so we are going to have to find more information so at this point we're going to go back and do things the traditional way so we are going to investigate the crime scene so we are gonna head into the mortuary and see if there's anything we can find and on Nerissa's table you can find that that there's a bouquet of flowers and the stems of the bouquet have fingerprints on them of the victim which contradicts what Nerissa said about being alone in the mortuary the entire time the victim was the pastor at some point so we're gonna go back to Nerissa and point this out to her

now she admits that fine in fact the victim did come through and you can see that I indicated by the new marker on the timeline so in the next section she will show that in fact she did greet the Isaac the art apprentice and then showed him the bouquet of flowers that he wanted to bring to his instructor Lucius but she claimed that in fact Isaac did not take the bouquet and left by the back exit now if nervous is telling the truth and we take her words at face value there's a clear contradiction between what mirrors the claims that the victim left at a back exit and what Abraham says which is that the nobody came through the back exit so normally we'd be stuck in the situation but we have one more power available to us as digital exercies we are going to enter Nerissa's

mind this is nurses sanctum which is a virtual representation of her psyche the main area is always available to the player but as you contradict given suspect they're resolved weekends and we can discover more secrets about their past their memories and their possible motives in this case we find this a worn bed which reveals to us that Nerissa had an impoverished upbringing at perhaps greed was a motivation for the killing or perhaps not on the table in the main area we can also discover the funeral schedule that narrows that remembers from earlier in the day which reveals that Lucy is the victims master was the one who organized the funeral in the first place so maybe the whole thing was something that was or curse orchestrated by Lucius but that's a quick look at Lucifer within us is subjective testimonies and investigation system

thank you very much for your time [Applause] thank you thank you so yeah I'm a big fan of story games and I love it when when people do investigative work on narrative systems and I thought that that time was really badass so next up we have a video and this video is misshapen yep and we're gonna show to you now oh okay so what is me Shaymin well how do you play or go

this is kind of similar but instead of having the power to make portals with your Peruvian players will be able to provoke and relent their uncontrolled cellular growth misshapen is an obscure physics base or first-person shooter where you can't kill your enemies of course not because we are against all that kind of violence instead you can reduce the mobility distorting their bodies and creating creepy living structures with them players may use these assertions to make traps for example or build complicated living contraptions and use these

structures to reach places that they are not accessible in any other way all of these will result in surprising scenarios and interesting emerging gameplay to think early the game is like let's say a macabre Metroid Vanya [Music]

this could be sugar or heceta nightmarish builder okay whatever this game is currently under the moment by Miko sorry daddy's on the market I'm independent team from fantastic so I don't think we've ever seen an uncontrolled cellular building game experimental gameplay workshop I think that's that's a first I think maybe as another another new genre discovered by this by this

workshop and so leek was here to present card though which I actually I think I saw the first time at Tokyo Game Show this past year I was walking around looking at the games and source student and independent games showcase and I saw this game and I was so charmed by it that I asked if he would be interested in submitting and he did so one of the other things that I can tell you about experimental gameplay workshop is that it is a family affair and that when you're somewhere traveling doesn't really matter where you are if there's games around if there's a school that you visit and there are some things that you think are interesting you can always just say hey you should submit your game to egw when with that I will probably keep talking because we are we're going okay great here's the quote with cárcel hello hello it's such an honor to be here my name is Lee kichan co-founder and game designer and some Hagen's small indie gaming studio in Taiwan and here's our game cutoff at first it look

like no more adventure game you'd count your character and explore lanes and you found a theme a map and you can switch to a map view and you can move or rotate an entire map and when the to tie up let's say and have a folder you can count Anglian together and when they change the world change as well and here's a new map piece and you can connect into the sorry Tula existing map to expand map and you'll miss some people and you can hear their stories but it's gonna take a while so let me speak skip some conversations at Spiro a little bit

it's a music out anyway I'll keep reading and so sometimes you will meet people who need help like this one so his house is instead of the one on the grassland along a sea and in order to fund his house you need to move his

tail to here and you found his house and here's another path so if I didn't skip the conversation before someone will sail Aaliyah's family live in the forest however you don't see anything besides this little pony so a reason leads no no house in this forest is because there's actually two forest any

little boy say there's only one forest so you have to combine a forest together and you will see a house [Applause] [Laughter] and he it is this is how the game works basically and based on this idea we take some experiment and there's a lot of teens who would like to show you so for example if sometimes in the tayo written so you have to make little or in a

certain shape to find out tire or sometimes you only have two tires and in order to find a way out you have to look carefully and try to find a correct way to follow path for example you see a simple here and you talk to here and you continue to in so you can serve the paso or sometimes you are in it in a maze and you can the Miss that construct by yourself [Music]

all the tile is more than one layer one there so for example is its ground level this is under ground level but you cannot change the map on the ground level you can choose only on the run levels will change you the ground level and on the ground level change as well or for example tiles are kinetic lab say move and rotate together like a matrix tricks or already in house nothing

outside housemaid and that's how Kim Carter thank you [Applause] thank you so much for taking the time to bring your game here it's so charming isn't it it's just so beautiful I'm sorry that we had the audio we had a little bit of audio problem with that one earlier today but we wanted to hop mic it so um we've been trying to work out all the kinks of experiments the game's a workshop for a while but there's it's not really an experimental gameplay workshop unless someone's demo totally crashes or one of us trips down the stairs and breaks a leg so you know losing losing it losing a little bit of sounds not so bad and so next we're going to have my favorite current game sloppy forgeries [Laughter] forgeries is a fast paced two-player at

the start of each round players select an abstracted painting from art history whose color palette has been reduced to four to five colors each player armed with the mouse a blank canvas and a few simple paint tools has a minute and a half to copy the painting as quickly and as accurately as possible players can strategically use three seconds of a hint briefly superimposing the goal painting over their canvas as the forgeries are created players are given immediate feedback on the accuracy of their reproductions accuracy is calculated by comparing each pixel of the original with the forgery and counting the number of matching colors generating a percentage complete score after a minute and a half of artful painstaking decision-making painting with the highest percentage complete score wins

[Music] the game collects all the paintings generated which you can do some fun things with like finding the average or finding the meme I also created an editor to help me reduce the color palette of a painting while keeping its distinguishing characteristics an online multi-player version of sloppy forgeries is currently being developed for iOS it is planned to be released in the summer of 2019 sign up for a newsletter at playful systems.com slash sloppy or follow a playful systems and act sloppy forgeries on twitter for release info i'm gurbin or if you want to throw to hate you head about and there you go so let me put up elephants real quick this is the first time I get to show it to the world basically so I'm very excited about your responses and let's get

immersed [Music] say that so this is eloquence which is basically a point-and-click adventure game only it uses a simple language that I designed what you just heard is an alien crashing off the shore of a volcanic island with three peoples living on it with three different languages and three different cultures you're the alien down here in human form because it doesn't wanna scare them and it was wants to prevent the volcano from erupting so the way the game works is you walk up to a person they will speak in a Somaliland language and once alien can do is drag that language down to inventory so now it has memorized and then it can return it to an npc to

create any input so that allows you to walk on and talk to the other NPCs in this scene you want to make it to the top as quickly as you can so you try to identify an exit she's probably here right so you can't quite make out what this guy wants but probably has something to do with an apple right so who has apples this one over here can anyone tell me what this what'd she say this is like regular census in English we're going on.you who trades fish for apples so what was she saying anyone else hi yeah you right you're in a stir well there you go all right so who has fish this guy down here right so you can take this this line and I'm going to show you I'm not gonna

display it to you but I just want to show you the mechanics and see different stuff so if we look at this line right here we have no idea what this means because we don't have any reference point for that but maybe we can figure out what this means what does this part mean what do you think hold up go again yeah you give me what you got a show Buffalo right so we moved back down here give me a fish he says I will give you a fish walk back up there I give you a fish I get you an apple what do we do with the Apple to the guard well done you all gonna stir well and then he tells me to walk on so that allows me to move to the next scene this is a bit

further in the game this is way up at the volcano and when we get here you get some more complicated problems basically so I'm not sure with this guy once this guy says hello again and you may have noticed I've got some more extra tools on this side so I am actually able to cut up the line right now and place it back together so I can make custom answers to solve the problems I need like that so I'm going to jump out of the game and show you a bit more about the thought behind it so there we go language is is hot right it's sick it's sexy it's happening everyone likes language we all use the lingo some of us learn Japanese just to follow the anime in their original languages we have blockbuster games coming out on language we have games gave us symbol languages

already and more recently heavens false who actually won a UK is a game of the show over two days ago so welcome for them so I thought this this game this game has been in development the language step in and development for three years I've been testing a lot for three years and so I did this is time to show it to the world basically but where I think my game differs from most of the other games is it's just about finding out what the symbol actually means and it's more about finding out how people use it in their conversations so just about puzzling in smaller exploration experimenting seeing what happens and it makes sense because language in itself is meaningless it's all about the context so if you have a look at this sentence for example this manner in Chinese this is niihama meaning are you okay are you well how are you but people rarely use this and for this meaning in China the instead

say it Salameh have you eaten did you eat yet so food is very important in a culture and that's where the meaning is derived from not from the two words themselves so what I want you to do in this game is think like a linguist and to give you a little example of that this is a phrase from Irish now to most of us this is incomprehensible but what a linguist does is see if he can assign some kind of meaning to every piece of that so some of that is just translation some of it is how it's the meaning in context and then you can translate that to something you do recognize in this case English my game gives gives you a language that basically gives you the code for all other languages I'm not interested in I'm not interested in the bottom part that's up to you so you can approach it from Italian or English or Mandarin Chinese or Portuguese so that

works both ways then you can use this language to communicate with anyone from all over the world and I think that makes it very exciting so I'm not sure how much time I have just want to show you what how the world looks so this is basically the game right here those are the levels each of them gives you a little bit of a lesson in the language itself and a rough around very nicely so you can make your way to the top like that or go straight up like there now each of the colors is actually a different symbol language which uses the same symbols but change is the syntax which makes it easier for someone for us to connect with it so this should ensure that all of us have a language that clicks for them and allows you to get to the top of the volcano time to save the island a little more circle theoretical stuff about how we deal with language so you have to know stuff first before I can create and you can see that this out left perfectly with my design

so I'm easing you into the language easing you into the game and at the end you get to climb to the top big shout out to my team who helped me babe make this prototype role part of a Dutch collective in the game bakery in the north and the guy on the Left who's made the art words on something spider-man as well so kudos to him and I need your help because I want funding most of all I want a community so I'm I want to give you the demo be in touch with me through either of these channels and I will send it to you in due time thank you so much for giving me time to pretend you you great what's such an interesting at all right so who wants to waffle if you want a stroopwafel come and please come and get one they're amazing if you don't if you

don't come and take them I'm gonna eat them so next up we have another video and this game is called nerve damage and the person that's speaking to you is Dennis car and this is my game nerve damage so before I get started I just want to emphasize what it says on the screen here this game has bright rapidly flashing colors there's a very very strong seizure warning and I just want to make sure everyone is aware of that before I start the game which I'm going to do right now okay so yeah this is nerve damage as you can hopefully see it's a fast-paced score attack arcade style first-person shooter with a loud noisy experimental visual style yeah so when I started working on this game I was coming off another project circle zero which is actually here nominated for nuove award in the IGF come see it just wanted to get that self plug in there of course but you know at least at the time that I finished that game I felt like you know I was very proud of it and I put a lot into it but it felt

like maybe we'd created something that was a little bit too unfriendly to the player it seemed like people were just bouncing off it and not a lot of people were really engaging with it so I was a little bit disillusioned and I wanted to create a game that still felt meaningfully experimental but which you know I wanted something that the players would be you know more more likely to want to play and that was maybe like fun you know and so you know I was also interested in this visual style that I'd been experimenting with and how would a visual style that is maybe kind of antagonistic and difficult for the player to read would affect the way that the players engage with the game you know cuz it's a 3d game and you know sort of in most 3d games the the idea is to make it as easy as possible for the player to immerse themselves and in the environment but you know I wanted to bring some friction to that process and complicated make players aware of the effort they're expending to that and so I tried to sort of build up

the screen so that it functions as much as a barrier into this world as as it is a window and you know I want players to have to sort of push their way through it and learn to read it and yeah well you know one thing I realized while I was making the game is that it is a little bit hard to immerse yourself in this world but once you get over that hump once you cross the barrier the barrier sort of functions as much to hold you into the game as it does as it did to keep you out of it so there's a little bit of a trance-like aspect of playing this game it's it's hard to stop sometimes and I like that you know I think of it as being similar to the the idea of the flow state but where the flow state is based in this idea of serenity I think the flow state that this game creates is more based on anxiety and adrenaline and I find it kind of cathartic to play a game like that you know I like it I like media that's that challenges you as much as it as it caters to you and you know I like

the idea that video games are a space where themes like anxiety compulsion pain discomfort can coexist with an experience that's kind of fun to play also on and genuine dancers painting and so that's kind of the experience that I'm creating with nerve damage yeah thank you for watching the video and enjoy the rest of the ugw this game is actually a really great opportunity to sort of have a teachable moment so we've had a couple games in the showcase over the years that were like this how many of you were here to see Jonathan Blow demoing the some of the hardest levels of space giraffe years ago yeah right so that was that was a really intense game that oh that used what we call obfuscation to create a sense of panic and also a flow state and then there was another game that was demoed here how many of you remember

there was this guy that made a list of the games that he would make if he had time on the internet and then people started making the games and he got really mad that they stole his ideas so like one year Sean Barrett for one of the game jams made a game called lost in the static how many of you saw that game yeah so it was basically a screen that was all static and the only time you could navigate the way they navigated was by basically rotating in the static to see where the static didn't change and then when you think about it kind of like unfinished Swan might be something that comes in that same pattern right and now there's a bunch of glitch games as well my students have made up several most of them incredibly unplayable but nevertheless interesting is a flow state case in this sort of scribble night kind of like way and like if your scribble scribble scribble eing and like everything's [ __ ] and you get into a flow state that's a really interesting place to explore in games and I really like this particular video because it sort of gives us it holds space for a game that's about the infinite rage that we all feel right now all the time so having said that plus/minus is here I'll

let them introduce themselves so hi everyone I'm you so this is empty we're from all the University of Finland so that's quite far away but we're here to show you plus/minus so we're the developers it was team of six now this game is pretty conventional so you can run around you can jump you can move third-person camera it's an action game but there's this addition we put in here and that's magnetism so you can actually magnetize any metal object in the surroundings either positively or negatively and now opposite polarities they attract each other and negative polarities repel and you might notice these bubbles around magnetized objects and those are there to demonstrate what the effective range is of the magnets so as soon as two bubbles start overlapping there starts to be an interaction and the closer they get the stronger that interaction now you can only magnetize metal objects

but there's a lot of surface here that's not metallic you can still use that so you can actually shoot the walls or the floor and it'll create this temporary field and this is useful for a variety of things like moving objects around so those are the basics let's get onto the gameplay so what can we actually do with this magnetic system a lot of the game is about moving through levels so there's rarely a direct path you can take instead you need to look at what's in the environment and how can you move that into a position that's going to let you get through and we're really playing around with a lot of like these tropes that are in action games so we have combat as well but we're doing something a bit different with that so usually you would shoot enemies to kill them here if you shoot an enemy it's only gonna polarize it it's not actually going to cause any direct damage however collisions caused damage so magnetism is actually perfect for that kind of combat

you're kind of bullying the enemies here so here we drop down and there's these three robots again you can do the same thing you can make the robots collide into each other and they're gonna start taking damage you can make them smash into walls that's gonna do the same thing or you can look around what's in the environment so we have these endless pits Mario usually falls into them but you can drop the robots down into there so really encouraging players to come up with these creative solutions for approaching problems such as combat and just like the enemies the player actually takes collision damage as well so usually what ends up happening is you're playing around magnets and then you get like this really large magnet in your face yeah let's hope that doesn't happen but it's kind of hope that it does okay so that was combat now we're gonna move on to some sections that are more focused on platforming so that's again another trope from action games you've

got this platforming but we want to do it a bit differently so right now here you have this large metal block and it's in the way and it might look like it's really heavy but the magnetic system doesn't really care about that so you can just move it out the way then we get to this pit you need to get across but there aren't really any platforms right there however there are these disks at the bottom and you can just magnetize those lift them up and you've created a path for yourself at this section it's pretty standard we're still tutorial izing the system but later on it starts to really open up and you don't have these obvious solutions those enemies they have the weirdest AI they just sometimes jump down on top of you and okay so we're taking a pretty taking a pretty standard approach through this level well there's a lot of potential for taking these creative shortcuts and we'll get back to that later and you may

have noticed we have these mechanisms like elevators and doors in our game you'll find them in every game but we're also using magnetism for those that's kind of important for the player so that we can really teach them to get used to this magnetism and it also kind of creates this cohesion where everything in the world with this same core magnetic system now this room is pretty fun so we have this floor that can be magnetized but we also have a ceiling that can be magnetized and the effect is pretty surprising so what's happening here is we got the floor pushing the enemies off the ceiling pushing the enemies down and they end up in this kind of limbo or they just bouncing around it's kind of silly but it's a lot of fun you can probably imagine how this might be used in puzzles or other level elements okay now we defeated those we're gonna skip forward a bit we don't have a lot of

time and this is pretty cool level we're going to show you now the thing in this level is we have this giant metal pillar in the center and as you magnetized it it creates a magnetic field that covers the entire area so this creates this sort of dynamic where now if you magnetize anything in the room it's gonna get either pushed or pulled towards the center now it's another platforming stage so you need to get kind of creative how you move forward so here we have this large gap there's no platforms there so you need to look what have we got here and we got this boxes so you can attach a box to the pillar and all of a sudden you have a platform now you could take the same approach for the last rest of the level so creating these platforms for yourself but we promised a shortcut so we're gonna try to do that that's a bit tricky to set up and we didn't actually design this shortcut so a plate tester was actually able to find it but it was really cool

and we really want to keep these sort of cool elements in our game so the player finds a way to break our game we let them okay so what we're doing here is well building a sort of launcher you got two magnets on top of each other and there we go we just skipped like half the level so yeah this is plus - we're gonna upload a small demo of this soon after GDC so that anybody else can go try it out and have some fun with it so make sure to check that out thanks so + - another opportunity for us - to do a little way back to machine with the experimental gameplay workshop audience how many of you were here when the original portal

first demoed for the first time ever here in the session that's right so games like portal you know at the time that they were being made were considered so experimental that they submitted to the workshop so that's how much has changed over the course of the history of the workshop and I also just wanted to take the moment here to say a little bit about dynamic games so what I love about + - and games like portal and the kinds of games that that I've always loved to play is that they have systems in them and they spend a lot less time on fidelity and a lot more time on simulating specific systems with the kind of fidelity that is just enough to create those kinds of opportunistic learnings for players and that's actually how people learn and it's why play is learning and so it's really really awesome to get games like this submitted it used to be that experimental gameplay workshop was almost only physics games and we've really been able to branch out and show games that are sometimes a little bit more like a paper game sometimes they're they're literally edible some sometimes

they're physical they're based on computing systems that are emerging and sometimes they're systems based in ways that we have never perceived or play with your your vision and your your ears we've we've had all audio games here that you play in a gas mask how many of you saw that alright see so we're starting to get to the place now where experimental game play workshop kind of defies description because it's whatever you submit and I really want to keep encouraging you to designing into designing and presenting even if it's a bizarre thing that you think may not be fun to bring it to us if you're watching on the internet and you have a bizarre Firmin never been to GE see you don't even have to come here anymore you can just send us the game we'll put a video up and maybe somebody will mail you a check and you'll be able to make it in your own home and never leave you'll be able to you'll be able to live your life in your pajamas smoking weed and make it your favorite game so that sounds like the life of a true artist to me and so with that I'm gonna let Shawn Lou I talked about hostile at user-interface

this is hostile user interface the game over full of IgM at RIT the object of the game is to navigate the maze but the controls have been intentionally designed to trick the player dext only triggering windows hockey combinations the inspiration came from my professor ian Schreiber's daughter who called over his keyboard when she was one-year-old costing the screen to flip upside down and he had to use Google with an upside-down screen to figure out what she did and how to undo it thus the idea to create a game where the challenge doesn't come from the game but from the actual operating system he pitches just one of the many ideas to work on in class and experimental gameplay and I decided I want to explore this concept so this first thing you have to do start this hold down the keys ctrl alt and delete obviously if you hit these keys the way normal people do it brings up the security menu if you wait long enough the game gives you a hint person to leave first because pressing ctrl or alt afterwards won't trigger the normal Windows response from the high concept the immediate problem is that it sounds more like a practical joke than a fun game so where do you start I could have made co-op using the ctrl alt f4 and Escape

keys but I doubt players would find it very fun instead I started with a simple game and thought about what would best enable hotkeys some keys need to be held down or other keys are pressed to trigger hotkeys like holding down at for and pressing else does nothing so I had the idea of having death fields and doors one of the trocars players to hold buttons down in the other that requires single key presses the other theme throughout development is that when the player does something wrong they have to blame themselves and not the UI even though it's totally the UIs fault that's how to make the player feel like they're overcoming a challenge and not that they're just getting laughed at by the game I found there are a few ways to do this you must make the experience enough of a clear game that the player can become immersed in the play as soon as the player enters a flow state they'll start playing on automatic they're hitting keys without thinking absolutely closed in the app and then realize what they did and that happened they weren't paying attention which gives us the self plane that we're looking for once I had the basics of the game working the rest came down to designing levels and traps and different and unique ways to keep the game interesting skipping ahead this is a first placement game over give players the option to close the game previously

combinations of hotkeys have had minimal effect despite giving them all the warnings most players would still manage to close out the game on this screen this isn't an obvious trap players have to go out of their way just to do this if they proceed normally that nothing happens this happens both if I'm standing there giving the mornings and then blind tests where I'm not even in the room it's also around here where three different types of players emerge some players love the game and want to keep playing some players hate the game but want to watch other people suffer through it and the last few pays the game but has to keep playing until they beat it because it's a matter of pride at that point some struggles with making this game where they're not all hardware is the same laptop keyboards aren't standardized at all with the layout of their home and delete and page down buttons but this is an extremely nish problem as controls for most games don't use these keys on the software side certain programs have their own hotkeys that could interfere with gameplay such as the newest hockey combination Nvidia's GeForce experience added to take screenshots at the moment there isn't really any way to fix it besides just disabling these hotkeys for those interested in either playing hostage interface or sending it to their friends and our enemies it's currently available on Steam

Hazell user-interface proves the fact that the platform old holder always has the power yes so making an experimental game can happen when you're a student it can happen with just the hotkeys on your computer so you have no excuse if you have the desire to make experimental games and next up we have Tim here to talk about what the golf yeah I need power okay it works it works okay it is the experimental game day workshop so I hope hope it works please yes okay can I get audio oh no

it's the wrong audio what Hey I kind of need audio for some of it nothing all the audio engineers that work the room at ugw every year because this happens every year the a/v step for the egw is always amazing let's have a huge round of applause for the people that made us see in here this Saturday I'm working on this game called what the goth and it's not just me the rest of the team is just actually working on the game and not hanging out here and so a lot lot more thanks to them um two years ago I presented a game here called keyboard sports saving QWERTY um and that also used all the keys on the keyboard and we

also have the altar for problem and we haven't released it yet still in some trouble but working hard on it let's do this we started out making an actual golf game kind of Dark Souls inspired golf a cold dark holes it it did not work it was it wasn't that funny it turns out golf just isn't that funny it's kind of boring so we we kind of moved on from there and you get you can go a little bit off on the volume okay and I do that yeah okay we moved on from that and tried a few other things and we have actually just kept making golf games ever since so we made like five hundred cough games and Moke most of them are really bad these are some of the better ones let's play back to normal or Negev

so the first thing it can wecan started exploring after it failed with the first project and second project we were like we can play with scale and we can like obviously doesn't need to be a golf ball and you can add a few puns and then it kind of works and in then you're kind of our inspiration again and you just look around the office what can we make and then then you kind of use the bunch of different objects and it's like that's obvious we can do boxes

and triangles and fakes but we also do things to the flag and once you kind of know Golf is about getting a thing from A to B you can kind of swap those things so now I'm the hole and I'm kind of going into this one here you can kind of see what's coming it's a hole and then once we have like the Goff everything nailed you can like think there are other games about getting a ball from A to B like this one like and then you can always go for like a week feed fun thing we're just but now we need they'll a from A to B and but why not change the perspective there's no reason it's not first-person golf right and one's been

first person we can also just go back to normal 2d golf this is kind of like desert off but way oh it's actually really boring it's one of the ones that didn't really make it but then we were to like [ __ ] that let's do something else then once once we in 2d why not look at some other 2d games they all kind of golf games and at this point we like all maybe all games are kind of golf games and then then we can

zoom out and relax a little bit [Music] and then like again golf getting things from A to B a you can probably find find few other games out there and then that never really gets old and then we can kind of just go back to like the old thing here because now everyone knows exactly what's gonna happen when I do this and another rule in golf is you usually don't hit the ball while it's

still moving but what if we just remove that and then we just started looking at everything

[Music] [Applause] yeah thank you super see do it no this

is a bit awkward it doesn't do anything thank you okay and I believe after this next video trainee you're here right you're here yes okay yes I train is here this is trans video and it is called you busy hey everyone I'm trans and I'm the game designer behind you busy you busy is a game about the various channels that people and information need to flow through in order to complete work essentially it's a game about productivity when there are a million things that can flick for our attention any given day at the office whether it be getting an approval on a task attending a meeting you know having to put out a fire there are so many things that get in the way of us being able to

check that box off of a list so as a mix of a game designer business analyst project manager and this like what a fascinating system to work with you know so much communication is required for us to actually feel productive at work what if I put this into a hectic local multiplayer environment just to see how that sheds light on the system so I very literally ripped approval processes from previous jobs I had and I put them into the game and added meetings at it fires and all the fun stuff at the office to try to make it actually fun but also to shed light on the system and don't really show like how much it takes for us to feel productive I'll do the current circumstances [Music] I can approve you so I made this game

with another person my partner in crime and fabulous program at her Sousa however we currently are not working on the game this was just like a super short project for us really quick dub cycle something we just wanted to get out of our systems but there are like a million things that we want to do with it like right now since it's a vertical slice you start right in the middle it's like starting closer to the fish-and-chips level and overcooked which is just a lot but we have a list of changes and improvements changing the sounds changing the levels ramping up game play that sort of thing we just currently don't have the time or the funds to work on it so we're really just

enjoying showing it at festivals and hearing what people have to say about it hearing about their work experiences so we'd love to hear your thoughts you can contact us at my Twitter handle I am trim and I'd love to hear about your work experience if you're what really resonated with you in the game if you're interested and working on it eventually if they ever started up like in general we would just love to hear from you so yeah trend is here so if you wanted to you know make her dream come true of making a game about the stress of being in an office you could just come up here at the end of the session and give her a fat check maybe you could give us both that checks that never went so so I think that one of the things about egw is that it does allow us to talk about things that can be but also I mean if it gets turn pointed out things that are and like it's not easy being us all the time making the stuff that we make and

and this place hopefully is giving you some inspiration we're getting close to the end of the session this year because we decided to keep it a little shorter because the eg IBEW used to be a marathon of endless games and everyone had to take a pee break in the middle and it was kind of intense and this year we're just kind of trying to keep it a little bit more focused so we really appreciate your your focus this year and this format I would personally like your feedback you want to see more games you want such to get bigger again do you want more stuff up front at the end let me know I know there's no Donuts this year maybe they'll be doing this next year and with that we're going to have Frank here to talk about picture processing hi I'm Frank Frank DeMarco from New York and I'm making a game called picture processing it's a picture puzzle where the object is to fix a glitch on your screen by swapping the graphics with each other the original demo was created for a game jam called a

game by its cover an online jam where games are created based on imagine NES games submitted to another separate annual event a gallery exhibit called my famiiy case my family case is an awesome art show that has been held yearly in Japan since 2005 in that slide you can see there are a bunch of fake NES cartridges the game that I chose to make my game based on is called Sato by Ishii Hiroaki the glitched out cover was very inspiring and looked cool to me and I checked the description by doing a Google Translate and it seems like the game concept is it's a conceptual game where you put a car Jhin it's not working and you meditate on the beauty of imperfection in the glitched out screen I added one thing to that concept which is you meditate so hard you can telepathically access the graphics memory of the system and fix the glitch by swapping graphics with

each other let's start a new game and take a look at the introduction so you're in your living room you try to play a game you put the cartridge in the system it's glitched out and so you start meditating and you get superpowers you're intimately engaging with the hardware of your videogame console as the great Bob of Bob's game put it it's a game inside of a game this is what the final illustration in the introduction looks like it's a head attached to a Nintendo by an energy beam and it's pretty weird but it's one of my ultimate fantasies using a mind control beam with the Nintendo so let's play scene one the only hint the player gets is this title so for scene one your hint is powerup when the scene begins you're presented

with a pretty severe mess of graphics also sometimes it's a little subtle but the sound is glitched out too so if you listen you can hear the music is booping every second or so so if the if the player knows it's a puzzle and they caught the basic idea of the game they might be able to put together that this level is a sidescroller based on the hint and seeing there's a mushroom and there's a Mario looking character maybe the clouds and the ground might tell you something but maybe they can't tell anything somebody yesterday told me that the Mario tile looks like a hamburger and maybe they didn't catch the premise of the game but I'll talk about that in a second so there's only one interaction at this point let's try pressing enter this menu comes up where all the tiles are displayed and you're able to choose between them the numbers on the Left correspond to memory addresses every one of these tiles is in the wrong memory address because the game makes sure all

the tiles are shuffled out of their correct locations if you select one of the tiles and select another you'll notice the screen changes somewhere from slightly to a lot so if we you can see the top is mostly filled with clouds which is pretty good cuz that's supposed to be the sky and the bottom is dirt which is also pretty good but they're both in the wrong place so let's try swapping cloud and ground so you could see that every place where the ground was now there's clouds and every place where the clouds were now there is ground but if you do a small swap like the blank space and the mushroom you might not notice much changes on the screen I've noticed that the real aha moment for this level is when you put the sky in the right place so let's switch memory 6 with memory zero so now

it kind of looks a little bit more like a side-scroller then it just becomes a classic puzzle game situation where you're putting things in the right place satisfying that compulsion that basically governs everything what we're all out here exploiting for profit mario goes here tree goes here rock goes there and ground goes there oh well what's this it looks correct but we're still one swap away if you look at the bottom of the screen it tells you how many swaps you have left I think one of the things that makes this game unique is you're solving a puzzle that only has an objective answer based on how the designer arranges the scene in most puzzle games there are no arbitrary situations there are rules in the game that prevent them MP cross the numbers that guide the player are generated directly by the

pixels on the grid in Tetris if you don't put the lines into the right order you lose in this game if the level designer decided the sky was made of rock they could do that sometimes people play this game by arranging the tiles look like something they want to see and they have fun with it that way in this scene it turns out that I think it looks slightly better if Mario is to the left of the mushroom and so yeah and then so the sound and glitches and you've beaten level one so yeah this is this is level two it's supposed to be a driving level it's like a racecar level but because I've noticed a lot of people want to be creative while playing I've started working on a level editor so let's take a look at that so yeah there's three different

things you can do from the main menu of the level editor you can edit the tiles you can test the level that you're building or you can place the tiles on the level so let's start by making a tile so I'll start by clearing the default title so yeah there's a paint tool and I'm just going to clear the whole tile to white and now I'll select green and I'm gonna try to draw a plant yeah you can see in the background that the whole level is changing that's just because the whole level is set to be the first tile so yeah that kind of looks

like a plant and you can also load tiles so I'm going to put these numbers in okay now I'm gonna place those okay let's let's test the level all right so it's all scrambled up usually the free swap is the background so you can see it's all filled with twos so we'll just put the plant there and now let's see if we can crack this code yeah and that's

it so in the level editor it just says solved in the bottom when you solve the level so a quick note about some attention this game received a blog by someone who has a PhD wrote about picture processing that's what's the Lafayette probably a lot of people here have a PhD and that's no big deal but I don't have one I have a computer science degree that's not even a science degree it's a Bachelor of Arts but I guess that's appropriate though this is art right it's still held by video ball so anyway a block that is a PhD blog wrote about my game so I guess my game is pretty cool please check out my PayPal

all right so this is gonna be the last precision for the day and Eddie and I are just gonna stay up here and we'll watch with you we wanted to make a note here because this video was submitted by someone who just shipped their game which is a huge accomplishment so for the tape let's give them a huge round of applause Jay's been pretty stressed out because he just shipped his game so the first part of video is just could be Jay for three minutes talking about his game so Jay hi I'm Jay dolan the lead developer of Hypnose bass outlaw Hypnose bass a loss started in 2014 as a small micro game called hypno space enforcer and that's where the whole concept of using the Internet while you sleep started using headbands at night it was

a little bit more futuristic then and while there was an operating system part it wasn't as robust the main part of the game was this sort of a play on the information superhighway and it was an inlet side-scrolling endless runner and you played as a cop and he had apprehend people for doing these various pretty banal internet violation things so it came from that and then it evolved into more of an operating system game over time because people just responded better to the operating system parts so yeah I started making a sequel shortly after releasing that in late or late 2014 or early 2015 around when my work on dropsy was ending anyway and then from that point on until the Kickstarter in 2016 and even a year after that it became more of a just a

big fake Internet we made me and my like made a few tools a paid builder so and I cussed some HSP Hypno's place page format for pages and a tune sequencer and the game runs the songs from the tune sequencer at runtime it triggers all the samples and the effects and everything so we did have a little bit of a framework for a game in there like where you make progress but it was mostly just a big big internet that we were making and I was you know intent on making it a game eventually but I wasn't just very interested in that so then about a year a year and two or three months ago then we kind of were like okay we have to make it into a game like

if you want to you know if it was up if it was just you know up to me and I wasn't you know if I didn't need money [Laughter] maybe kept going and making a big internet but I felt like we needed like progression systems well that wasn't too bad they didn't really change a whole lot about the big deep web that you get to explore anyway so yeah that's that's the basics and what I'll be doing is and here's a trailer again watch it again [Music]

is your helper here [Music] [Music] [Music] so this room has the capacity a hole maybe a thousand people it's pretty pretty close to capacity so if you each gave him $1,000 that'd be rad if

everyone that watched this trailer on the internet gave him $1,000 for his game that'd be even more rad and he could probably live for a long time just making games doing this thing you know everyone's had that moment where they're working on something and they go oh I should probably put a progression system in here I think that that moment the video is the one that really struck me it was like oh yeah I know you probably have to but you don't you don't always have to and as we continue to create spaces like this in our communities where people can show their art you don't have to you can support each other not just with money but also with congratulations love hugs doughnuts so if you have a moment at some point to just send the sky an email you know look his game up drop him a line and say hey I love that demo thanks for making your weird internet somewhat playable that would be really nice you know that'd be a nice thing for you I'm not saying you have to do it but one of the ways that we thrive is by getting positive feedback and that would be really nice and so everybody that participated if

you showed a video if you're a game developer that's here that was in the showcase please come up as well as all the organizers please come up on stage [Applause] this is experimental gameplay and you are all experimental game play and GDC is now actually almost officially over we have 15 minutes instead of having questions session just come up and meet these people and give them a hug thank you [Applause]