Rob Davis of Playniac will be at Bit of Alright, running Cat On Yer Head. COYH, best explained here, is an audience experiment in game design, where the audience and the person running it constantly feed stuff back to each other and devise modifications. Here’s a video of it running at GameCity last October:
Jerry Carpenter: KB’s Gametoilet
Jerry Carpenter is the mastermind behind KBsGameToilet. He has a very sensible job in game development, but outside of that designs and illustrates one decidedly insensible flash game every day. He’s got up to four hundred and three at the time of writing, and number four hundred and four is probably in progress right now.
When, in the explanation for this event, I mentioned a talk that made us cry laughing, this was it. It’s not just a funny talk though. Ideas are often given short shrift by people in the games industry: “Anyone can have ideas”, “But what do you actually do?”, etc., which are all legitimate criticisms. Neither those evaluations, nor the ideas themselves are a problem at all. The problem is when people respond to such criticism by ceasing to cultivate their imaginations.
In the same way a photographer has hundreds of unused shots lying around on contact sheets, or Danny McAskill is often covered in cuts and bruises from all the tricks that get edited out, Jerry has hundreds of unmade game designs. He amply illustrates that when we accept that ideas can flow far faster than we’ll ever be able make them, the results can in fact be glorious.
(Our favourite is Black Arrows)
Live Games: IndieSkies
IndieSkies are a fairly new, fairly large graduates students (edit: They’ve set up the company in the sandwich year of a four year course, which is an excellent strategy for students to deal with the chronic shortage of industry placements), including programmers from one of the finest games programming degrees in the country.
Programmer Andrew Roper approached me to ask if they could run a game at Bit of Alright, and we knocked some ideas around. We spoke about a game that happened at GDC in 2008: Destroy All Developers. It was a lovely idea with a fatal flaw. The concept was that, as a registered player, you’d be given missions, like “Get five business cards from European developers”. It seemed like a lovely way to get strangers talking, but in practice the leaderboards were quickly dominated by student attendees who had no meetings to get to and no boss to answer to as such. They roamed the halls with ridiculous stacks of cards, making perfunctory conversation with delegates or sometimes just asking them directly for their cards. It was needy, twatty, and not in the spirit of the game.
I told IndieSkies they could run something like it as long as they bore that in mind. It’s an interesting challenge to make a game like that run nicely, and they’ll be running the it several times throughout the day. It will center on teams of spies who have codephrases they need to slip into conversation, and near the end of the day there will be a debrief session to discuss how it all went.