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“Alternative Controllers mini-jam” with Tatiana Vilela

  • glass2016
  • 10 juin 2016
  • 3 min de lecture


“During this workshop, we will make games based on alternative controllers made out of organic materials (from vegetables to water, depending on your creativity). After spending the morning designing and developing the software parts, we'll take the afternoon to build the controllers. The day will end with a short presentation of each game.”

See Tatiana Vilela’s work on Mechbird


This Friday, Tatiana Vilela showed us the potentials of alternative controllers. Games can be controlled in many other ways than just a gamepad or a mouse+keyboard setup: conductive surfaces and objects, movement detection, noise, heat or unusual electronic devices, the possibilities are almost limitless.


For the same reasons that see the content of games standardized, the controls are most often the same, bound to the system you use them on. But with Tatiana, we learned to think beyond this common conception of games, and approached controls as installations, extensions of the players, creating weird custom controls for a few classic game genres, and some strange and playful experiences.


We used Makey Makeys, a few arcade buttons and joysticks, a lot of tin foil, and even more imagination.


After presenting a wide variety of her own works as an inspiration for the workshop, we split in six groups for a mini game jam. Here are the projects that were born during this workshop:


A Link to the game

By Marine Bocquet & Charlotte de Brabant

The first game was an homage to the classic top-down zelda-like genre, using the Makey Makey for an augmented reality twist: the player swings a cardboard and tinfoil sword into a target to destroy his in-game enemies. In order to move through the maze-like level, filled with ennemies and heatlth pick-ups, the player also has to move his feet on a Dance Dance Revolution like D-pad place at his feet; just step on the buttons to move Up, Down, left or right!




Vertical shooter, horizontal player

By Margaux Monguillon & Vivianne Plouzeau

In this typical vertical arcade shooter, you sit down and use your arms and legs to survive the bullethell! Two Hand-buttons allow you to swerve left and right to avoid the constant swarms of ennemies, and you shoot lasers with your feet thanks to a joystick.






Nyan shooter


By Nina Guérin, Correntin Mathé-Deletang, Samuel Churlaud, Vasiliki Kirtsou & James Petit


This is a game of coordination and cooperation for three players facing an invasion of smiley faces: a leader in the center has to touch the blue or red players to go left or right, which themselves can only shoot in the column corresponding to their colour.





Mario Analog Game


By Dorian Delannoy, Adrien Raimbault & Cindy Ficher


We made a Mario like 2D platformer game thanks to Unity 3D. We created special alternative controllers to play this game: a rug with 4 pedals and 2 buttons for each hand. So, the player has to push alternatively on both front pedals to make Mario go forward in the game, to push alternatively on both pedals at the back to make Mario go backward in the game, to jump for Mario to jump in the game. For the buttons in each hand: one can be used for Mario to throw fireballs and the other one can be used for Mario to take a cool pose.



Wake the Groom!


By Jack Berreby, Clément David & Thibaut Moulin


In this game, you face a lazy hotel groom who fell asleep at the reception desk. To wake him up, you need to ring an actual bell, plugged into a Makey Makey, until he falls off his chair, and then bully him by throwing actual candy at his head. You can watch how Clément designed and animated the groom in this video!







Piano Fighters


By Clément Barbisan, Titouan Generat & Adrien David


An unorthodox take on the classic versus fighting genre, it is a game for two players with a twist: they share the same controller, which is a simple MIDI synthesizer. Both players start at an edge of the keyboard, but the controls on the keys are relative to the players position on the screen, leading them to meet halfway both on screen and the keys in order to fight, resulting in a literal fight for the controls as well as in the game.

 
 
 

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