NY Game Developers Show Off New Ways To Play

NYConvergence ORIGINAL
by: Amy Berryhill

The New York Gaming Meet Up gathered at Gallery Bar in Manhattan's Lower East Side neighborhood last night to demo four new creations and discuss process with the game developers, animators and programmers.

Batman Brawl

Batman and friends, or enemies rather, box in this web based fighting game. The set-up is a classic single opponent boxing layout with the splashy animation expected from the Batman The Brave and the Bold franchise. "The challenge was to figure out when to allow the keystroke to allow for your punch. We tried some that were too fast and others that were to slow. I think we designed a somewhat more realistic boxing game than most," said programmer Steve Mead of Upper Cut Animation.

Route-rageous and Friskies Cat Food iPhone Game

Both of these games were originally built as web based Flash applications, from which the Codewalla team worked to port them to Facebook and the iPhone.

Route-rageous was ported for Progressive, who had seen success with the game online and wanted to bring it to Facebook. The game allows users to direct a car around a course and, when they inevitably crash, a reminder about the benefits of Progress Concierge Car service pops up. Work to bring this game to the iPhone is ongoing.

The Friskies Cat Food iPhone Game is a seek and find game that Codewalla ported to the iPhone. According to presenter Rakesh Raju, one of the concerns about the game is that, because so many items were animated simultaneously, the frame rate took a hit. None the less, the demo showed a sparkly fantasy land of levels that could keep a 5-year-old quiet for hours.

Elliptic Twist

This is a space shooter game that was created with fast, cheap and good in mind. The gun moves around an elliptical path as manipulated by the user. The goal is to shoot meteors that fly through the air and out into the deep space backgrounds of the various levels.

The game was built to be intensely easy and, as a result, presenter Orchun Koroglu of Mihar Games said there has been great feedback from users that are outside the regular demographic for these games, like women and elderly users. The hope is that the circular motion of the game will allow it to be cross-compatible with platforms in addition to the PC. The development has so far taken four months and the hope is that the prototype demoed will be finished in the next month. 

5 lives of Criss Angel

This game was built for A&E to promote the television show of the same name. It requires the gamer to print out a marker that the application can focus on via webcam. The user then rotates the printed marker to manipulate a ball along the path displayed on the monitor, much like the ball on a wire child's toy. According to Patrick O'Shaughnessey from Circ.us, one of the downsides to the game is that it requires a lot of light, so the demo in the dark bar was a little shaky.

Another issue with a game like this is that there was concern users might not know what to do. To help with this a demo was created to demo the process of printing out the marker and manipulating it to control the game.

Comments

[Patrick O'Shaughnessey]

Hello - Thanks for the write-up. Lighting does continue to be an issue with Flash-based AR apps. This will hopefully improve as better tracking algorithms become available.

One note: My company is Patched Reality (http://patchedreality.com). Circ.us was the primary creative agency on the project, and they employed my company to do game and AR programming.