If you going, come say hi, July 15-17th LA Convention Center

Happy Summer

You can watch a higher res youtube Here

OR
Download the full res version Here
EDIT fixed the above link

During my thesis presentation I was asked what I would do again differently. I had forgot to mention I was writing a postmortem on the very subject for gamasutra. In the article I also cover a bit about how we went about building team Winterbottom and avoiding student game pitfalls. If you are planning on working with a student team on your thesis, you might want to take a quick look.

Article Here

I am reposting this cause now I can embed it : )

"Hush offers a glimpse, as it were, of how vignette might be used successfully in games. As an exploration of the potential of the style, the game is a success. And as a vignette of a situation in mid-90s civil war-torn Rwanda, the game is compelling..."

Read full article here

Hooray for Jamie and the Hush Team!

See more by Cucuy on the Winterbottom Flickr Stream

Paul Bellezza, Jamie Antonisse, Phil Gregorchuk, Mike Brazil, Scott Gillies, Mike Rossmassler, and myself submitted a game to Tigsource.com's B-Game competition . You play an invisible monster in a bad scifi/horror movie in the 1950's.

VOTING has commenced.... You can play and vote here, we are at the bottom of the page. You need a forum account to vote, but the forums are a good place to hang out for independent games anyways : )

Our forum thread is here

More write-up on the intense 5 day game making process later on...

via gamepolitics.com

We already wear cows, alligators, and snakes on our feet; Why not Gnomes? Ever since the first Gnome sighting in early 1975, man has always struggled to find a use for these bizarre creatures. They have served as jesters, bowling balls, garden ornaments, and even spokesmen for Cash Call… Isn’t it about time we wore them on our feet?

Now that dream can become a reality with the stylish and affordable gnome booting system. What makes our patented system work is the weighted backpack worn by each of the gnomes. This backpack is perfectly counterweighted along with the head mount to hold about 150 pounds on a gnome's frame. The system works best for gnome's under 3.5 feet, and causes the gnome no pain. Heels slide into the foot strap atop the gnome's head, with the greatest of ease, no shoehorn required. You will be the envy of your block with these sleek, practical, 100 % genuine gnome boots (gnome's sold separately).

These boots were designed for running but can serve multiple purposes. Don’t trust the shower? Gnome Boots work great under water. Whether rock climbing, playing soccer or just lounging around the house, Gnome Boots are perfect for you. We do not condone gnome abuse, keep your gnome's happy, feed them many Reese’s Pieces everyday (because like E.T. gnomes love Reese’s Pieces, it‘s a Fact).

Prior Art:
Snakeskin Boots
http://www.amazon.com/Dolce-Gabbana-brown-snakeskin-boots/dp/B000I40CYM

David the Gnome
http://www.80scartoons.net/toons/davidthegnome.html

Stilts
http://www.juggling.org/help/circus-arts/stilts/

Claim: Means of strapping a gnome to your body by use of a weighted backpack and a head mount.

In Elysium in a Box you can take a peek underneath a bed and see a magical world made of pure dreams. However, don’t stay too long there or your dreams will become nightmares.

You peek under a bed…

Photo by Julian Bleeker

This is what you see through a hole

Press a button and your dreams become nightmares

Here is how it works:

A sheet of plexiglass reflects a laptop screen ala Pepper’s Ghost. Behind the plexiglass are real elements that the scene is projected onto, creating a creepy ghost like effect. All this is enclosed in a casing with a peephole cut out for the viewer to look through. A flash app on the PC runs the video that switches at the press of a button. The videos are synched to switch at the exact animation time in the loop. Here is the flash program that runs in the box. Press and hold left mouse button to change.

Process:
I have been obsessed with illusions and magic from an early age. In the 8th grade I read the biography of Robert Houdin, a famous French magician of the 19th century. He was trained by a watchmaker and used a lot of machines and mechanical elements in his illusions. Alice in Wonderland always serves as an inspiration, and I wanted to play with the “through the rabbit hole” feeling the book portrays. Also, Disneyland uses many illusions like this in the line cues of rides. I wanted to see if I could make one myself.

For the theme I decided to use Goodnight Elysium (a game the GD3 team and I have been working on for over a year). I felt the game assets would work well with the dual reality theme I wanted to play around with. So, I started with the in-game assets but, had to clean them up a bit, make them higher poly, animate the cycles I needed, and render them out. I feel I should thank the Goodnight Elysium art team for their hard work on the original assets, without this project would not be possible in a week. So a very special thanks to Brad Newman, Kenneth Leung, and Mike Rossmassler.

I settled on a plan on Sunday while driving home from Northern California. I knew I was not going to have much time to put this project together due to my mom in the ICU, so I was thinking of doing something very simple. Something like a thousand bouncing superballs falling out once you opened the cabinet followed by a hand broom and a dust pan. On the ride home from the hospital I thought about projections and smoke and other things I really wanted to play with. I was going to be an intense two days but, I decided to take the plunge on the more complicated project. Creation commenced on Monday.

Prototyping:

The box went through many iterations. I was always trying to make the box smaller and smaller. Before any content was created or any nail was hammered, I had to make sure the illusion would work. I did this by ripping up a glass panel off my living room coffee table. My roommates were less then thrilled by this. I was trying to reflect a still image off my computer onto the glass in front of a black piece of cardboard with a picture of a tree. The pane of glass was fragile an heavy but, by tilting it up and down it was apparent the idea was sound and it would work. I swapped the pane of glass with a cheaper lighter piece of plexiglass, and placed the glass back on the coffee table, that made my roommates happy.

At first I was laying my laptop upside down projecting onto the angled glass. I was designing the piece to be seen from straight on. I hated laying down my laptop this way and knew it was an accident waiting to happen. I also scratched my screen a little by doing this. Eventually I figured out I could put my screen right side up with the viewer looking to the right of the setup and get the same effect. Another challenge was how to keep the plexiglass stable at an angle. I tried many things; bricks, wood ledges, and divits, before I came to the design I used which essentially was a weighted stand with a sponge nailed to the top to absorb the weight of the glass.

Reflections:
Overall I think the project worked out as expected. I had wasted a little time with constantly redesigning the structure, but I think I had to get to the conclusion I came to. I also wasted time spray painting the enclosure, when I ended up covering it with a blanket to make the bed anyway. If I would have thought through the bed idea through more I would not have needed to paint it. If I had more time I would have loved to make the enclosure box smaller. Also, I would like to have a nifty stylized button to press instead of a mouse. Or maybe no button at all, but a sensor that would switch the assets to nightmare after you had been peeking through the hole for awhile…. Creepy

New: : I am designing a game based off of time mechanics because I want to find out how to
demonstrate principals of paradox in order to help the player experience theories not grounded in this reality along with FUN.

2) Name THREE potential outside advisors.
I am not going to name anybody here because I haven’t officially asked them yet, however most likely they will sign on.
However, a loftier goal would be to have some industry professional on the project that can make sure the abstract ideas are still coherent to the average casual player. Someone maybe that knows nothing of games.

3) Define your audience(s).
Casual Gamers, that don’t have time for 70+ hour epic games. Players that are interested in a quick play experience with “new” ideas.