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Artcade

The Artsy Games Incubator and TOJam present ARTCADE at Canzine on Sunday Oct. 26th, where you can play over a dozen Toronto indie videogames on our totally awesome & totally fake arcade cabinets. At 5pm we will be having ten minute presentations of new and in-progress projects from the indie videogame community, followed by discussion and more game playing.

Schedule (Subject to Change)

1-4pm: Free play on our four cabinets rotating Toronto indie games:

1pm: Happy Goat Lucky, Lightspeed, Albacross, Cowgirl and Gospelboy Sue
2pm: Gesundheit, A Game About Bouncing, Babel
3pm: Scourge, Baby Runs This Mofo, Cupcake Challenge, Benny Hinn’s Bible Blast For Cash
4pm: Flowers of Error, Mouse Police, Mondrian Provoked, Bungee Fisher

5pm-6pm: In-progress and completed game presentations (10 min. each)

6-7pm: Free play of Snow, Night of the Cephelapods, The Landmarkers, Bubl and Plastico Baggera

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8 Responses to “Artcade”

  1. […] you live in or around the Toronto area, you may be interested in checking out ARTCADE, “where you can play over a dozen Toronto indie videogames on our totally awesome & […]

  2. This sounds like a lot of fun.

    Also, I’d love to get involved in the production of a game.

    Also also, I don’t know how I got on that email list but thanks for sending it to meeeeeeeeee.

  3. Wow, this sounds cool. I think ill try to make it out.

  4. Windows required? Please change your name to No Media Kings Except Microsoft.

    Sad, since its unnecessary – Java and Flash will run unchanged on Linux/Mac/Win – and run safely in the browser. Gamedev could be done on a cross platform dev stack of free (OpenGL, SDL, Orgre3D etc..) and commercial (Torque, etc…) cross-platform libraries which is a little harder since they would need to be compiled separately for each platform but not unreasonable. But no – the only requirement is Windows so most of the games are single platform. Screw you Mac and Linux users.

    Lame. Either let everybody create games for whatever platform they want. Or require cross-platform from everybody. Or change your URL.

    Codemattic

  5. @ Codemattic
    Just responding from my own perspective as a participant in the last round. The idea of the Artsy Games Incubator is to use easy non-intimidating tools for artists (not coders!) to create games with. We do use Scratch early on which is cross platform compatible, but is a little too simplistic for implementing some of the final projects (many of the final projects do use it though!)

    Unfortunately there are not a lot of easy to use game making tools like Game Maker or Adventure Game Studio for Linux or Mac and OpenGL, SDL, Ogre3D, Torque etc.. are much too complex for the participants to learn and create something playable with in the time given. They’re really made for coders rather then artists trying to create something for the first time.

    If you know of any cross platform, simple game making tools that a non-coder could learn in a couple of weekends I’m sure Jim would like to know about them and they could be included in the next round.

  6. There is clearly an abundance of Windows game dev tools. And few Mac ones. And even fewer user-friendly Linux ones.

    However after some Googling,

    Some sort of visual game and simulation dev:
    http://www.stagecast.com/index.html

    An online flex-based game dev site:
    http://playmockingbird.com/designer-trial

    And apple has a page of links to Mac gamedev tools here:
    http://www.apple.com/games/articles/2005/08/gamebuildingtools/

    Also dont forget good ol’ html/javascript, what could be more democratic than that? The main tojam.ca site seems to have a lot of javascript/html space-invadery animation going on – why not just create a javascript kit for contestants to use. Then anybody can develop on any platform, and anybody can run from any platform. That seems easier.

    hth,
    Codemattic

    PS:
    I havent used any of these, so I cannot vouch for them. Im devving on C/C++/ObjC/OpenGLES/iPhone right now. But some of the links above looked good – although Im not sure its the simple click-and-create game kit you are looking for. There are some others that I cannot remember right now – if I can track them down Ill post back.

  7. Cool! Those links look like they should be helpful for the next round!

    Html/javascript development is probably still too intimidating for many participants, since that involves working with a big wall of text that can be hard for non-coders to start with.

    I found through my experience with this round making “Night of the Cephalopods” that the best tool for me personally was one like Game Maker that would let me make a simple game using a drag and drop system, but had the ability to use scripts and code so I could ease into the more complex stuff. So while I started just dragging and dropping I was mainly writing code after a day or two of working on the game.

    In the end Jim lets us each choose whatever tool we feel most comfortable using for our final project, some participants stay in Scratch, others have used ‘real’ development environments like Flash AS3.

    Thanks again for the links, I’m sure having more choices, especially for the Mac users in the group will be appreciated next round.

  8. […] Artcade has been mentioned across the internet, but not in too much detail, so I decided to write up a […]

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