This week on Maker Update.
We're at the Game Developers Conference
covering the awesomely weird maker-made games of Alt.Ctrl.
Hey I’m Donald Bell for Maker Update,
the show where we update you on cool things makers are making
and it's a very special show today.
We're at Moscone Center in San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference.
What most people don't know is that within GDC there is a very cool,
very weird event called the Alt.Ctrl Showcase.
These are one-off indie games that you'll probably only find at this event.
And what makes them special is that every game has a unique
and unexpected way that you interact with it,
and it's those alternative controllers that really make this a makers event.
If you don't believe me, let's go check out some games.
All right. My name's Lucas Diab.
I am a student at Sheridan College out in Toronto, Canada.
Me and a few of my
classmates have decided to make an Alt.Ctrl.GDC game.
And we're just students.
We're just here to have fun.
So the concept of the game is you play as a little boxy like character,
and you fly or control a paraglider and fly
through a little expansive landscape.
You get little speed boosts and rings along the way to give you a little boost.
And the goal is to get the best time
friendly competition between all the other players.
This control interface is relatively simple.
All it is is two rotary encoders that detect you
pulling on a string, essentially.
And as you pull on the string, you're going to turn with the paraglider.
You got a little rotary encoders detecting how hard you turn,
where you are in the rotation and all that sort of stuff.
Just to make it as as precise as possible.
Yeah. So the encoders are just... all it is,
All it does is take a rotational input,
and that is just we just have a bunch of wires
going along the entirety of the controller and it just goes towards Unity.
And then I think our programmer made it.
So every rotation is just another input
and that detects how much you're rotating, etc., all that kind of stuff.
Yes, that is the little Arduino that our programmer welded together
with the ends of the of the wire.
But that's all it is. It's just that that's.
That's right.
That's the brain of our entire controller.
So my name is Erin J.K. Truesdell.
I am a Ph.D.
candidate at Georgia Tech, and my game is called Haber Dasher.
The great thing about it is it's really simple.
It's a giant hat for two people
and that's also what makes it really fun.
You've got to bring a friend.
Or if you don't have a friend, you've got to make one in line.
So great networking opportunity, great way to get to know somebody
and the premise is that you are Zorg, the Infiltrator, an alien sent to Earth
to blend in with the humans, gain power as a businessman and take over the world.
So to do that,
you have to do what your alien society has learned that human business people do.
You have to pick up a briefcase.
You have to get a cup of coffee and you have to go to the office.
But the challenge is you're sharing a giant hat with your partner.
We use a wi-fi enabled accelerometer, and that sends data about the angle
the hat is tilting at to the PC that hosts the game,
and that translates it into the Avatar’s motion.
It's very straightforward.
And the really great thing is it's kind of a low tech situation.
We don't have a fancy kind of setup
where you're running this off of an old smartphone
that's just embedded in the front of the hat,
and that's what sends all the data.
And so the hat basically a gigantic phone case.
That was definitely the most challenging part of working on this game
was crafting a hat that was this big but still light enough for people to wear.
So I don't I think you got some pictures before, but
as you can see, it's hung from the ceiling. The hat is light enough for people to wear,
It's just kind of uncomfortable.
So we do that mostly for comfort rather than necessary support.
It's mostly made out of sculpted foam
like the spray foam insulation you can get at your local hardware store.
And then the surface is done in lightweight spackle.
But the real challenge was making sure it was light enough every step of the way.
How do you build something this large?
We ran into a bunch of different challenges,
not only with weight, but with things like manufacturing techniques.
I would have loved to use a laser cutter to cut out the foam that form the brim.
But I didn't have access to a laser cutter that was big enough.
3 x 4 feet
sounds huge until you're cutting something that's four feet by eight feet.
I did wire bending.
I did foam sculpting with a wire wheel attached to a drill
which murdered my hands.
But it's been a great time.
And I love the way that people walk around and say, Oh, my gosh,
what is that?
My name is Derrick Williams.
I worked on the hardware of the game and I built out the levels.
So a two by four racing is a cooperative racing game where two players control
the same car together back to back.
Yeah.
So it's a it's a fun, chaotic experience about getting around
the track and swapping roles every once in a while.
So we've got two pilots.
The one in the front is going to be steering the vehicle
and the one in the back operates our patented engine crank.
So making the vehicle go faster and slower.
The car has fuel and when it runs out of fuel, it explodes.
So you're racing around the track, collecting fuel
and trying to get the fastest time.
We're using fidgets from 2003,
which I think our programmer would not recommend using.
I think he would recommend using something more up to date.
He had to completely rewrite how Unity was communicating with the fidgets.
So I think that was kind of a nightmare for him.
But we're also using Arduino for
stepper motor control on our dials.
We have a dial that counts the amount of cows that you hit throughout the race.
So that's I did that part.
That's the first step in motor control and it controls our buttons.
And Fidget is the company that makes the encoder that we're using to
to basically... it... it straight up controls the wheels.
So yeah, we're from students from the University of Utah, so our game is
Funny Kitty Stick.
It's a old control games that we built with a electric magnet
that helps with haptic feedback.
So when the cat grabs the stick.
I'm the A.I. engineer. My name is Wei.
Hope you guys like the game and having fun with it.
I am not the hardware engineer, but I can briefly explain it to you.
So the controller, the main stick is it's made of 3D
printed material and there's a Wii remote controller in it.
We have a sensors on our on our TV.
So right below it to kind of detect a spatial and movement of it.
So with the electromagnet, we have a, as you can see, a little big one up there.
And the down below in the black box, we have a bunch of wires
and, and Arduino boards that kind of load our programs.
So once the cat grabs it, we're going to
activate the electro magnets and kind of pull the players down a little bit.
That's through Bluetooth.
So we kind of send the signal through to the board
and activate the check magnet, as simple as that.
So I'm Victor and we are we have created with my team Grocery Trip,
which is a game you play by two players and when one person drive
a shopping carts in the mall and the other one is in the cart and punch people
and grab all the things that you can.
The goal is to make the people
in the in the shopping cart like as it was in their real shopping cart.
So we used a lot of buttons for this and we have a little card
that transform the push on the buttons
into input of the computer and the computer transform does inputs
into like if it was inputs from a real keyboard.
So like, for example, if you press a button, it is a computer.
We understand, like as you press A.
And so all the game is made like that's everything, like just fit well
and that everything as the right button can take this to the right thing
and at the end, at the end and works.
It works like just a new code, as in any game.
All right.
So basically, this is Stumped.
This is a lumberjack wood chopping game.
over here that we have our axe basically, any time you get a “chop” prompt,
you want to hit down onto the detection pad over here.
And we also have anytime we see a bore for our friendly raccoon, you want to.
You don't want to hurt them, so you want to trash them.
So we have a foot pedal down over here that we use to trash any objects.
Sometimes we'll get a different combination of items
that you might see over there.
Now, you might need a chop charge just to mix it up.
The goal of the game is obviously to get the high score
and you have five lives, so the higher the score, the better.
And yeah, that's our game.
So basically, everything, all you see here inside runs on a Makey Makey board.
So what it really relies on is like conductive circuits.
So over here we have this is actually just electrical tape that we have,
and this is steel wool.
So any time they make contact, it's basically a circuit
and it sends a message onto the Makey Makey board.
Technically, it reads as a click for the computer,
but it's the illusion that you're actually just hitting it down with the ax.
And same thing with our pedal over here.
Basically, it's two pieces of tinfoil.
So any time they're pressed together,
it's another connectivity circuit and that counts as a space.
So it's basically click and space, chop and trash.
So that's the illusion. That's how everything works.
All right.
So that was a look at just some of the games of Alt.Ctrl.GDC.
A big thanks to Digi-Key for making videos like this possible
and thank you for watching.
I'll see you soon.