My name is Alex Roberts, and we're at the National Videogame Arcade,
and I'm an engineer here.
So this is "Mission Control".
This was my first project, when I very first started working here.
Just before we opened last year.
uhm. Its a bit of a monstrosity
It is a game designed to show people how games are made,
and give, kids the opportunity to interact with
the game and change the things in the game, whilst their playing the game.
There's two players with Nintendo 64 controllers.
Um.
Its a really simple game where, you're a character
and you have to get pickups, and avoid enemies.
And collect as many, get as many points as you can
and beat the other player.
Uhm. But whilst you're doing that people can,
draw enemies over here
and there is a drawing station
where you can draw a picture with a white board marker.
Sean - Let's have a picture, come on let's have an enemy.
Alex - Okay so, we can have an alien.
Uhm.
With a smiley face, and then we can scan it.
Oops, sorry. Scan it like that.
It's come up there, press it again.
That's now in the game.
So when they start the game that will be one of the enemies that appears,
almost immediately.
Uhm.
Then round here, you can change all the effects in the game,
So we've got whether you're screen is wrapping,
or you're going to bounce of the sides.
The background, turn the liquid mesh, On or Off.
You can change the fonts in the game as well,
So there is a bunch of effects there.
Sean - Have you got a Comic Sans?
Alex - We don't have Comic Sans,
don't worry its fine. It's fine.
Uhm.
You can change what you're going to be picking up,
So one minute you're picking up cherries,
the next minute you're trying to collect stars, or cubes.
Or rings.
Uhm, and the rate at which they spawn.
And you can also manually spawn things into the game.
So if your friend is near,
Uh, pick up, you can quickly spawn another one
they can quickly get that one as well.
Also on the player, you can choose from our
preset selections, what your sprite is going to look like.
So at the moment you're the white character.
You can change colors so you're the red character.
So we just changed the color of it,
and now we can actually, just go
Oh, I don't want it to look like that
I'm gonna pick one of the presets
Now it says: N V A, instead.
But actually I don't want to see that
I'm going to make it say...
something else.
Ah so.
On Father's day we had "Dad"
was a popular one
So you change the D, and then we've got D A.
Then we can change that as well.
So this is the Novation launch pads.
So it's um MIDI controller these.
That we've re-housed
Behind in our massive console of stuff
Sean - So you've literally pressed the buttons there
that'll turn the pixels on and off, yeah?
Alex - So you can see that, that now says D V D, at the moment.
So now it's an alien, and we can change what that aliens going to looks like.
And you have that for both players,
so you have three frames of animation
So you're showing kids a bit about what animation is,
and kind of just getting them to,
consider all of these different things,
all of these things have to be thought about
when you're talking about making a game
Uhm.
So this is a really clear demonstration, of those things.
Uhm.
And then you can see if you start playing.
The player has gone to manual mode
and now I'm in control
Where as Player 2 is still being controlled by the AI.
There's also some sound effects that can be changed around here.
So you can change the sound volume.
And if we start the game, we can change what track is gonna play, while you're playing.
Erm.
You can take a photo, or you can draw
a picture on our blackboard
And then take a photo and it'll become the background of the game.
Sean - So hows it work behind the scenes?
So we've seen some nice interfaces for people,
but what's going on behind the scenes?
Alex - So, it is, um
a lot of different things, so the main technology,
is actually all connected via MIDI
Ah, cause' thats kind of what we knew,
when we very first started.
Now, we'd make it entirely different way
and that is eventually going to be the plan.
But like I said this was kind of the first big project
that we did when we got here.
So each one of these screens
is a Raspberry Pi.
So that just displaying a webpage
that's being served from a web server.
Which talks to the Unity game, which is the game running in the background.
Then each of the stations is controlled with a Teensy,
which is a little bit like an Arduino.
And then we've obviously got a PC running the Unity game in the background.
Yeah, people really enjoy playing with it,
but also it's really nice when people come in
and they get why its there.
When people come in and go
"Aw yeah, look you can change all the things"
and see how a game is put together,
in that way. That's what we were trying to do!
Uhm.
So thats really nice.
[Music]
You must immediately get Gangbeasts,
It's been made in Sheffield,
It's a kind of drunk, jelly babies
fighting in a car park, physics brawler.
Uh, game, by a company called Boneloaf
[Changed Voice, others in the background]
This particular server has four
Titan X graphics cards, in it.
A Titan X is one of the foremost graphics cards
there are new generation ten.