IndieCade East 2016

In pursuit of a more expressive development experience, we've spent the past year integrating the Clojure programming language into the Unity3D game engine. We call it Arcadia, and it combines the live coded, functional, dynamic programming of Clojure with the ubiquity, vast ecosystem, and powerful builtin libraries of Unity. It has changed the way we make games, and we're excited to share it with you.

Death has been a prevalent mechanic in video games starting almost as early as the birth of the medium. Arcade games like Space Invaders and home console games like Super Mario Bros popularized death mechanics like life-systems (a certain amount of retries designated to a player after they’ve died) and respawning (when a player reappears at a fixed point in the game, after they die) in order to challenge the player and encourage them to continue playing — and paying quarters, in the case of arcade games.

Since then we’ve seen death evolve in mechanically and narratively interesting ways, from replacing health bars with damage vignettes (Call of Duty 2), to altering gameplay by making death permanent (Mass Effect, Spelunky, Undertale). Game developers are innovating on how death is treated in their games, and adapting it to fit new technologies.

In this talk we will be looking at the various death mechanics video games have utilized in the past, how game developers are innovating on death to best fit their games, and the future of death in video games — with a focus on how it’s being used in future technologies like virtual and augmented reality.

Over the last few years, the world of machine learning has been turned upside down by recurrent neural networks and so-called "deep learning".

Research applications aside, it turns out that these sorts of neural networks are incredibly good at creating generative art. From Google's "Deep Dream" to Twitter bots like @RoboRosewater and @DeepForger, people are starting to use deep learning to create procedurally-generated artworks with far more complex and beautiful output than traditional procedural content generation techniques can produce. Machine learning seems scary and inaccessible, but in actuality there are a lot of high-level tools that make it easy to train your own neural networks. You too can make cool and weird things with machine learning, even with zero background knowledge!

This talk will start with a (very high-level, aggressively approachable) conceptual overview of what machine learning is, and quickly move into a more practical discussion of how game designers and creative coders can use existing deep learning libraries/tools to do all sorts of different kinds of procedural generation, as well as the relative strengths and weaknesses of neural networks as opposed to other forms of procedural generation.

Experimental game maker Pippin Barr wants you to make the same game 36 times for fun, learning, and probably-non-profit. Drawing on his own games PONGS and BREAKSOUT, Pippin will challenge you to take a journey of discovery into what games are made of (paddles and balls, mostly), how code and design intertwine (a lot), and how to adapt the pottery scene from the movie Ghost into a game of Breakout (come and find out!).

Virtual reality is finally here and it is amazing!  And VR is especially amazing for games, but there are fundamental differences as compared to standard 2d displays.  VR provides a sense of presence that enables entirely new games that leverage the scale and space cues that are lost with a 2d display.  VR also has a set of new challenges related to locomotion and interaction.    This talk explores a wide variety of techniques and game mechanics for VR, some which work well and others which do not, and provides a technological explanation for why this is the case.

Our team built VEC9 -- the first new vector arcade game in 30 years, but it did not start out to do that. This presentation is an exploration of the creative advantages, engineering challenges, and uncomfortable personal psychological revelations about building a game based on weird technology.

The path to making a Soviet arcade game began with a broken Asteroids vector monitor, went on to spawn custom digital hardware to draw hip hop stars, a handwritten 3d engine used to draw spinning sausages, and ultimately ended in (OBVIOUSLY) a game about nuclear annihilation and the cold war.

The entire process was born of exploring either antiquated or atypical hardware, and the not-always-obvious gameplay and aesthetics that it ultimately suggested.

Sometimes this was inspiring and led to exciting creative leaps we never might have made, other times it led to months of trying square pegs in round holes, but it ultimately ended in a unique thing. This talk is part inspirational speech, part engineering textbook and part cautionary tale.

Did you know you can make successful games faster, cheaper and more reliable by building your own tech instead of using a third party engine?
With a small team and no budget, KillHouse Games managed to make 2014's best tactics game (Door Kickers) in a very short time, with a huge amount of content, on 5 platforms. Without using any third-party engines or tools.
Instead of adding tech, they removed tech. They kept removing until there was almost nothing left. Sounds counter-intuitive? Think of it this way: simpler means faster, cheaper and more reliable.
Learn about the extreme simplicity of the production pipeline and the "unified everything" game engine used for Door Kickers.
Learn that developing a game can also be done in a very smart and simple way, instead of spending years or $$$$$ on game engines. Learn how to focus on what is important and that finding the simplest solutions is usually the hardest.

Surreal mechanics and visual effects are great for “wow” factor, but in Anamorphine we use them to reinforce the narrative and reflect the emotional state of the characters through the environment. We’re being literally figurative, telling a story by actually representing the mind of our character for players to spatially explore.

We will explain how we convey the emotionally strong memories the character is traversing without dialogue, cut scenes, UI or action buttons, and how we use the minimalistic acts of looking and walking around as storytelling tools.

(CONTENT WARNING: this talk features frequent footage of hunky dudes taking their clothes off... but nothing hardcore.)
Game designers, developers, and players often have very little formalized knowledge of lighting design. Indies, in particular, generally distrust complex 3D engine middleware as tainted demonic magick that is either beneath or beyond them. But it doesn't have to be like that! What can game lighting mean, and how can games use lighting to affect mood? In this talk inspired by the seminal beefcake film Magic Mike (2012), we will learn about contemporary game lighting technologies and workflows, as well as watch a lot of men take their clothes off. Let's get lit!

NESpectre is a genuine 8-bit NES console that will be supernaturally influenced by YOU and the rest of the entire audience.  Come haunt our NES and expect the wildly unexpected to happen!  We've already said too much... trust us, you won't want to miss this.  And please don't tip off our poor unsuspecting speedrunners!

Andrew Reitano (Batsly Adams) and Zachary Johnson (Zachstronaut) will share how they created NESpectre: The Massively Multi-Haunted NES.  We'll have some other audience-interactive NES hacks for you to try as well, and we'll talk about our process.  This is a great session for hardware hackers, homebrew cartridge enthusiasts, JavaScript and Python geeks, and anybody who loves a good story about random, 48 hour collaborations and the magic of game festivals.