Five game makers will have a five-week residency @ the cell theatre with access to studio space and an artist’s stipend. They will build prototypes of games, to be playable live @ the cell at the completion of the residency.

Games allow us to play out potential risks, complex emotions and empathetic responses in a safe and creative space. Well-formed checks and balances allow any game to stay fresh and unpredictable. Each set of rules gives players the confines with which to explore new conditions and rewards. Each risk that is taken can help to build a narrative.

Player Indigo seeks to build on those foundations of gameplay. However it is each random or chosen decision that must provide elevated consequences and branching pathways. If these pathways are well-formed, the true reward is a novel experience. 

Join our final showcase and play all five games this Sunday February 20th!

Anagram Challenge

Congratulations to Daniel Evans for winning the Anagram Challenge. With 10 anagrams for “Player Indigo”, Daniel came out on top! Here’s his complete list:

alien prodigy

yo, lipreading! 

AI do replying

idol repaying

pained gorily 

plying roadie

yo, dingle pair 

any rigid pole 

angrily I Op-Ed

airy gold pine

Wanna play something else? Join our discord chat (https://discord.gg/Ucc2Q6UQ) for opportunities to play test the 5 games being developed, including our final in-person play test session Feb 17-20.

 

Shroud for the Seneschal

 

Sharang has won IndieCade and IGDN awards for games, presented talks and workshops at international conferences, and showcased games at various art institutions including PioneerWorks, The Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and The Toronto Reference Library. He is currently the Game Design Artist in Residence at the Museum of the Moving Image.

Sharang is an adjunct professor of Game Design at the NYU Game Centre and Fordham University, and has been designing games for more than a decade.

Sharang has won IndieCade and IGDN awards for games, presented talks and workshops at international conferences, and showcased games at various art institutions including PioneerWorks, The Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and The Toronto Reference Library. He is currently the Game Design Artist in Residence at the Museum of the Moving Image.

““I’m really interested in making games where players get to create and engage in compelling stories, in characters that traverse narratives that mean something to the players. I like exploring new ways of telling these stories, and new mechanics that help create different kinds of stories.

I tend to focus on the procedures players engage in. What verbs do a game ask a player to  perform, and how do these verbs create emotional states or further narratives? I often try to look at verbs beyond the traditional “roll a die” or “draw a card”. For example, some of my games that have garnered attention suggest that players prepare salad while playing, to remove articles of clothing as part of the game, and even to kiss other players to further the narrative.””
— Sharang Biswas

Salmon Roll: The Upstream Team

 

Andy Wallace is an independent game designer and creative coder who lives in NYC. He is also a founding member of the non-profit Death By Audio Arcade collective. He received his MFA from Parsons The New School For Design in 2012, and worked for a few years at the tiny NYC game company Golden Ruby Games. After that, he was the director of the Digital Game Design & Development program at Long Island University Post Campus. He started coding on his parents' IBM 386 when he was 10, and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. He loves using computers to make magic.

  • Circumnavigators (2018) Created in collaboration with Juno Morrow, Circumnavigators is a physical arcade game where players must run around a circular strip of LEDs attempting to keep their glowing dot safe. Tapping the arcade buttons along the top moves the obstacles (represented by different color bars). Players must physically keep up with their dot and are encouraged to sabotage other players. Shown at: Caveat, Secret Project Robot, MAGFest, Smithsonian American Art Museum

    Bleep Space (2017) Bleep Space was inspired by playing with a friend’s Korg sequencer and the joy I found in creating music while exploring a device that I didn’t fully understand. Created in collaboration with local musician Dan Friel, Bleep Space is a sequencer toy for iOS, PC & Mac. It also has an arcade installation that encourages 4 people to play together. Shown at: IndieCade, Smithsonian American Museum of Art, MAGFest

    Salmon Roll: The Upstream Team (2017) Jane Friedhoff and I were commissioned to make an installation game for Play NYC, a games conference in NYC held in Terminal 5. We created Salmon Roll: The Upstream Team, a two player collaborative game with a five foot long custom controller based on the 1983 arcade game Ice Cold Beer. The size of the controller meant that two players had to be holding it in order to play. Art by Diego Garcia. Shown at: Play NYC, Wonderville, Cloud City, MAGFest, Render()

    Drink Rink (2016) Drink Rink is a bar and a game platform created with fellow Death By Audio Arcade members Mark Kleback and K. Anthony Marefat. Drinks are placed in special koozies that are seen by the cameras in the bar and used as game pieces for the game projected up onto the surface. The bar runs a collection of ambient games and cycles between them. Shown at: Lwlvl Festival, The Dream House

    Particle Mace (2015) PARTICLE MACE is a game for Windows, Mac and iOS that pays homage to classic space shooters, but replaces the typical guns with an unruly physics-based weapon. This has proved to be one of the most successful games in the Death By Audio Arcade library and has been shown in many places throughout the USA. Shown at: IndieCade, Museum of the Moving Image, Babycastles, Gamercamp, Out of Index Festival, MAGFest, Silent Barn, Smithsonian American Art Museum

““I like to bring players to the same emotional space by encouraging exploration and allowing players to create their own emotional or narrative arc. Learning from each other while playing (even if they are opponents) lets everybody grow and discover more of the experience. For games in public spaces, it is also critical that players understand the rules quickly. Nobody likes to feel like a fool, and playing a game with people watching can be high pressure. I don’t want that barrier keeping people from playing. This is not the same as players mastering the rules of a game quickly, just that they don’t feel stressed because they don’t understand.””
— Andy Wallace

We’re Not Going to Die Here

 

Andrew has been making games for the past 10 years in two major contexts: as a personal hobby for his friends and family and in the classroom as a high school social studies teacher. He likes to make teaching more engaging by providing game mechanics for everyday lesson plans.

  • Friends & Family Projects

    Rip & Tear A portal to hell ripped its way across the surface of the Earth unleashing a horde upon humanity. 500 foot tall leviathans pillaged their way across the world, destroying everything in their path. This was until the scientists and governments of Earth banded together to come up with a solution. Giant freakin robots. Equipped with enough advanced weaponry and firepower to tear each monster asunder. You are the five people trained to pilot the mechs and tear them apart.     

    We’re Not Going to Die Here The flight never made it to Tokyo, and it flew at most 5 hours.You don’t remember much. An explosion…Fire and smoke…Frantic directions from the crew…A steep dive ending in a crash...silence The four of you awoke from unconsciousness to discover you were the only survivors. You found yourselves on a rock of an island god knows where. It became clear quickly that no help was coming. You needed to get off this island yourselves...or die trying.

    The Queen is Dead The work of treasonous assassins. Her only daughter, the princess, the rightful heir, was captured. The people, lacking stable leadership give way to rebellion & rioting.The realm is in chaos.... You are the Queen’s small council. With the queen dead and the princess missing it is your responsibility to lead the people and put the pieces of the broken kingdom back together. All you need to do is find the princess, bring the assassins to justice, restore order, maintain peace, and take care of the hundreds of problems that arise when leading a kingdom.  Tread wisely, for  your choices will make…or unmake the future.

    Escape the Car Involves handcuffing 3-4 friends to the door of a car as they have 60 minutes to solve a series of puzzles. Eventually they work their way out of the handcuffs and disarm a "bomb" on the hood of the car. Only possible after solving more puzzles that had clues hidden on the outside of the car and in the surrounding area.

    Classroom Games

    Classroom simulations are an excellent and engaging way to get students to care about seemingly "boring" content. One example of a simulation Andrew created is of America's early government and the Articles of Confederation. The simulation is designed to show that the early government encouraged the 13 state governments NOT to cooperate and was almost destined for failure. 

    Most teachers just resort to just playing Jeopardy with their students as a review game before an exam but Andrew prefers to make review games more unique and memorable. For example, he created a review game called speed run in which review terms are printed out on paper and taped all over the walls of the classroom and students are awarded points for being the first to tap the correct term when asked a question referring to one of the terms. 

    And just like his escape rooms for friends and family, students are encouraged to explore the room. In order to find the keys to all of the puzzles required, students must know the answers to questions related to the day's lesson.

““At the end of the day, the vast majority of engaging play comes down to forcing your players to make interesting choices. How do I spend my limited resources? What is the morally correct thing to do in this situation? What’s the best way to get a laugh out of my friends? If there are no difficult decisions to be made at a constant rate, then the game becomes less enjoyable to play.””
— Andrew Menfi

Zoltan’s Zarkade

 

John has a history of game making experience that is a tad unconventional: he came to game design by way of theatrical directing. His first interactive experience was a choose-your-own adventure based on the play Woyzeck. John made a detour in Escape Room design with his most notable project, Zoltan's Zarkade.

In 2021 John truly dove into game design and created 40 different games. These were primarily developed for a project called 100 Days of Making Games, where he tried to make as many games as possible in 100 days. Typically a new game was made every other day and then tested once or twice. While none of these are particularly 'finished', John is very proud of many of them and really happy with the game design process that was honed over that time.

  • Woyzeck The concept for this production was to create a choose-your-own adventure version of Woyzeck where the audience voted on their phones to determine Woyzeck’s fate. The idea being that Woyzeck is at the whims of larger systems outside of his control, and perhaps if the audience chose his destiny they might feel responsible for his predicament. The play itself was relatively unfinished at the time of the author’s death, and there is no agreed upon definitive order of scenes. In our version we used that to our advantage and allowed the audience to choose between three “tracks” that ultimately resulted in three possible endings: carnival, science and military.

    Zoltan’s Zarcade The goal was to create an immersive spooky escape room in the old boy scout’s room of the Shiloh Baptist Church for Brian Sander’s 2nd Sanctuary Experience. The space had a lot of character but not much infrastructure.The client wanted something creepy, psychedelic and retro, and I realized it was very important to work with what the space was already providing us. We came up with a concept that centered around uncovering the mystery of a Troop of Kidscouts who mysteriously vanished in the 1970s. We also threw in some arcade games and a mysterious Zoltan Fortune telling machine…In addition to designing many analogue puzzles, the game also needed a large number of intelligent props that all had to communicate with each other: I needed to retrofit four classic arcade games to communicate with our control software, I needed to create a fortune telling machine, secret doors and more. I decided to use MAX/MSP as the software that would control the entire experience, and for the props we decided to create a particle mesh network that would allow the devices to all communicate wirelessly with our master patch.

    A Life in the Year A life in the year is a journal-based ttrp playable by 1 or more people over the course of 1 full year. This is a game about deep time, history and movements through life. Each actual day you play the game represents one whole season in a year of the life of your character.

    Flowers for Spanky Spanky was a cat you never knew, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be remembered. Bring the flowers to Spanky. Swipe once to walk down the road

    Magical Candy Factory Magical Candy Factory is a One shot ttrpg for 4-8 players. The first thing to know about Magical Candy Factory is that it is sort of like a traditional Table Top Role Playing game: Sort of in the sense that several players play as characters (Kids) and one player plays as a Game Master of Sorts. What makes Magical Candy Factory different is that this other player is not an omnipotent force in the world, rather they are just a very powerful character- they play as the Owner of the Candy factory. Instead of referring to them as the GM, they are the GW aka the Gene Wilder aka the Wilder.

    Very Serious Interpretive Dance Contest A game of very serious artful competitive dance for 4+ players. All the judges will each need index cards labeled 1-5 (or I suppose 5 fingers on a hand...).They will need a paper and writing implement each though.

““​​In evoking competition I think it’s a matter of designing clear objectives that are mutually exclusive- employing things like scarcity, territory, combat. What is complicated about this is that these ideas are quite problematic; something I’m researching and exploring now in my work is how to create competitive games that don’t just perpetuate nasty imperialist systems of capitalism, colonialism and violence. This is an open question. Can you really have any competitive game where players aren’t engaging in some sort of toxic ideology? Or is playing in that space not so bad? Can you have competition without an enemy? Can you have it without an Other?””
— John Bezark

Proctor Hill

 

Hankins makes games about old houses that are no longer homes and looking for answers buried below fresh snow or scrawled in digital memory. Hankins believes that story is the universal human experience of narrativizing ourselves and the world. To him, interactive media is the logical conclusion of these tendencies coupled with another related human drive: play.

Above all, Hankins creates to participate, to share– as a discursive practice.

  • Proctor Hill I developed this game in order to teach myself the fundamentals of Unity and C#. The result is a simulated archive experience surrounding the history of the fictional down east North Carolina town of Proctor Hill and its forgotten name. In the end, it is a conversation that reveals the solution. Too often we neglect the significance of oral history; it is our loved ones and fellow community members who most directly connect us to the past. While forgetting is natural, so too is attempting to remember.

    Puzzle Box Completed as a final for a physical computing course at NYU, the M.R.S. Puzzle Box is an experiment in blending digital and physical technologies in the world of puzzle games. The puzzle is accompanied by a supplementary story. Players receive a letter from their grandfather, detailing the hiding of his last will and testament inside a locked box. They are challenged to retrieve the will by cracking the code and actualizing Mr. Easton's last wishes. The box is powered by Arduino technology on the hardware and software side.

    Marcos World Coming of age in the 2010s, the internet forum was a dying medium by the time I could comprehend it. But in remote corners of the web, communities held onto the immediate and personal structure of forums. By the time I arrived to the forum, nearly all its members had left, save for two. I was overtaken by the need to understand what had transpired in this space that left it so barren. It inspired me to attend Lightshine Chamber's 2021 Web Art Jam, and teach myself the basics of HTML to explore those feelings. The result is Marcos World, a personal forum abandoned by a hobbyist birder in 2004.

    Semiotica Many are familiar with the scene of the detective’s final deduction in mystery fiction. This climactic unraveling of the plot is the heart of mysteries. The detective explains, contextualizes, and justifies each little detail, from the angle of the victim’s stab wound to the torn cloth in the windowsill. In Semiotica, each player tries their hand at weaving an elaborate explanation for a manor, steamship, or museum full of evidence. And the player among you who explains it all the best, who truly channels their inner Poirot, will emerge the victor.

““Games are rituals; when players step into the magic circle, they are entitled to certain expectations, including comfort, respect, and dignity. This is doubly the case if a game’s themes or subject matter relate to something contentious or heavy. It is the role of a game’s designer and facilitators to make sure players are comfortable, tended to, and respected throughout their playful journey. If play is to be an arena for self exploration, empathy, learning, collaboration, and excitement, players must feel empowered by their role and reassured by the design of the game. I keep this in mind as a player among many and as a designer.””
— Hankins Feichter