//IndieCade 2012 Nominees

//A Closed World

2012 Nominee

Singapore–MIT GAMBIT Game LabSingapore

Have you ever been so frustrated, so fed up with where you are, that you just want to throw it all away and run off to somewhere new? In A Closed World you play as a young person who has decided to do exactly that. This console RPG-like game puts you in the shoes of a young resident of a village just outside a forest that everyone says is a place of no return. Supposedly home to hungering demons and a beast that would destroy the village, the forest is forbidden and nobody knows what's on the other side. However, our hero's beloved -- tired of the oppressive attitude of the villagers -- decided to go there, as anywhere would be better than home. Now it's your turn to follow after. Are you willing to risk everything to find out what's on the other side?

//Analogue: A Hate Story

2012 Nominee

Christine LoveCanada

Analogue: A Hate Story is a dark visual novel about about investigating a long-derelict generation ship by reading through its dead crew's logs, with the help of a pair of spunky AI sidekicks. The player will read through dozens of diary entries that paint a portrait of life aboard the ship, engage in terminal hacking, and maybe even discover friendship or romance with one of the two AIs over the course of the investigation.

//Armada d6

2012 Award Winner: Game Design Award

Adaptation and additional game design by Eric Zimmerman, with graphic design research and reconstruction by John SharpUSA

Armada D6 is an unpublished board game with an unusual origin story. It is based on an obscure game-like ritual practice from the 1930s called “Armada Dei Gratia VI” (sixth armada from the grace of god). In this way, Armada d6 is part historic reconstruction and part original game design. A strategy boardgame for 2-4 players, Armada d6 is about the conquest of space. Dice are used as space ships, with each number a different type: for example, sixes are fast and agile scouts, ones are slow and powerful battlestations. Players use their ships’ abilities in clever combinations to create powerful gameplay effects. Gameplay maps are built from modular tiles and players can design their own map arrangements. The abstract and austere aesthetics of the game are inspired by the original found materials.

//Beat Sneak Bandit

2012 Nominee

SimogoSweden

RHYTHM. STEALTH. PUZZLE. When all the clocks in the world are stolen by Duke Clockface and the world is in chaos, it'll be up to the Beat Sneak Bandit to steal them back!

Rhythmadelic controls: Everything in this game moves rhythmically, just like the simple controls: Tap to the beat to sneak!
Stealthalicious gameplay: Sneak past patrolling guards, security lights, trapdoors and all the other freaky stuff and contraptions the creepy Duke's got in store for you!
Puzzletastic levels: Watch, listen and learn the rhythm patterns to figure out how to solve all of the sneaky puzzles!

//BlindSide

2012 Nominee

Aaron Rasmussen & Michael T. Astolfi / USAUSA

BlindSide simulates the experience of waking up blind in a world filled with deadly monsters. Free from graphics and guided only by audio, you'll bump against objects in the dark, slide along walls, and rely on your girlfriend to help you survive the monsters that now roam the streets. BlindSide melds the iPhone's gyroscope and a pair of headphones into a uniquely immersive control scheme - simply turning to face a direction in the real world causes your in-game character to do the same. Drawing on the memories of one co-creators' brush with temporary blindness, and real-world navigation tactics from the blind and visually impaired community, BlindSide presents an opportunity for both sighted and visually impaired gamers to enjoy an identically fun and terrifying gameplay experience.

//Bloop

2012 Nominee

Rusty MoyherUSA

WARNING: HAND COLLISION IMMINENT — Bloop is a fast, frantic touch game for iPad designed by Rusty Moyher. Two, three, or four players race to tap the most tiles...at the same time! Easy at first, but soon the tiles shrink. Hands collide. Fingers cross. Fireworks! Each color plays a unique BLOOP sound. Hear your symphonic success or dissonant disaster. As players push their way to victory, this onomatopoeic adventure becomes a hilarious party game.

//Botanicula

2012 Award Winner: Story / World Design Award

Amanita DesignsCzech Republic

Botanicula is a point'n'click adventure game created by the makers of award-winning Machinarium, studio Amanita Design and Czech band DVA. It`s about a bunch of five friends - little tree creatures who set out for a journey to save the last seed from their home tree which is infested by evil parasites. We will help the main heroes to explore their world, solve various puzzles, play mini games, find tons of hidden bonuses and collect cards with all the characters we will meet on our journey. It's very relaxed game perfect for hardcore gamers, their partners, families and seniors.

//Cart Life

2012 Nominee

Richard HofmeierUSA

Cart Life is a retail simulation for windows. This game combines common videogame devices with a mundane setting to examine the life of a street vendor.

//Chroma Shuffle

2012 Nominee

SifteoUSA

Chroma Shuffle is an abstract puzzle game that is played on Sifteo cubes. Arrange your cubes to match colors and clear out dots. Tilt a cube to shift and shuffle the dots. Clear out the cubes to solve dozens of puzzles, or form giant combos to rack up a high score in the arcade modes. Chroma Shuffle is an abstract video game with physical presence, an experience that can be shared in real-life social settings, as well as being played on one’s own.:

//Contre Jour

2012 Nominee

MokusUkraine

Blurring the lines between games and interactive art, Contre Jour welcomes you to a hauntingly beautiful world shaped by the interplay of light and darkness. Use your finger to morph the landscape, propelling the mysterious creature Petit to safety. Pull, swipe, and tap gadgets such as tendrils, air geysers, and pulleys to complete clever puzzles. Set to a poignant orchestrated soundtrack from composer David Ari Leon, Contre Jour both delights and bedevils from start to finish.

//Dreams of Your Life

2012 Nominee

Hide & SeekUnited Kingdom

Dreams of Your Life is a thought-provoking and immersive browser-based experience, built as a response to the new documentary Dreams of a Life by Carol Morley. The film movingly pieces together the true story of thirty-eight year old Joyce Vincent, whose skeleton was discovered in her bedsit three years after she had died. Written by AL Kennedy, Dreams of Your Life is a darkly playful world that helps you think about the themes of the film by taking you through a conversation with a mysterious voice about your place in the world, and your relatedness to your social circle. The overriding comments indicate people are finding it provides a refreshing opportunity for contemplation and aesthetic appreciation, which is uncommon on the internet. We are proud to have tackled such a challenging task and feel that, like the film itself, the experience created is haunting, compassionate and inventive.

//Dyad

2012 Award Winner: Audio Design Award

RSBLSBUSA

Dyad will reveal to you the secrets of the universe via bright flashy colours and phat beatz. Dyad is a gamified tie dye machine. Dyad is an interactive mind altering substance absorbed through your thumbs, eyes and ears. Dyad is a tactical octopus action ballet in a reactive audio-visual tube.

//Find Me A Good One

2012 Nominee

Andy Wallace & Haitham EnnasrUSA

Find Me A Good One is a surreal puzzle platformer that explores responsibility felt by players towards non-playing fictional characters. In it, the player must explore a visually rich dreamscape to find dreams to fend off the nightmares encroaching on their brother or play with the toys offered up by the world. Although the brother in Find Me A Good One is clearly dependent on the player, it is up to her to decide how much she is or is not helping her sibling. Find Me A Good One allows the player to be diligent in her responsibility, or shirk it in order to further explore the dreamscape of the game. Because the system does not assign value to her actions, the player is left to judge her own actions and the effect they have on her virtual brother.

//FTL: Faster Than Light

2012 Nominee

Subset GamesChina

FTL (Faster Than Light) is a spaceship simulation rogue-like game. Explore a randomly populated galaxy, hyper-space jumping over very long distances. Explore asteroid fields, rescue stations from pirates, and stay one step ahead of your pursuers, the rebel fleet. You will need to manage your ship by balancing ship power between weapons, shields, engines and life-support. You must find and buy new equipment, upgrade your ship and keep your crew alive to complete your mission. Each playthrough is unique and each death is entertaining in the uniquely challenging FTL.

//Gorogoa

2012 Award Winner: Visual Design Award

Jason RobertsUSA

Gorogoa is a lovingly hand-illustrated world suspended inside of a unique puzzle. To solve the puzzle, the player rearranges a few tiles on a simple grid, placing them next to or on top of one another. But each tile is also a window into a different part of the game world--or perhaps into a different world--and each window plays like its own little game. The key to progressing never lies within one tile, but in the connections between tiles...

//Guacamelee!

2012 Nominee

DrinkBox StudiosCanada

Guacamelee! is a Metroid-vania style action-platformer set in a magical Mexican inspired world. The game draws its inspiration from traditional Mexican culture and folklore, and features many interesting and unique characters. Guacamelee builds upon the classic open-world Metroid-vania style of games, by adding a strong melee combat component, a new dimension switching mechanic, and cooperative same-screen multiplayer for the entire story. The game also blurs the boundaries between combat and platforming by making many of the moves useful and necessary for both of these.

//Hidden in Plain Sight

2012 Nominee

Adam SpraggUSA

Hidden in Plain Sight is a local-multiplayer (shared couch) game where players attempt to blend in with NPCs while completing various goals. The game has five unique game modes, each of which employ the theme of accomplishing goals without revealing your identity to other players. In each game mode, players have the ability to eliminate each other from the game, so blending in with the AI-controlled NPCs is essential. In "Death Race", for example, players are racing to the finish line amongst a crowd of NPCs, but each player also has a gun with a single bullet. Players want to cross the finish line first, but racing out in front is a quick way to get shot by your opponents. Try to win, but don't look like you're trying to win, or you'll lose. Each game is tense, but the rounds are quick and always end with friendly shouting and laughter.

//Hit Me!

2012 Nominee

Kaho AbeUSA

Hit Me! is a two-player hyper-interactive, physical game that tests speed, agility and the ability to take good snapshots. Utilizing wireless technology and incorporating the concept of the metagame, Hit Me! encourages face-to-face real-world interactions, not only by the players but also by the spectators. The object of the game is to hit the opponent’s button on top of the head. Once a hit is made, the hitter’s camera takes a snapshot of the victim. The hitter receives a point for the hit, and up to 2 additional points can be awarded by the Judge based on the quality of the snapshot. The snapshots, points and times are projected on a wall for spectators to observe.

//Hokra

2012 Nominee

Ramiro CorbettaUSA

Hokra is a minimalist digital sports game. A fast-paced, competitive game for two teams, Hokra uses sports metaphors to foster cooperation between teammates and competition between opponents. The game has simple controls and minimal rules while not losing the depth that makes multiplayer games exciting for advanced players. Like the sports from which it draws inspiration, Hokra is engaging to both player and spectators. Hokra’s music and sound design were created by Nathan Tompkins.

//INTERFERENCE

2012 Award Winner: Interaction Award

Eric Zimmerman & Nathalie PozziUSA

Interference is a physical game installation designed for a museum exhibition. It consists of five parallel steel walls, each 10 feet by 10 feet and less than a millimeter thick, which hang suspended from the ceiling and serve as visually permeable, vertical game boards. Pairs of players (up to 10 or more pairs at a time) can start playing anytime they want. The walls are divided into “cells” and each pair plays in a small, local area of connected cells. Gameplay is focused on moving colored wooden pieces around the walls in a simple strategy game. Your goal is to have the majority of your color in the cell cluster where your local game is taking place. The basic move in Interference is to steal a piece from another game that is going on between another pair of players. Playing your game means interfering in the games of other players.

//International Racing Squirrels

2012 Nominee

PlayniacUnited Kingdom

International Racing Squirrels is a race management sim that also models and reflects on real-world financial systems. The game has the player running an errant gang of misbehaving squirrels, who act a bit like glamorous soccer stars. It is set in the dark underworld of the international squirrel racing scene, brought to life with 50 interactive "storylets" and 25 levels through which the game's complexity gradually unfurls. Bribery, debt, hotel room trashing, gambling and secondary careers in reality TV or the pop charts are rife. In the up-tree urban training facility players purchase homes, build up their team, train their squirrels and send them off to racetracks around the world. From jungles to futuristic cities and streets to deserts they face a barrage of feisty opponents. The idea was inspired by an article in Scientific American on the relative running speeds of animals.

//Open Source

2012 Nominee

Super SoulUSA

“Open Source” is a re-imagining of the classic video game Pong placed within the context of the Rauschenberg piece “Open Score”. Instead of a game played out visually on a screen, two participants face off against one another on a small scale tennis court with no ball or paddles. Players judge the position of a virtual ball based on auditory cues while Kinect hardware tracks the participants as their bodies act as virtual paddles. Open Source combines game and art history to further the dialogue of the past, present and future of games.

//POP: Methodology Experiment One

2012 Nominee

Rob LachUSA

POP: Methdology Experiment One is an experimental game in the most literal sense. The game was purposefully built in way that explores a different approach to the typical game development pipeline. It was developed by first composing the music and running with the first game concept that happened to emerge during that creative process. In POP, the player plays through a series of erratic minigames stylistically tied with the music. The vignettes are interconnected by idiosyncratic videos creating a purposefully disjointed experience. POP:ME1 is currently available for PC, MAC, and OnLive.

//Prom Week

2012 Nominee

Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa CruzUSA

Prom Week is a Flash game that makes social relationships playable. Powered by a novel AI system created in tandem with this project, Prom Week enables players to shape the lives of high schoolers in the tumultuous week leading up to their prom. Play consists of selecting actions between pairs of characters that they themselves naturally want to do based on the social state, such as “Reminisce” or “Ask Out.” Each action the player takes, be it backstabbing a friend or making two characters fall in love, sends ripples throughout the school, affecting the social landscape in subtle ways; and consequently the desires and actions of the rest of the student body. This notion of Social Physics, paired with an ever growing Social Facts Database, generates stories about these characters while teaching players strategies for social manipulation. Finding yourself using these strategies can be a moment for self reflection.

//Qasir al-Wasat: A Night in-Between

2012 Nominee

AdugeBrazil

Qasir al-Wasat: A Night in-Between is a stealth-adventure set on a wondrous Arabian fortress, sealed in-between worlds. You play as an invisible and fragile summoned fiend, called by a sorcerer to fulfill a stealth mission. As the character explores and investigates the palace, it discovers that the mission is actually more complex than how it was initially briefed. It is up to the player to solve the puzzles and riddles scattered around and unravel the real secret of the palace. The game draws heavily from Arabic and Persian medieval folklore and iconography to set its tone and mood, being kind of a video-gamey One Thousand and One Nights poem. Qasir al-Wasat is available for PC and Mac.

//Reality Ends Here

2012 Awardee: Impact Award

Jeff Watson, Simon Wiscombe, & Tracy FullertonUSA