The hangout area at Indiecade East 2014, inside the Museum of the Moving Image.
Photo by Brady Dale.
No surprise you could find Brooklyn ties this weekend at IndieCade 2014, the gaming festival held at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.
For one, there was the team at Brooklyn Gamery, who let us take a crack at their unreleased game Prism Shell. Its pace and sense of impending doom are terrifying, which is precisely what developer Catt Small told us they are going for. One thing people like about Prism Shell is its innovative approach to moving your avatar.
NYU Game Center had a continually rotating display of all sorts of games from its students and faculty, such as students Wynn Chen, Allen Yu, Bruce Lan and Zack Zhang, who showed off a game they developed at the Global Game Jam, Shadow. It’s a very short puzzle game that messes with your head because you think you are meant to guide your avatar through the game, but what you are really guiding is his shadow.
You move it forward and back with the keyboard keys but you change the shadow’s position on the screen with a light source controlled by the mouse.
Particle Mace mutiplayer gameplay underway, with audience.
One really unique aspect of Indiecade East is the way they showed multiplayer games on a giant screen in an ampitheater, letting people from the crowd play them while casters called out the play-by-play over the PA system. It really made videogames feel like a sport.
One of the Brooklyn games that got this treatment was Particle Mace. It’s a sort of spaceship fighting game, except you aren’t so much battling with lasers and missiles as these swinging payloads following your ship.
A lot of developers showed off their games during “Show and Tell.” It was an open space where tables were set up and teams could use their space to show off whatever game they had, from analog games to tablet games to PC based games.
We saw Studio Mercato‘s under-development game, Crystal Brawl, a four player sports combat game (capture the flag with wizards and knights).
People looked like they got pretty into it:
A real life Crystal Brawl.
Attendees also got to try out the Oculus Virtual Reality system.
Brady Dale is a tech reporter, comedian and storyteller. In July 2015 he joined the New York Observer. Brady was Technical.ly Brooklyn's lead reporter from August 2013 till June 2015. A native of Pittsburg, Kansas, he went to Cornell and worked as a progressive community organizer for over a decade before quitting his job to pursue writing.
