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Can you look them in the eye and say "choose cancer"?

Is that an advert for Mondo Medicals?

The iPhone / iTouch actually has a pretty unique interface for casual games. The touch screen and accelerometer allow for some really unique games that don't translate as well onto other devices. For instance, there are a few marble-maze sorts of games available for Jailbroken iPhones that allow you to control work your way through a maze just by tilting the phone. It's like those old games with a little bead of mercury or a ball bearing, only without the problems of friction making the ball stick. And there's a partial port of Crayon Physics that's really slick. Given a handful of good games, I could easily see the iPhone becoming a great handheld gaming platform.

The project later released an experimental gameplay framework to help in your rapid prototyping, consisting of many of the tools they built during the project itself. It's slashdotted now, so here's the Google cache for immediate satisfaction.

And as a CS grad student, how is this different from every other semester and summer?

I've played the Tower of Goo game. It's really a fun "casual game" sort of game, and honestly, they came up with an idea that was fairly different from much of anything else out there, which isn't easy to do. They didn't just make yet another Tetris clone, or a Bejeweled clone, or some other puzzle game that's been done a million times, they seem to have tried to come up with really innovative game ideas.

The Experimental Gameplay Project has a lot of really unique game concepts like this.

• The games are cheap or free
• It's all legal
• They're usually easy to pick up and play, with a focus on fun game mechanics over action-movie style production
• You find new, creative ideas all over the place

These days, I often find myself watching or helping my kids play and less time playing myself.

Last night I had both kids playing Garry's Mod (a HL2 mod) against each other. Emma, who's four and a half, was having a great time spawning in odd things and making rebel companions. I did have to step in and mediate Emma wailed "Sam's murdering my buddies." Ah, parenting.

They also both spent a lot of time playing the experimental game Darwin Hill. Emma requested it, "The one where there's the bugs and you get to squish them!".

Experimental Gameplay Project game called Troy. http://www.experimentalgameplay.com/game.php?11242 3

Gravity Head, and the rest of the Experimental Gameplay Project
Dada: Stagnation in Blue
Cloud
Katamari Damacy
Facade
Flow
Orisinal

Gravity Head, and the rest of the Experimental Gameplay Project
Dada: Stagnation in Blue
Cloud
Katamari Damacy
Facade
Flow
Orisinal

I mean one or two guys used to code/write entire games! Now I don't think anyone of those games listed has less than what? 50 people in the credits?

Check out http://www.experimentalgameplay.com/. It's game developers working by themselves and taking a nugget of a game idea and working on it for no more than a week.

I've been wasting a lot of hours on Tower of Goo Unlimited during the last few days. Many of these games have surprisingly good/sophisticated production design. The gameplay is simple, but very fun.

I hope they're relevant.

Well the submisison is basically a cut-n-paste from the website. The about section says there will be a Hot Games' session will preview unreleased titles from major game companies and indie developers. (The website also says The program will be made available early June. So it's a litte early.)

The question is: will there be booth babes? No really.

So there is suttlebut about a huge show case of the 'latest and greatest' games with forthcoming release. The graphical theory and practice, at the state of the art, is already a focus of SIGGRAPH. Some video game engines approach implementation of 'last years' ideas, but most are not more techically sophisticated than generic toolkit $FOO running on OpenGL / Direct X shaders.

The reason to have a showcase such as this is to demo innovative User Interface design and game play hacking, both arguably harder to get right than NURBS modeling and bit pushing. Yet we've seen how innovative game publishers are in UI and gameplay. Doom 3 or Halo 2, anyone? They mention indie developers, but as I see it this is another game company's wet dream. As this is an ACM event, the subtle dilluting of the SIGGRAPH conference is in keeping with the corporate ethos of ACM. But, will this be any different than publishers hoping to expand their market via word of mouth?

I would more belive the utility of such a presentation if it looked at current, past and soon to be released games. Games that are either the epitome of a UI approach or possesing distinctive gameplay would be a usefull topic. Things like the products of Carnegie Mellon's Experimental Gameplay Project, where gameplay is actually researched, would be welcome. Eventaully, this could develop into it's own ACM Special Interest Group conference. As it stands this special session sounds like chance to sit and drool at the latest and shiniest grandchild of Wolfenstien 3D. I'd like to give it the benefit of the doubt, but there will be more skankily clad women in EA's 'presentation' than indie developers total.

Will single player games (or 1-4 on the console) continue to thrive or is the future in MMORPG's

At this point I seriously doubt that any real stats will come out of it. Until they start listing presenters and papers, I'm betting that the only answer to this is 'yes, if you buy our game.'

Fun, but not original.

I am more impressed by these guys: http://www.experimentalgameplay.com/ - 4 grad studens who created 50+ games in one semester.

Yea but for a CS246 (2nd year comp sci students) this is good...you are comparing 4 grad students to 2nd year under grads?

I am more impressed by these guys: http://www.experimentalgameplay.com/ - 4 grad studens who created 50+ games in one semester.

It comes down to "Write trivial, borderline-unplayable games that hold your interest for a minute or so," then write many versions of each game. There are a few gems, but on the whole the results were disappointing.

I am more impressed by these guys: http://www.experimentalgameplay.com/ - 4 grad studens who created 50+ games in one semester.

The Experimental Gameplay Project began as a student pitched project at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. The project started in Spring 2005 with the goal of discovering and rapidly prototyping as many new forms of gameplay as possible. A team of four grad students, we locked ourselves in a room for a semester with three rules:

1. Each game must be made in less than seven days,
2. Each game must be made by exactly one person,
3. Each game must be based around a common theme i.e. "gravity", "vegetation", "swarms", etc.

As the project progressed, we were amazed and thrilled with the onslaught of web traffic, with the attention from gaming magazines, and with industry professionals and academics all asking the same questions, "How are you making these games so quickly?" and "How can we do it too?" Though we successfully met our goal of making over 50 games, we realized that this project had become much less about the games, and much more about the crazy development process - and how we could help others do the same thing. We wrote about this process in our whitepaper How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days.

How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20051026/gabler_ 01.shtml Recommended read.