DIY Tinycade aims to bring Alt Ctrl games to the masses
Enlarge (credit: P. Gyory et al., 2022)
What's a frustrated game designer to do when stuck at home during a global pandemic? If that designer is Peter Gyory, a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, you figure out how to make a game out of the piles of discarded cardboard lying around the house.
The result is Tinycade, created by Gyory and several colleagues at UCB's ATLAS Institute. All you need to make your own Tinycade game is some cardboard, a smartphone, two small mirrors, rubber bands, and toothpicks. "The restriction I gave myself was that if you couldn't go to the grocery store and buy it, I couldn't use it in Tinycade," said Gyory. He and his collaborators presented their work in June at the Association for Computing Machinery on Creativity and Cognition in Venice, Italy, with a paper published in the conference proceedings.
Gyory is part of a growing community of game developers interested in building Alt Ctrl (alternative controller) games, which employ novel physical interfaces for players. Hot Swap, for example, involves steering and managing the sails of a ship with individual inputs that must be swapped while playing. Octopad will turn a Nintendo Entertainment System controller into eight distinct parts, turning any game played on the system into "a real-time co-op strategy game," per the authors, while Cook Your Way "educates players on how the immigration process strips people of their culture with its faux kitchen controller, complete with a knife and pot."