UCLA Game Art Festival 2012 Maybe USC's Would Have Been Better

The UCLA Game Art Festival, might have relied too much on the art side of things. Among the different titles were some very thought out games with some kooky creations. As weird games based on Harry Potter were played outside loud booming chiptune music ruined the experience of being able to play many games inside. I attended the second day's performance of arcade titles and art projects mixed together at the, I never thought it was tiny before Broad Art Center located in UCLA.
Students were buzzing about their creations, other students were busy learning the controls. I would day the events were extremely nice effort from the students to show off their work. I can't grade them too low for first time endeavors or trying new ideas, but I will go over what kept my interest. Below I'll be going over the different titles I had a chance to play with.

Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth

by Timothy Sherman 

 As you can see above this title took quite the smashing, thrashing, building and bludgeoning. The game is played by messing with Play-Doh to create different shapes. Those shapes are then captured by a Kinect and in real time or made in the digital landscape. So if you create anything out of the Play-doh it will show up digitally. Everyone seemed to just have fun with this title. I know I did.

Now it doesn't just have to be Play-Doh, any physical object can be converted into an island. So simply putting your hand down will have you creating an new island. Random generated characters inhabits these islands and also die when their island is destroyed, become ghosts that float off and regenerate quite often. There's also a troll that will hunt them and kill them.

Timothy one of the creators talked how the game was inspired by Lemmings and that in early forms of the games with more defined rules everyone hated it, so it was simplified. Another note, that grass is from Mario 64.

I'd really like to see Play-Doh or some company get interested about this game. You could creat levels for yourself, or for tots just create new art.

Flyswatter

by Phoebe Hui

 Flyswatter seemed like a fun try, but I never saw it working correctly. You can hear a fly buzzing by and can try and hit it with your hand by wearing gloves that are suppose to capture your movement.

Talk Therapy

by Chris Reilly, Peter Lu 

This combined racing and yelling into a fun, annoying to everyone around you arcade title. The premise was a bit more fun then play. You're racing your opponent with the power of your screams. You can also slow down your opponent if you and they meet at the same point. I like the concept, but the game half worked from time to time and the overall race element of two gauges going up in down was just not that fun.

This Evil Egg Game was like a new Magic 8-Ball. You ask the egg your questions and it might not give you a straightforward answer. You have to set what the questions about on the left with a knob, talk into the egg and press the button on the right to activate. Then the bird skull spins to reveal an answer.


I'll have more games to go over from the event soon.