Phantasm Atlas

Sara Haas, Jules Kris, Amanda Glover

Phantasm Atlas is an interactive video installation re-imagining our bodily anatomy. Users manipulate their experience by interacting with the wearable controller, which is covered in fantastical pods that glow when flicked. The installation is comprised of a wearable silicone controller running on Arduino, Unity, and custom software, which manipulates a screen or projection of live action video and 3D animation. Phantasm Atlas was inspired by the Fantastic Voyage movie, science fiction, vintage anatomy books, and fictional maps.

For a video of this project visit
https://vimeo.com/228268105

For more information visit
https://games.ucla.edu/game/phantasm-atlas/

Artifacts

Phazero

Artifacts is an art game and digital art piece that allows players to wonder about the excavation of digital pasts, the malleability of historical evidence, and the power of the photographic image. The game imagines digital landscapes made of pixels and sculpted by data. The art in the game is repurposed images salvaged from Geocities, iconic American photographs, and memes. Artifact encourages the player to reflect on the nature of archeology, anthropology, and discovery.

For a video of this project visit
https://vimeo.com/191578091

For more information visit
https://www.christinazero.com/

Letting Them Sleep

Stalgia Grigg

In Letting Them Sleep, players navigate a lengthy character customization screen and create a self-representative avatar. After this process, the character they created goes to sleep in the single bed in the background. When a new player joins the game, the currently sleeping avatar leaves the screen to be replaced by a new character. The game is accompanied by a high score screen that lists the avatars that were able to sleep for the longest. The disinterest of nearby would-be participants is the key to achieving a high score.

For a video of this project visit
https://stalgiagrigg.name/a_img/2017/17.mp4

For more information visit
https://stalgiagrigg.name/a_years/2017.html

Face Exercise Machine

Tuangkamol Thongborisute

The Face Excerise Machine allows users to tone and sculpt their facial muscles by isolating individual features. Five levels guide players through challenging muscle workouts for your eyebrows, eyes, nose, cheeks, and lips. After practicing with each facial feature, users embark on the ultimate workout, using all parts of their face. A scorecard at the end of the experience lets players know what their most standout feature is.

For a video of this project visit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spDcbic0IUE

For more information visit
https://tuangstudio.com/portfolio/face-exercise-machine/

Incognito Mode

Lee Tusman

Incognito Mode is an Alternate Reality Game parodying the battle between hackers, governments and corporations. Players join a secret cohort of hackers attempting to leak illicitly gathered images and data in an act of rebellion. Players are covertly embedded within the festival, unaware of their fellow conspirators around them. A secret website will inform you of an important mission you must undertake to do reconaissance and gather an image covertly to be leaked to our organization. Once the information has been distributed, players must stay in disguise and move through the festival, avoiding security cameras, taking photos secretly, and then uploading them to our secluded darknet.

For a video of this project visit
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8JvitoUUXcSek5NYm5zZExhaEE

For more information visit
https://leetusman.com/

Casual Games for Protesters

Molleindustria, Harry Josephine Giles

Casual Games for Protesters is an ongoing zine collection of games to be played in the context of marches, rallies, occupations and other protests. Rallies and marches can be overwhelming, formulaic in structure, unnecessarily grave, or even boring to attend. These games can help craft the collective experience of protest into something exhilarating, liberatory and fun. Of course, context is crucial, and not all games make sense in all situations—serious or culturally tied protests may not leave room for playfulness. For some protests, however, Casual Games can be invaluable in creating an intellectually and physically stimulating experience.

For more information visit
https://protestgames.org/

Escape from the Glass Factory

Bruce Evans and Devin Ensz

Escape from the Glass Factory is a hybrid analog-digital game and an experiment with alternative controllers. The game is projected onto a magnetic whiteboard. Two players control characters, a spaceman and a Donkey-Kong-like adversary, while one player moves magnetic objects on the whiteboard to form platforms. A webcam pointed at the whiteboard detects the platforms and spawns virtual platforms in the game world. The players can see the characters interacting with the real world as the images are projected back onto the whiteboard.

For a video of this project visit
https://vimeo.com/236445871

For more information visit
https://www.since88.com/portfolio/escape-from-mars/

Nour

Terrifying Jellyfish

Nour is an interactive exploration of the aesthetics of food. Players are presented with scenes full of ramen noodles, boba tea, popcorn, and more. Rather than focus on game objectives or directions, Nour gives players the chance to play with their food, without the mess. Mash buttons at will to interact with the food in curious and unconventional ways.

For a video of this project visit
https://ksr-video.imgix.net/projects/3039860/video-815387-h264_high.mp4

For more information visit
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/terrifyingjellyfish/nour-experimental-food-art-game-interactive-food-s?ref=card

Harold Halibut

Onat Hekimoglu, Ole Tillmann, Fabian Preuschoff, Kardelen Babal, Daniel Beckmann, Ilja Burzev, Holle Schlickmann, Sascha Haus

Harold Halibut follows the titular hero, a young janitor, aboard a spaceship crashed on an unknown planet of water. When one of the remaining scientists on board tries to repair the ship, young Harold assists her efforts. Join Harold as he explores the ark-like ship and find the secrets it hides. Harold Halibut works like a game but looks like a stop-motion film, with sets made of actual welded metal, carefully sewn textiles, tiny wooden floorboards, and clay faces the size of walnuts. The hand-crafted details push the visual boundaries of adventure games--and pull the player into this exploratory adventure.

For a video of this project visit
https://vimeo.com/222858916

For more information visit
https://haroldhalibut.com/

Zip Squid

Phil James

Inspired by Mega Man speed runs, Zip Squid is a blocky retro-style sidescroller that allows players to run inside the walls of the game world. Players control a humanoid that was captured by a pink hand and changed into a squid. Crawl through walls to find secret areas and trail rainbows across the screen, but be careful! Spending time in the walls causes you to lose health, sending you back to the last checkpoint. It's a perfectly normal game.

For a video of this project visit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn9kuJ7QL_U&feature=youtu.be

For more information visit
https://philllllljames.me/2017/04/21/zipsquid-devlog-1/

Witchball

Stephen Lawrence Clark

Witchball imagines a post-reality racing game played by children in the year 2601. In this future, massive environmental change has made much of the world inaccessible, and long-distance travel impossible. Although communities are isolated, technology has advanced so that short distances between people are virtually erased. In Witchball, two players compete in a race in 3D space while simultaneously playing a 2D ball game on the surface of the screen. Points are gained in both aspects and tallied per lap, so it is important--and tricky--to manage the space better than the opponent.

For a video of this project visit
https://vimeo.com/214109537

For more information visit
https://twentycapitalletters.com/Witchball

Future Unfolding

Mattias Ljungström, Marek Plichta, Andreas Zecher, Thomas Carleberg, Emil Nilsson, Till Wittwer

Future Unfolding is an action adventure that eschews traditional gaming tutorials and instead encourages exploration. Players must try to unfold the puzzles and mysteries hidden in the beautiful landscapes themselves. Leave the path and hunt down secrets in the forgotten woods, or explore hidden caves. During the journey, different types of wild animals appear, some friendly and some dangerous. You can either avoid the dangerous creatures, or search for ways to befriend them. A detailed map fills in with previously visited locations, revealing the world as the player loses themselves in play.

For a video of this project visit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihyrf2jfpIk

For more information visit
https://www.futureunfolding.com/

Regurgitating

Matthias Dörfelt

Regurgitating is a projected animation loop of a flower and its lifecycle rendered in real time through procedurally generated computer imagery. Even though the loops transition seamlessly from one iteration to the next—as expected from the traditional animation loop—each of the iterations displays a unique instance of the underlying core idea. The result is a meditative experience that is close to life itself: every iteration of the loop will be the last one.

For more information visit
https://www.mokafolio.com/works/Regurgitating

Horse Game: A Friend You Can Ride On

Nick Crockett, Adeline Ducker

Horse Game: A Friend You Can Ride On is an arcade game and performance designed for the UCLA Game Lab Arcade Backpack. Aided by a magic pocket mirror, players must guide their trusty and adorable pink steed, portrayed by game designer Nick Crockett, through both in-game city streets and the real-life Hammer Museum courtyard. Turn miles into money by picking up animal-corpse-beings and shepherding them to their destinations in your taxi.

Moshambo

Miller Klitsner

A new take on the classic game of roshambo, Moshambo is a fast-paced dueler that exchanges the original elements of chance for temporal tactics as players lunge, morph, and retreat until their hands inevitably clash.

Gecko Ridemption

Theo Triantafyllidis, Alex Rickett

Gecko Ridemption is a browser-based, online-multiplayer, area-control, rock-climbing, laser-blasting, stuff-barfing, sport-ish game. Up to eight players control geckos that puke random bits of sports equipment that stick together into gravity defying structures. Players must barf, build, and crawl up these structures to capture levitating sport-balls and score points. Don't get careless though! Geckos can also discharge power laser beams that will explode other geckos and their carefully constructed vomit-ladders.

For a video of this project visit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v092FoSCYPI

For more information visit
https://theotrian.itch.io/gecko-ridemption

Lady Rugs

Kit Kirby

As Pablo Picasso once observed, "There are two kinds of women: Goddesses and Doormats." Lady Rugs riffs on this expression through a series of rugs depecting actual women from history who respond when the rugs are stepped on. Each woman--Harriet Tubman, Hillary Clinton, Roberta Williams, and Gertrude Stein--is a pioneer in a traditionally male dominated field, but is often overlooked, underapreciated, even despied. Each rug has a fabric pressure sensor, which triggers audio clips of voices explaining why each woman has been devalued. The voices also explain why fields such as the military, politics, video game development, and fine art remain part of "a man's world."

JEEP JEEP

Anna Luisa Petrisko, Tonia Beglari, Bela Messex, and David Lyons

JEEP JEEP, a video game art experience in which a diasporic space traveler returns to his home planet to summon ancestors for the ultimate cosmic ride in a decked-out jeep. Travel through hallucinatory portals to visit relatives who jubilantly display the traditional dances of this tropical neon planet. JEEP JEEP is as much a creation story as it is about the end of life, as the game is inspired by the "death" of the game artist's musical alias.

For more information visit
https://www.jeepneysjeepneys.com/

Ape Out

Gabe Cuzzillo

Ape Out is a wildly intense and colorfully stylized smash ‘em up about primal escape, rhythmic violence, and frenetic jazz. Players control an escaped ape in a procedurally generated prison, guarded by human beings that can be thrown or used as shields. Build up momentum as you smash a path to freedom. Find your rhythm in the chaos accompanied by a dynamic jazz soundtrack of drums and cymbals.

For a video of this project visit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6-ChUXSMn8

For more information visit
https://www.devolverdigital.com/games/view/ape-out

Spherical Constitution

Dennis Carr, Claire Carré, Longxiao Li

Spherical Constitution is a marble rolling game exploring themes of pain, compulsion and the mechanization of the human body. In order to succeed, the player must roll a ball across the bodies of anonymous human figures by contorting them into difficult poses.

For a video of this project visit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVEFOw36i04

For more information visit
https://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/10403

Genesis Noir

Evan Anthony, Jeremy Abel, Mercy Lomelin

Genesis Noir is set before, during, and after The Big Bang. To save your love, you must stop the expansion of the universe. A love triangle gone askew as cosmic beings quarrel in the dark nether of pre-creation. Confrontation and a shot fired. A Big Bang. The birth of the universe, an expanding force of destruction, the Earth a fragment of shrapnel hurtling towards the fragile heart of a god. Is there a way to stop the expansion and save your love?

For more information visit
https://genesisnoirgame.com/

Oblige

Jocelyn Kim, Ivan Tsang, Quetzel Herzig

Inspired by the stories of mothers and grandmothers living and working as housewives, Oblige is a narratively rich, sidescroller game in which the player becomes a working-class mother in 1979 Hong Kong. The player must take care of everyday chores while balancing work, life, and a growing responsibility to appease to her spouse and children.

For more information visit
https://jocelyn.itch.io/oblige

Keyboard Sports

Triband

Using the entire keyboard as your controller, you play as the young apprentice to Master QWERTY, who takes you on a wild adventure across oceans, through temples, and into dreams in the search for your inner key.

For more information visit
https://keyboardsports.com/

MIST Magicians

Two UCLA students, members of the world famous Magic Castle, will be wandering the festival with card tricks and subtle miracles for those curious enough to watch!

For more information visit
https://www.facebook.com/mistucla/