The annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco is a wonderfully outrageous, high tech fantasy land where corporations like Microsoft, Facebook, Sony and Google, hold court with their latest zombie-blasting simulators and VR headsets. But it has a secret.

Off in the back (technically in a whole separate building), away from the buzz and hustle of the main show floor, is a small cluster of 20 curated, one-of-a-kind games under a banner labeled “alt.ctrl”. Here, the creators of these games encourage people to come over and play their project. They call themselves Developers, but I see them as Makers like myself. People who take their fun from mixing equal parts Art and Engineering. 

I felt immediately at home talking to the teams showcasing at Alt.CTRL. I didn’t know the game dev lingo, but the minute we started talking hardware — controllers stuffed with Arduinos, addressable LEDs, Raspberry Pi, jacks, buttons, and switches — we were off and running.

Here are the twenty projects on display at the 2018 Alt.CTRL.GDC showcase:

• Striker Air Hockey (Guerrilla Nouveau)
• Too Many Captains (And Not Enough Wire) (Avi Romanoff, Giada Sun) 
• Vaccination (Installation Required) 
• Clunker Junker (HNRY) 
• Grave Call (Totally Not a Game Studio)
• Living Orb (Jonathan Giroux)
• Wind Golf (Pepijn Willekens)
• Puppet Pandemonium (Fluffy Games) 
• Disco is Dead! (Third Floor Games) 
• Voiceball (Alex Turbyfield, Stephen Borden, Ilya Polyakov, Talal Alothman, Ali Yaldrim) 
• Wobble Garden (Robin Baumgarten)
• Unicornelia (The Sad Rainbows)
• Mark Wars (Matthieu Alves, Louis Bernot, Alessandro Cheinisse, Gaëtan Cloarec, Florian Eschalier, Matthias Johan, Pierre Llanusa)
• Pump the Frog (7 Holy Frogges)
• Bot Party (Phoenix Perry and Frieda Abtan) 
• Yo, Bartender! (Kraken)
• Doors to the City (Looking Glass)
• Lemonade (Jing Sun, Yaying Zeng, Yuchen Huang, Ziqiang He)
• Hi-5 Heroes (Bobby Lockhart and Marty Meinerz)
• Scissors The That Than and Shcocoococo VS (Miyazaworks) 

Of those 20, I was sadly only able to weave together five interview videos in the time that I had. If GDC has me back (please have me back!) I’ll be sure to hire on some help so that I can cover more ground and crank out more videos. This was my first Alt.CTRL. I arrived as a curious outsider, but I left fully converted and eager to do what I can to bring more attention to this growing, creative community.

So, here’s what I was able to accomplish before exhaustion hit. I’ll go through five interviews in the order I encountered them.

Too Many Captains (And Not Enough Wire)

I’m a sucker for a fun sci-fi game, especially one that plays on a classic Star Trek trope. In Too Many Captains (And Not Enough Wire) one player plays as the Engineer, while others play as Captains. The Engineer physically controls the on-screen ship with a patchbay panel, but is unable to see what’s going on. He or she relies on directions from the captains to guide them through increasingly tough waves of enemies and asteroids.

It’s a fun game with a great co-op dynamic.

The hardware is a mix of Raspberry Pi and Intel NUK computers, connected to an array of addressable Neopixel LED strips, arcade buttons, and a unique switchboard of audio jacks and cables that provide a satisfying old fashioned “ka-chunk” when moved around.

Wobble Garden

Robin Baumgarten is a bit of a celebrity within the alternative controller community. He earned his status off the success of his game Line Wobbler, an innovative and drastically minimal game constrained to a single strip of LED lights and controlled with a doorstop spring.

This year Robin brought Wobble Garden, a playful, visual exciting experiment that plays with many of the same elements that made Line Wobbler so enticing — colorful, lightening fast LEDs and doorstop spring controls.

Robin had several demos available on his computer to showcase potential ways to put the controller to use. But in true Maker Faire style, he was actively receptive to hearing other’s ideas about where to take the project.

What I particularly liked about his hardware was its modular design. Tiles of three laser-cut hexagons, each with three springs ringed by LEDs, were linked together into a larger, infinitely expandable system.

The springs were used to sense player input, measuring vibration through inexpensive vibration switches within the spring, or through capacitive touch, registered through the 3D printed conductive caps on the top of the spring.

Input was then fed into a nearby laptop and processed through custom code written in Python. The result of this processing was an interactive light show played out on the series of LED rings, as well as sound (which was difficult to hear in the noisy hall).

Robin says that he’s toying with the idea of opening the platform up to other developers, and I hope he does. I think it’s a fun and fascinating interface to play with.

Clunker Junker

Of all the games at the showcase, Clunker Junker has a special place in my Maker heart. After all, it’s a game about fixing your perpetually breaking spaceship. It’s Sisyphus in space. It’s the Millennium Falcon in the best Star Wars movie ever made (Empire Strikes Back, obviously… Fight Me!).

Two players are needed to play Clunker Junker, because there’s simply too many things going wrong to both fix things and steer the ship at the same time. It doesn’t help that you’re drifting through an impossible-to-navigate asteroid field.

What I loved most about this game were the handheld “spaceship tools” used to operate all the controls (steering, repair, speed, shields, etc). The tools feels like a sophisticated bit of magic, but really it’s a glorified hand-crank flashlight that shines into the light sensors tucked within many of the panels. The brightness and duration of the light is what gets the work done.

The guys were nice enough to move the table back and give me a look at the Arduino Mega used to connect up to all the sensors. They chose that particular project board for its abundance of analog input pins, needed for all those light-dependent resistor sensors. Great game, and fun controllers!

Puppet Pandemonium!

This game challenged by preconceptions about what I would see at Alt.Ctrl, and I don’t think I was alone. It is the gamification of puppet shows, and it is a blast. No game held bigger crowds for longer periods of time than Puppet Pandemonium! It also, as I understand it, won an award as a standout game at this year’s showcase.

Two volunteers control and voice the puppets, reading lines from a TV screen they can see from where they’re seated. Within the audience, four additional players can sit down at a nearby table and help the puppets along their scripted journey using giant arcade buttons set in the table (communicating to a nearby Arduino).

The adventure includes some funny banter, several mini games, and a final boss level where all the players have to combine forces to triumph. It’s loads of fun, even just for spectators, and it really benefits from being such an unexpected sight in the midst of all the high tech of GDC.

What’s particularly poetic is that many of the developers of Puppet Pandemonium! work for a VR studio. This game was a radical shift away from synthetic experiences. It was a love letter to the tactile, awkward, childish, human experience of gathering together in meatspace and mashing buttons against a common foe. It makes me hopeful for the future. The kids are alright.

Vaccination

For my last game, I stopped by Vaccination. This is an updated riff on the classic game of Operation. Instead of moving bones, two players work together to vaccinate a patient from an increasingly terrible bout of bacteria.

The two players divide responsibilities. One plays as the role of the Scanner, using a single joystick to scan around a magnified view of the patient’s cartoon body, looking for nearby bacteria. Once these invaders are identified, the Scanner calls out their location to the other player who works as the Injector, administering different color-coded medicines to the pretend patient, rendered in a mix of painted wood and acrylic.

Aside from being a fun game with a thoroughly realized design aesthetic, it also happened to check all my boxes as a Maker. The hardware used a mixture of CNC cut wood and plastic, a 3D printed syringe, addressable LEDs, and an Arduino Pro Micro to communicate injections back to the nearby computer.

I was even treated to a look at an initial prototype of the hardware, rendered in laser cut plywood and banana jacks, with an assortment of wires linking back to a Makey Makey project board.

These are my people. I suspect many of them have never been to a Maker Faire or have any inkling how well there games would fit in among the kinetic propane sculptures and homebrewed R2-D2s contained there, but I’m certain our world will collide soon.

Also, hat’s off to alt.ctrl.GDC co-creator and organizer John Polson. You’ve made a bit of magic here, and I hope to come back again.