\\ BREAKING SHIT

This blog lived for a semester and is now dead. New semester blog here: http://vulturetaming.tumblr.com/

-- 9 months ago

LAZA KNITEZ!! is coming to distortion festival. You can help us and the Copenhagen Game Collective to make the Distortion Street Arcade as awesome as possible! http://www.booomerang.dk/projects/street-arcade-distortion/

Give them some of your money, what else are you going to use it for?

-- 1 year ago

LAZA KNITEZ!! has been nominated for the Nordic Game Indie Night. It’s pretty amazing and we’re thinking of creating a new physical incarnation of the arcade. A new concept, punk-bricolage meets ikea meets exhibition space. Just you wait.

-- 1 year ago

Would you change your life has almost reached 30.000 bodies in the history of the game. I thought to do something to commemorate this.

As you know, you can leave a message on your body. Here’s some instant classics from the database:

• I wish I wasn’t such a tease.. -ANONYMOUS
• I wish I had three hands -ANONYMOUS
• I wanna a donut. -M 
• Fuck you Carsten! -ANONYMOUS
• Get more blowjobs -ANONYMOUS
• Should have walked ze dog -T-pain
• I should have taken bettre care of Hercules. -Zeus
• zzz -snorlax

And many… many more. 

What’s surprising is that many people make stunning revelations. Initially I thought many of them were ironic, but the more I read the more it feels like the people who wrote them actually considered, just for a few seconds, how they life could be better. These messages are an interesting artefact, an emergent side effect of the WYCYL game, as I never expected anybody to put any thought in it. A very PostSecret-esque effect.

I didn’t post any of the deeper messages as I don’t want to offend or expose anybody. Your secrets die with me (and the few people I choose to tell, because most of you didn’t fill in a name anyway).

-- 1 year ago

The campaign is public now, but you probably already heard: I made a game called “Would you change your life?” as part of the album release of the Danish band “The Blue Van”. What I didn’t know is that they were going to make a teaser with the main character from the game. That’s right, the guy in the video is wearing the shirt from the guy in the game, not the other way around.

The entire game was made in just 3 days, with one programmer and one artist. The last day two more team members joined in and we pulled an all-dayer and subsequent all-nighter, to finish the game. It is remarkably fun, and the winner gets a prize. 

-- 1 year ago

When I look back, the two games that inspired my most are Blind Monk which was created at the Nordic Game Jam of 2012. It is an unreleased game by two Danish developers, Christian and Toke. The player is blindfolded, holding an iPhone stretched out in front of her. She must pivot physically to find a particular sound, which signifies a ninja creeping in the darkness. When she finds the sound, she stabs forward with the phone to attempt to strike at him. The similarity with ZUMBIE is quite obvious: pivoting and making use of the accelerometer for additional input mechanics. I was very inspired by their way of forcing elaborate physical interaction in a game that could easily be played with a keyboard.

The other idea I had comes from a game I used to run as a teambuilding instructor called Minefield. In Minefield, a group of players must traverse a 10x10 grid of squares which is drawn on the ground, about 2x2 feet for each square. They must start at one end and there is only one clear path through the field which is not revealed to them. They take turns and move slowly, so the game leader can see clearly which square they are on. If a player hits a non-path square, she is sent back to the beginning and another player takes a turn. They cannot take notes, but they can communicate freely during the entire game. The path will be discovered by trial and error. Minefield focuses on group-memory communication since the physical actions are trivial (taking a step), often only one person remembers whether a tile is path or non-path but can he or she communicate this and will the rest of the group listen? This is where I got the idea of having two separate responsibilities in the game. 

When exactly the project changed from being an experiment to being a combination of these two games I cannot say. Luckily, ZUMBIE turned out to be more than just a combination as it has a few interesting elements of its own. 

Read More

-- 1 year ago

Zumbie is a cooperative game for at least 2 players, and maximum an entire auditorium. One player, the shooter, will hold an Android Smartphone and, while blindfolded, will follow orders from the other player(s). The other players will be looking at the screen where they will see zombies swarm in from all sides. They need to guide the shooter to aim in the right direction, who will physically have to rotate to aim. 

Everyone playing is cooperating to survive as long as possible. It’s up to you, the players, to find efficient ways of communicating.

Get it here: http://joon.be/toy/zumbie/

-- 1 year ago