PAX East Roadtrip 2010

Since a bunch of us are going to PAX East in Boston this year, why not all go together and make it an epic roadtrip? Fast food, car farts and interminable boredom await… not to mention car-to-car WiFi gaming battles!

The plan is to stop in Rochester and check out NCHEG, the National Center for the History of Electronic Games (ncheg.org), nerd out, grab dinner and possibly drink too much. The next morning we’ll finish the drive and be at PAX for the weekend before returning Sunday.

If that sounds interesting, fill out the survey below. It’s just to see if people are down, no commitment at this point… if there’s enough people we’ll plan it out. And if you have ideas or questions, post up a comment.

Survey: http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/237061/pax-east-roadtrip-2010

first social of 2010 is… Thursday Feb 11th***

To the distinguished membership of the Hand Eye Society: apologies for this double-post (reason: it’s complicated), please note that the corrected date for this event is Thursday, February 11th 2010. ***

For the fifth Hand Eye Society Social, the first of 2010, we are preparing a brief audiovisual presentation intended to thrill & amuse. Hosted by Mr. Nathan Vella of Toronto’s own Capy, a studio that has recently released a couple of thingamjigs for Sony & Nintendo’s machines, the presentation will include glimpses at two types of blinking lights offered by two dudes with beards:

Firstly, Mr. Kris Piotrowski, born in Poland & raised in Cuban Missile Ssauga, a former Ryerson film student and currently creative director at one of them independent videogame studios located here in Toronto, will be presenting for the first time a (hopefully) crazybananas Wiiware project called ‘Heartbeat’, while attempting to explain some learnings from its roundabout design process.

Secondly, Mr. Craig D. Adams, born on Canada’s west coast & living in Toronto since the turn of this 21st century, will be presenting a three-way collaborative project named ‘Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP’, described as a brave experiment in I/O cinema for Apple’s touchtronic machines featuring 1) the remarkable pixel artwork of Superbrothers, an ambiguously pluralized & irritatingly cryptic art & design organization known for the occasional published pixel illustration & a few DIY videogame efforts at ToJam & with the AGI plus 2) the soulful soundz of Toronto’s Jim Guthrie, the Juno nominated recording artist known for using a PSone as a drum machine & sequencer to make marvelous music 3) the engineering capabilities & videogame design prowess of the fine & noble folks at Capy.

These two projects, still deep in development and up until now all but unseen, will be making what is effectively their world premiere at this free presentation and social event at Unit Bar on Queen West in Toronto on February 11th. Doors will open & beers will be available from 19:00 EST and the half-hour presentation itself will begin at 20:00 EST (otherwise known as eight o’clock in the evening).

Afterwards the entire Heartbeat & S:S&S EP teams, including Mr.Jim Guthrie, will be on-hand for chit-chat, poutine or what-have-you.

*** It has been reported by members of the Hand Eye Society that, due to a rare bug with Safari, Mozilla & all internet browsers other than Netscape Explorer v1.7, the date of the next social was incorrectly displayed in a recently published post & in the promotional images on handeyesociety.com & everywhere else on the internet too.

The correct date for the next social is in fact Thursday February 11th 2010. For real. The 11th. ELEVEN. TEN PLUS ONE. (NOT THE FOURTH). We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this confusion may have caused.

DS Gaming Night Tonight

Oh hai!

So a while ago my friend Scott (the voice actor from Night of The Cephalopods), and I used to throw regular DS nights in bars, then we all got busy and things got put on the back burner. But we decided to start it up again for 2010.

We’ll be having a DS night tonight (Wednesday the 13th), from 7pm until around 1am at The Central over at 603 Markham Street.

More details can be found on Facebook

Feel free to drop in and play a round!

Social #5: The World Premiere of Something Cool

At:
the Unit Bar
1198 Queen St W.
MAP
the unlabelled bar next to the pawnshop, which is next to the Gladstone

On:
November 26th, 2009.
7PM

Let’s:
Smash talk the trash and video games what?

Seriously:
Pekko Koskinen,
from FINLAND, designer of two IGF award winning games Dragonfly Variations and Spawns of Deflebub, as well as co-creator of TOJam game Flowers of Error

and Shawn McGrath,
from EVERYWHERE, creator of Chain3 for iPhone, as well as ToJam favourites Xiq and A Game About Bouncing

Together they secretly collaborate on an unannounced project, Dyad, making this social the WORLD PREMIERE of their new game.  Watch a demonstration of the game and then a break down of design concepts showing an evolution from THIS to THIS.  Afterwards, ask Pekko how he choregraped a dance using shoot-em-up game rules, and ask Shawn about how awesome it was to have Tetsuya Mizuguchi (producer of Rez, Lumines, Space Channel 5) play his game.

As coleslaw, or corn-bread, but ultimately depending on blood sugar levels, Jon Mak (Everyday Shooter guy) may present old, abandoned prototypes of games he and Shawhan (I Am Robot and Proud guy) worked on.

COME and BRING ALL FRIENDS.

Canzine Artcade 2009

Pictures do not really do it justice. When you’re standing in front of the TORONTRON with your hands on the classic joystick and button, you’re wrapped in a cocoon of sound and light that is an experience more than the sum of its parts.

While the crown jewel at the event was undoubtedly the TORONTRON, we had a bunch of things going on in the Artcade. Here’s Craig’s quick vid sweep of the room.

We set up three stations for the game-curious to creatively engage with games. We had a couple hundred people through the room, and they really seemed to dig it. Craig and Karie sat down people in front of Scratch to mess around with a pre-existing game (Jori’s freaky baby at the end of the vid was an example of this), Mark and Rose showed people the wild fun to be had attaching balloons to buses with Gary’s Mod, and Davin invited people to draw their own videogame character which he then animated in front of their eyes.

You can check out all the characters that were created at Canzine including my crappy one — just click on my character and use the right and left arrow. But even more amazingly, if you have a webcam you can actually draw and animate your character from home.

Here’s how:
1. Print out this PDF.
2. Draw your 4 frames (use colour if you want!)
3. Make sure your webcam is plugged in, go to this page and allow Flash to access it.
4. Put your page in front of the cam and line it up (you might want to try lighting it evenly if you have a desk lamp).
5. Click Grab, and then give it a one word character name. It’ll save it to the server (note: there’s no way to delete this at the moment).
6. Now you can go to the character viewer page and find your name in the list.

Kudos to Davin for making this for the Artcade! I think it’d be great for educators or anyone looking to involve visual artists in videogames. And thanks to the volunteers who made this room possible.

Gamercamp Toronto (Nov 21)

There’s a gaming event coming up called Gamercamp that I’m helping organize and I think you might really dig it. Alot of the community is already involved and it would be great to have you there too.

It’s a one day event that happens right here in Toronto on November 21, 2009 and celebrates the creativity, art, and history of video games with top-notch speakers, demos, and an arcade filled with rare and retro games, not to mention Toronto’s own indie game cabinet, the Torontron.

We’re excited to announce the keynotes will be Hand Eye’s own Mare Sheppard and Raigan Burns talking about approaching video game development with the rock band model (instead of the movie production one). Not to mention Michael Todd (also a Hand Eye member) who’ll be talking about Broken Brothers Deluxe and the lessons learned from his game-a-week experiment. As well, Gamercamp will be the first place to hear from Gerald Darcy of the Replay Arcade Museum, Canada’s very first gaming museum located here in Toronto and set to open soon.

Between sessions we’ll be showcasing work from the Toronto indie dev community: game demos, works-in-progress and pixel art (there are still a couple spots open). We’ve also teamed up with Replay for a one-of-a-kind closing party, 1UP, which features 25 rare and classic arcade cabinets for an on-site arcade with unlimited freeplay into the night. There will even be dinner provided to power up for all that gaming madness.

The whole thing goes from 1:00pm to 9:30pm at the Lower Ossington Theatre (100A Ossington Ave). Tickets are only $15 and include admission, dinner, and the unlimited freeplay at the 1UP closing party. They’re available right now at Gamercamp.ca.

If you would like to show one of your games or have any questions at all, feel free to send me an email (mark@gamercamp.ca) or check out the site (www.gamercamp.ca).

Hope to see you there!

This Sunday, We Unveil…

We’ll be launching the retrofitted arcade cabinet we’ve filled with homegrown indie games this Sunday, November 1st at the Canzine Artcade at the Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen St W, east of Dufferin). Come try it out!

We will be in room 212 from 1-7pm. At 5pm, Hand Eye Society member Jph Wacheski, who built the cabinet, will be doing a slide show/Q&A entitled “Build Your Own Arcade Cabinet: Under the Hood of the Torontron”.

All day attractions, run by Hand Eye Society volunteers, include:

• Draw your own videogame character!
• Circuit bending-style game design!
• 3D sculptural sketching in a first person shooter!

Canzine is a super-inspiring annual zine and indie culture fair with hundreds of vendors. This is the second year we’re doing an Artcade there, last year’s was really fun. It’s a great way to meet fellow artists in different disciplines, especially illustrators, writers and musicians. Canzine costs $5 at the door.

Please spread the word to the gamers and the game-curious folks you know!

Progress Pics from the Indie Arcade Cabinet

Jph has been working away at the indie arcade cabinet that we’re launching at Canzine Nov. 1st. As you can see here, Canzine’s a great alternative culture and zine fair at a beautiful restored hotel, and tons of creative and talented people come through. It’s a great time to introduce other indie creators and enthusiasts to the indie videogame scene in Toronto, and at last year’s Artcade over 500 people came through and played the 20 games we showcased. This year if we get enough volunteers we’d like to add stations where people can try modding a game, draw their own videogame character, and trying out 3D sketching with Gary’s Mod.

Can you help out on Nov. 1st? Please get in touch if so and we’ll fit you with something you find interesting. It’s not required, but if you have a computer/monitor you can bring or a large vehicle please mention that.

But anyway, on with the pics from Jph’s workshop! Mouse over for commentary, click for larger pics.

If you have suggestions for (or have made) a Toronto indie game that would be awesome on this cabinet, or know of a bar/gallery/any public space where it could travel to after Canzine, let us know ASAP!

Some specs: the games have to be a Windows .exe and can be played with joystick & one button input. They’re going to be played on a lower-res (but big and retro-looking) screen so nothing with tiny type.

Hand Eye Society: The Quadrocial (Social #4)

THIS JUST IN: METANET SOFTWARE ORGANIZES EPIC INTRA-CONTINENTAL MISSION!

In an unprecedented reversal of conventional game-developer migration patterns, Alex Austin (Cryptic Sea’s designer/programmer, aka “the one without tattoos and a goatee”) will be coming all the way from California (Santa Cruz) to Ontario (Toronto).

Yes, you read that right — it’s the never-fabled SW-to-NE crossing!  It’ll be just like “Gold Rush”, but with more than 4 colours, and backwards! Hopefully Alex will remember to LOOK SCHEDULE and BUY MOSQUITO NET!

We know, it’s crazy. And it’s happening August 27th 2009 at Unit Bar, 1198 Queen St W. (7-10pm)

Here’s Unit Bar on Google Maps.

And here are pics of some of the many other Alex Austins who will probably not be attending, courtesy of Google Images. Though to be fair, if any of them had been making their own games for over a decade, we would have invited them too.

(NOTE: you may have a hard time finding Unit partly because the window is full of junk, making it look like yet another semi-abandoned gallery space on West-West-West-Queen-West-West, and mostly because the only “signage” is the word Unit scrawled in chalk on a wall next to the doorway — perpendicular to the sidewalk! So, be extra vigilant when trying to locate it… it really does exist!)

Alex will be showing off (as usual), and talking about some of the exciting and wonderful stuff they’ve been cooking up down south, when they’re not too busy having rollerskating-pizza-karaoke-birthday-parties with Jon Blow. Also we (Metanet) will hopefully have something super-exciting to show. Or at least something exciting — frankly, at this point we’re just shooting for “something”!

Come one, come all.

p.s – Little Known Fact: Toru Iwatani originally came up with the idea for Gish when he observed a pizza missing a slice. Then he forgot all about it and made Pac-Man instead; it wasn’t until twenty years later that Alex and Edmund re-discovered the idea and turned it into a game!

p.p.s – If you’re wondering how the shape and/or colour of a pizza could possibly suggest Gish, it’s because you’ve never seen Japanese pizza — they put really disgusting stuff like mayo and bonito flakes on there, at the same time! A double-cheeze smothered with tar and a couple of eyeballs isn’t really much of a stretch.

Codename: TIGRAC

The Toronto Indie Game Retrofitted Arcade Cabinet project is underway, and hopefully will have a better name before its fall launch. Jph has sourced a place in Oakville that sells cabinets for $100, so now we have to find the following hardware. Anyone want to donate or know where we can get a really cheap:

• monitor (LCD or CRT, let us know screen size and dimensions)
• PC (preferably above a P2)
• speakers
• keyboard
• powerbar

The project, if it’s not entirely clear, is to retrofit an old arcade cabinet and put modern indie games by Toronto creators on it and make it available to the public in a bar/gallery/coffee shop. As Jph said at the last Social, “you’d walk by a bunch of familiar games, and then there’d be this game you’d never seen…”

Colin has offered to look into sponsorship/venues for it, and Nadine has offered to do interface and cabinet design, so we’re on our way with this. But feel free to get in touch if you’d like to contribute in some way… maybe you have a large, arcade cabinet sized vehicle for instance?