Student Area

thatgamecompany is an independent game company founded in 2006 by two friends from USC, Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago. All of their games are rather minimalist and visually aesthetic, and the company aims to create games that emotionally provoke and stimulate players.

flOw

flOw is a simple game in which you are an organism swimming around and eating things as you dive deeper, and there are multiple organisms you can turn into. there are no instructions, you’re just dropped into the space and left to figure out how to navigate and progress.

Flower

Flower again focuses on the aesthetics more than anything else, but with a bit more direction. You start off as a single flower petal and control the wind, and the goal is to collect other petals to fly around and “activate” as many flowers as possible. When you’ve completed a section the area blooms, and as you progress through different stages of the game more infrastructure and technology appears in each environment.

Journey

Journey has the most narrative and goal-oriented qualities of the three games, you play as a wanderer in the desert going on some kind of quest. There are no instructions but different creatures help/harm you along the way and much of the game is spent trying to accurately navigate the environment and strategize how to move forward. You can also run into other plays in the game, there’s no communication besides sending a symbol to each other but you can help accomplish tasks together.

new build of august

changes:

• water clipping through boat fixed
• lowered mic responsiveness (a lot!); should work well even in reasonably loud rooms now
• sail responds to overall speed, as well as to blowing into the mic (billows more when you blow)

new link (windows): https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5LjA0KYyVXvelhUZTBxcFFiTEE

Cardboard Computer is a indie game studio consisting of about three people and currently responsible for the game Kentucky Route Zero,a narrative-driven point and click game about a bunch of strangers who end up traveling together on a magical (?) underground highway in rural Kentucky. The first of five acts was released in 2013 and the rest have been released intermittently; currently four acts are out (the amount of time between acts 3 and 4 was about two years).

Kentucky Route Zero has a relatively linear storyline in that the choices the player makes don’t have much effect on the overarching storyline (timeline wise it will occasionally jump into the distant past or future, often casually switching character POV in the process). Instead, the player’s choices end up defining or detailing the character’s personalities, which have no overall effect on the ‘plot’ but can certainly change the feel of the game for the player. The game itself is heavily influenced by Southern Gothic tropes, Americana folklore/ghost stories and is filled with literary references.

Santa Ragione is an Italian micro game design studio based in Milan. There are three main contributors: Pietro Righi Riva and Nicolò Tedeschi, who founded the studio together in 2010, and Paolo Taje who is the lead programmer. They are doing rather well and have won numerous awards. Their video game FOTONICA in particular did very well. They also created the international indie game event LUNARCADE.

According to their website, they like making games that focus on “achieving a visceral response from the player”, such as through the desolate landscapes of MirrorMoon EP, the extreme speeds in the game FOTONICA, or the controversial political narrative in Wheels of Aurelia

Wheels of Aurelia: A game about a road trip around Italy in the 1970s, where you talk to people you pick up along the way. Very narrative based, but allows for driving which is very distracting.

FOTONICA: somewhat typical arcade game style but with very trippy/unique visual elements that almost made me feel dizzy. It is very simple to learn, quite hard to play.

MirrorMoon EP: A space exploration game that is very puzzle-based. The graphics are very clean and aesthetically pleasing, and it has a unique game element of having a smaller planet be the mirror of the one you are standing on.

Mac: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx2WEOUaU_fGQzFzeDMxRU9BYTg/view?usp=sharing

PC: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx2WEOUaU_fGT01YRTlHVld3d3c/view?usp=sharing

Unity Project: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4UBeIWZoNX9blEydmVIa2RDLU0/view?usp=sharing

Cyborg Goddess

Techno Tarot

Cyber Sext Adventure

“Oh no, I like making small shitty games. I only feel embarrassed when I think they’re going to just be parsed as these incapable aspirants to some different ideal of what a game should look like, for instance as the withered embryos of 30+-minute IGF contestants rather than as things in their own right.”-Thecatamites

Murder Dog IV

From 12/10/2012 Doors Without Keys (post on his website):

“Every videogame, song, poem calls up a kind of phantom audience that it’s addressed to as well as a phantom tradition to belong to: previously disparite elements which get knitted together when seen retroactively through something new. The sense of mystery and depth in videogames is sometimes just the feeling of not being a part of the audience for a work, or not being able to imagine a context which would make it coherent.”What is the jagged blue thing meant to represent?” “Is this referencing a previous game?” “Am I supposed to be able to do this?” “Is this a secret?”. Or when you find someone’s private little webpage listing a mixture of tech demos and heartfelt projects, or the tiny community around some obscure development kit, or a list of strange titles for a system you didn’t know about. You might not ever play them just like you might not get all the way through a particular title or have the time to figure out everything that somebody’s trying to say, but that’s okay because this absence can have a quality of its own.”

Increpare is an indie game development “studio” run by Stephen Lavelle showcasing over 200 games for free on his website.

Here’s a link to a slideshow about a few of his works.

The bell of the monastery has been rung seven times,
signaling for the common folk to come to the Monastery for healing.
A strange affliction has enfeebled you, and you’re resigned to bed.
The other clergy members believe it’s nothing to worry about,
although you have noticed that they have started coughing too.
Now, the huddled masses are coming to you for help,
and you are too weak to close the Abbey gates.

Untested on Windows.

Cloister v0.1.0-macOS, 465.2MB

Cloister v0.1.0-win, 428.8MB

Gabbers.

You wake up in a room, dazed by loud noises and a bump on your head, strapped to an old wooden chair. You look around only to find one and a half adidas tracksuits and a large monuments to the athletic company. The music intensifies, and the room closes in around you. The only thing you can do to survive is accept it.

Controls : 

Use your head. Gabber Dance.

Platform and Build : 

Developed for Android using Google Cardboard.

Link to Project

by Charlie and Sydney

Lesson of this project: Git is evil.

We decided to create some floating islands in the sky with randomly generated cities atop them.  They have rope bridges to attach them.  The cities will destroy themselves slowly with spacebar.

Look around with mouse.

Push Space for city destruction

Mac Link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2RxPeR5ieIteEgxUTBybGx1Nk0

Windows Link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B2RxPeR5ieItZzhENlMyUm55d3c?usp=sharing

Created by: Emily Zhou & Andrew Edwards

A game in which the user can experience a coffee buzz by watching the cafe environment change with every sip.

Controls: look down at your coffee cup with your mouse to take a sip.

Mac: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx2WEOUaU_fGQlRkbnNtNnFPTGs/view?usp=sharing

Windows: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx2WEOUaU_fGVW5aSkxLeDUxdnc/view?usp=sharing

Whole project file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx2WEOUaU_fGUFh6YnZQT2E2ZTA/view?usp=sharing

Mac Build

Use the up/down arrows to control the brightness and weather to simulate the effects of seasonal affective disorder.

I’m really sorry, this is terribly incomplete.

Some brain cells start dying less than 5 minutes after their oxygen supply disappears. This was an attempt to make something organic and abstract that responds to a natural human reaction.

Press and hold Spacebar = Breathe in, hold your breath
Release = Exhale

Mac Download

Windows Download (I hope)

okay try this one for Windows instead

Authors: Sophia Zhu

Symphonic Lights maps audio input to a light show over your head in an attempt to simulate Aurora Borealis.

Controls: Mouse movement simulates head/camera turn. ESC to… escape.

Windows Build
Mac Build

Mac Download <– mac version appears to not be working

Windows Download  <– this works though

Press spacebar to increase the rate of the heartbeat. As heart rate goes up, the room changes accordingly.

(headphones required)

Happytown is a virtual city in which you can experience mass disaster with the touch of a button. Press <space> to watch the city around you crumble to pieces 🙂

(Headset required, there is sound)

Windows Version

Mac Version

By Jason Ma and Kristin Yin

We wanted to really push the limits of our Unity skills, so we made our own rube goldberg machine (with a twist!). All of the scripts and animations are homemade 🙂

Instructions:

The machine is only activated as far as your camera field of view. Going in clockwise, the phases are numerated as phases 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. The next phase can only be unlocked if the following criteria are met:

1. your camera is staring at a specific area in that phase
2. the previous phase is activated
3. the previous phase has gone through a certain amount of progress

Mac Download (updated with crits! )

PC Download

(note: google drive might try to scan for viruses, which would cause it to look like its loading for a while. just click the download icon and skip the loading animation)

Thanks and enjoy!

Instructions: Look around using your mouse. Power your sailboat by blowing into the microphone.

Statement: August is about a sailing experience I had as a kid, where a bad thunderstorm cropped up in the middle of a solo sail and capsized my boat. My primary goal with this piece was to replicate that experience in an immersive virtual setting, and by doing so, be able to share and relate that experience with others in the context of a game. The player’s ability to control the weather (a luxury I didn’t have that day) means that the player is the one who makes the decision to continue forward or to stop the boat. This mechanic is meant to establish the metaphorical context of my conflicted relationship with sailing, as the decision to continue out that day was entirely my own.

Builds:

Mac: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5LjA0KYyVXvVVhOcE1BT2Jqc1E

Windows: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5LjA0KYyVXvTjJsSUlyVjFDOEU