Indiecade is coming

Indiecade, that quintessential festival of independent games, is happening in just about a month. And it’s going to be a very busy few days for me.

Two of my games – Interference and Armada d6 – were selected as finalists and will be on exhibit there. Another project I helped design, Local No.12’s Metagame, is an Official Selection and will be available to play throughout the festival. I’m also giving a talk about the act of *being* a game designer and I’ll be interviewing the amazing Bernie DeKoven for one of the keynote sessions.

There are many incredible games being presented this year and it’s an honor being part of the festival. Plus it’s a great excuse to spend a few days in California wandering among the games and talks with other independent developers.

See you in Culver City.

Starry Heavens at Playpublik

Starry Heavens, the large-scale game installation I designed with Nathalie Pozzi in 2011, recently had a run in Berlin. You can see a video about the game produced by Asia Dèr here.

We were invited by Invisible Playground, the amazing Berlin-based game collective that organized the Playpublik game festival in Berlin, to mount the game. This was the second time that we were to install the game – the first was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, as part of the Kill Screen ARCADE event. You can find more information about the original Starry Heavens here on my website.

This time around, the game became a collaboration with the team at Invisible Playground and they helped us transform the game in several ways. To begin with, as part of the festival we held a 3-hour playtesting event where players helped us explore new rule variations, resulting in substantial changes to the gameplay.