Sifteo and Finger Print Play-Caitlins Notes

Post date: Apr 03, 2013 12:32:23 AM

I wasn't able to go to any big talks, but I was able to take a tour at two small game companies. The first company was Sifteo, responsible for making the Sifteo game cubes.

The company actually allowed us to try out a few of their games. One was called Sandwich Kingdom, which (from what I could gather) was a pixelated adventure game, and used the cubes to find different paths in the game. They are also creating a game where you have to stack the cubes, then flick the main cube at the tower. You have to flick it hard enough that it hits the tower, but gentle enough that the tower doesn't tumble down. I really enjoyed how you get to actually physically play with the cubes as a part of the games. The cubes were pretty good at giving the player feedback (although there were some moments where the cubes seemed a bit glitchy... though that's understandable since they said that those particular cubes were a prototype.) Some of the problems they're facing is organizing the cubes (which main cube controls which cubes, or is the main cube affecting other cubes it isn't suppose to be.)

The second company was Finger Print Play. This company focuses on making childrens games for the ipad/iphone. This company actually asked us a lot of the questions, however, there were a few interesting things we learned while we were there. The big one was actually on making a game design document. The set up was like a web, and as the game was developed, the game designers replaced old parts of the documents with new, visual pieces from the game. They put the document in google documents so that it could be easily shared and edited between the different developers.