Tales from the NYU Workshop

The 8-bit design workshop, hosted at NYU last week, was awesome! After a brief explanation of the Playpower project by Derek, Don (8bitpeople’s No Carrier!) led a really badass lecture regarding the capabilities and limitations of the 8-bit 6502 processor, or in layman’s terms NES. By the time lunch was served everyone had already got their hands dirty hacking an old copy of the Bomberman ROM; we learned how to alter the sprites so that bomberman would appear headless, or with a skull for a head, or with legs for a head, or whatever…After a brief period of recharging, a seminar focused on brainstorming educational games began. The ideas flying around the room were exciting and numerous, after a vote things were winnowed down to a few frontrunners which then occupied our design teams on day two.

Upon regrouping the second day, I wound up in a group with Kyle, Daniel and Jessen that was working to develop a game called Math Shark. We had a productive huddle, where we discussed overall game design and assigned some basic group roles, I got assigned to do the score. Luckily, a talk by Jeremiah and Joey, (8bitpeople’s Nullsleep and Animal Style!) on how to compose music using the FamiTracker sequencer, followed. For me, this was geekbait; I had been listening to these guys for the past two years. While my team programmed, I worked on the score “Clever Fishies,” the final accoutrement of our 8bit game. All in all, it was a lot of fun, and at the end of the day we had a working graphic demo ready to present to the rest of the room. An animated shark bit at numeric
fish who swam across the screen – its goal was to solve the equations at the top of the screen by eating a set of numbers which would eventually total the solution.


A lot of other really awesome games got demoed as well: I’m sure that the new game on the top of everyone’s list was Rainbow Cats, a hip color matching game about colorful cats in the sky. Matching colors effectively and consistently, encourages the development of critical thinking skills. Also in development was a reboot, or rather preboot, of the PS1’s Carnage Hearts, a game where you program a robot with a flowchart, and race across a deadly maze with a second player. Another game, Soccer Shootout took me back to my childhood, playing sports games on the NES. It teaches physics by encouraging players to take into account factors like wind resistance and angle as they line up and compete for the perfect shot. Finally, it seemed like there had been a really productive brainstorm for the Sim Malaria game already in development. The brilliant mechanic of plate spinning (think Diner Dash) was to be implemented in the context of public health and sanitation. The workshop was an incredible experience, I’m psyched that there might be a sequel coming up!



Hey, if you've got any pics from the workshop that you want to share, post them to the comments below!