MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
What’s your game?
Our game is Chambara, a split-screen first-person stealth game with only two colours. The dichromatic aesthetic allows players to hide against like-coloured backgrounds, allowing for all sorts of interesting, emergent play to occur.
What has the Dare experience been like?
Dare to be Digital has been absolutely fantastic. We’ve done a lot of game jams before, but nothing quite on the scale of this. Our dichromatic aesthetic nullifies the usefulness of a lot of existing design knowledge, which leaves us to create our own through bold experimentation and frequent testing.
Standards like metrics-driven balancing, lighting-based signposting, and the standard Counter-Strike figure-8 pattern don’t apply to a game like this, forcing us to make our own design discoveries.
What have you learned from Dare?
We come into Dare with an interest in socially conscious play and how art influences, and is influenced by, the social context that it exists in. As a competitive action game, conflict is inherently violent, oppositional, and resolved with the eradication of ‘the other’.
Many of our discoveries on Chambara have revolved around countering these unethical memes in a formal structure that privileges them, and we hope the result of our efforts promotes positive play and is welcoming to folks not often served by the mainstream.
Are you looking forward to ProtoPlay?
Absolutely. Our game is made for spectatorship and community-based play, which means we believe it will thrive in a festival setting. We’ve been involved with indie game festivals like IndieCade and the IGF before, and we expect that ProtoPlay will be a great time for the community in August.
What are your ambitions after Dare?
If there’s interest in the game post-Dare, we might look into releasing Chambara to the public. We’ve already submitted the game to the Fantastic Arcade festival in Austin, and might end up doing a post-mortem or talk about our experience working on the game when we return to the US.
Follow Overly Kinetic on Twitter and Facebook to learn more about their game.
Dare ProtoPlay and Indie Fest is on 7th-10th August in Dundee’s Caird Hall and City Square, with all 15 Dare student games on show, as well as over 30 indie games.
