Nuit Blanche Arcadian Renaissance
/We recently had Nuit Blanche 2010 in Toronto, an all night event where the city is filled with all sorts of art, from gallery shows to huge building sized interactive installations. This year it also had an arcade thanks to The Hand Eye Society. Our game Cephalopods: Co-op Cottage Defence was one of the indie games exhibited.
There were six cabinets in all, each running an indie game made in part or in whole by people in and around Toronto. Unfortunately the Osmos cabinet, a modified original Torontron, gave up the ghost and had to be reverted to it's standard set of games.
Cephalopods: Co-op Cottage Defence got a new arcade specific build, and (finally) a proper title screen. I'm still doing some tweaks before I put the home version up on the Spooky Squid website, but the old version is still available for play.
A full shot of the cabinet complete with back lit marquee.
The arcade took place in an amazing space at the brand new TIFF Bell Lightbox Building. The Lightbox was designed for film festivals which means we also had access to a huge projector...
...which was used for rounds of Everyday Shooter, Cephalopods: Co-op Cottage Defence, and a midnight Nidhogg tournament!
The award winning Nidhogg was our international guest game for the event. You can really see the size of the screen here.
Several of the cabinets will now be loaded up with multiple games and distributed around the city. Each cabinet is set up for different control schemes. Shown here the 'one button' cabinet playing Silent Skies!
Mark Rabo from Gamercamp put together a great video of the event:
And the TIFF folks produced this one with an awesome packman soundtrack:
This was put together thanks to a huge number of volunteers and several generous sponsors. Full list of games and everyone involved is posted on the Hand Eye Society Website.