Video coming soon
Birds Don’t Cry At Sunrise
Nominated for the Impact Award
Description: Birds Don’t Cry at Sunrise is a short, narrative-driven psychological horror game about beliefs and family, where the players become ‘Lin,’ a girl who woke up to her house morphed into a nightmare.
Single Player
Platforms: PC, Mac
Status: Released
Video coming soon
Video coming soon
Atuel
Nominated for the Impact Award
Description: Atuel is a surrealist documentary game in which you traverse an oneiric landscape inspired by the topography and wildlife of the Atuel River, in Argentina. The game utilizes clips from interviews with locals, exploring our intimate and historic relationships with land and nature.
Single Player
Platforms: PC
Status: Released
Video coming soon
Babble Royale
Nominated for the Systemic Design Award
Description: Babble Royale is an intense multiplayer free-for-all that combines word-making skill with fast-paced tactical and strategic action. Outwit, outspell, and outlast your opponents to have the Last Word!
Multiplayer
Platforms: PC, Mac
Status: Released
The Shape of Time
Nominated for the Narrative Award
Description: The Shape of Time presents the philosophical reflection on modern time, the process that the contemporary sense of time derails into atomic time, and gives some methods that may save time.
Single Player
Platform: PC, itch.io in-browser build
Status: Released
Artholomew Video’s Stream Challenge
Nominated for the Performance Award
Description: A suite of creative performances played live on Twitch! Type into chat to direct paintings, dance, music and storytelling, or hop in front of the camera and become your audience’s very own art-puppet!
Online Multiplayer
Platforms: Twitch, itch.io
Status: Released
Radio Ghost
Nominated for the Live Action Award
Description: A 3-player audio driven, walking game. You are a ghost-hunter, broadcasting your journey through a haunted Mall. Tune into the sounds of DJ IVA, making you long for a time that never existed.
Single Player
Platform: Android
Status: Released
Long Story: a deep time LARP
Nominated for the Live Action Award
Description: Join a multi-species cast on a journey into the future. Travel hundreds and millions of years to explore a restless world: hot and swampy one era, cool and arid the next. How will you adapt?
Multiplayer
Platform: LARP, Downloadable
Status: Published
MAZES Fantasy Roleplaying
Nominated for the Tabletop Design Award
Description: MAZES Fantasy Roleplaying is a TTRPG inspired by classic sword & sorcery dungeon crawlers from the 70s but built for today with the elegant, easy to learn, fast to play polymorph rules system.
Multiplayer
Platforms: Tabletop
Status: Released
Remember August
Nominated for the Tabletop Design Award
Description: Remember August is an experimental live keepsake game by Shing Yin Khor, about forgotten friendships and lost memories, played to the ritual and cadence of sending and receiving postal mail.
Single Player
Platforms: Tabletop
Status: Released
Creative Dying Card Game
Nominated for the Tabletop Design Award
Description: Creative Dying is a conversation game that offers a low-stakes, accessible way to have meaningful discussions about life, death and dying, with ways to play in-person and remotely.
Multiplayer
Platform: Cards
Status: Released
TIKATMOS
Nominated for the Live Action Award
Description: In the future, humanity has wiped itself out, but every other entity on Earth has become sentient and escaped together in a ship to find a new home. You run the information kiosk at that ship’s mall.
Single Player
Platforms: Custom Voice-Controlled Installation
Gambling Paradise: The Escape Call
Nominated for the Live Action Award
Description: Gambling Paradise: The Escape Call is an immersive alternative controller escape game where you have to guide your AI partner through a casino while dodging the guards so you can escape with the loot!
Single Player
Platforms: Cathode Ray Television Installation
Status: In Development
Kitchen Kauldron
Nominated for the Live Action Award
Description: Join Wendy the Witch’s crew and help turn her struggling magical business venture around. Serve fantastical creatures and embark through magical lands in a real-life gamified food truck experience.
Multiplayer
Platforms: Live-Action Roleplay, Interactive Set
Status: Released
Video coming soon
Sean Bouchard
-GUEST STREAMER-
Sean is a game designer and researcher at the University of Southern California’s Interactive Media and Games Division. He regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on game design fundamentals, experimental game design, polishing and publishing games, and game production. You can find him on Twitter, on the Twitch show Mostly Walking with Day9 on Monday nights, and on his own Twitch channel playing and talking about indie games. You can even play his games! Check out From Ivan or The Klaxo Radio Hour, he thinks you’ll like them.
Jenny Windom
– GUEST STREAMER –
Jenny (Kimchica) is passionate about indie games, their communities, and advocating for representation across all levels of the industry. A middle school teacher turned streamer and game dev, her current work includes Lead Producer and Co-Owner of Soft Not Weak (Spirit Swap), Advisor for Kowloon Nights, and Organizer/Host of the Wholesome Games. Previously, she was Communications Manager for Rose City Games (The World Next Door, Floppy Knights, Garden Story).
When she’s not making games, she’s playing them on her Twitch stream, focusing on titles with intriguing worlds and mechanics, and facilitating a space where folks can watch exciting games, learn a bit about what it’s like to make them, and talk about what it’s like playing them.
Celia Pearce
– PLAYABLE THEATRE –
Celia Pearce is an award-winning game designer, artist, curator, author, teacher, and serial instigator. She is the co-founder IndieCade and the Playable Theatre Project, and currently holds a position as Associate Professor of Game Design at Northeastern University, where she has created games with student teams under the mantle of Paidia Studios and Pins&Needles. Her games have been featured at Come Out & Play, Different Games, Incubate, Smithsonian Indie Arcade, and BostonFIG Fest, where her game eBee (designed with Gillian Smith, Jeanie Choi and Isabella Carlsson) received the 2016 award for most Innovative Tabletop Game.
Her books include Communities of Play (The MIT Press 2009) and IndieCade: A History — The Interdependence of Independence (ETC/CMU Press 2020), and she has authored/co-authored/edited numerous papers and book chapters as well as two other books. Her current research and creative practice builds on her pre-academia career as an experience designer for theme parks and is focused on the intersection between game design, live action roleplaying and theatre. Her performative and live action works have appeared at Living Games A Week in Boston, and The Night Cafe, a collection of live pieces around the heme of insomnia co-created by Kellian Pletcher-Adams and Lizzie Stark. She is a Higher Education Video Game Association (HEVGA) Fellow and was included in Game Advocacy’s “50 Over 50 Most Influential people in the Game Industry” in 2018.
Peih-Gee Law
– ESCAPE ROOMS –
Peih-Gee is most well known for being a fan favorite contestant on the reality show Survivor, where she played first in Survivor China in 2007, and again in a returning All-Star season Survivor Second Chance. She calls Survivor “the greatest immersive game in the world.” She is the co-host of REPOD, a podcast exploring escape rooms and immersive gaming. She also hosts the live Q&A sessions at RECON. Loves: narrative-driven games with lots of player interactions & clever wordplay. Hates: Math puzzles and poor functionality that distracts from immersion.
David Spira
– ESCAPE ROOMS –
David is the co-founder of Room Escape Artist, a resource for escape room creators and enthusiasts alike. From the start, he applied his professional skills as a digital experience designer to the burgeoning industry of escape rooms. David is full of ideas: from in-depth research pieces to new content types… like cute animals solving puzzles. He is always pushing REA to try new things, take risks, and be something more. He is also the co-founder of RECON, a convention for the escape & immersive game industry, as well as the co-host of REPOD, a podcast exploring escape rooms and immersive gaming.
Tatiana Vilela dos Santos
– ALTERNATIVE CONTROLLERS –
Tatiana Vilela dos Santos is a multi-award winning independent game designer and artist based in Paris, France. She makes experimental games based on new technologies and hand-made interfaces through her multimedia project, MechBird. Her goal is to explore the uncharted territories of playfulness.
Alistair Aitcheson
– ALTERNATIVE CONTROLLERS –
Alistair Aitcheson is a British indie developer who specialises in playful installations, custom-made game hardware, and interactive performances. He sees his games as a springboard for real-world social interaction, and loves to encourage players to bend rules and make the technology their own.
Alistair is the creator and host of The Incredible Playable Show, an interactive stage show which has been performed across the UK, Europe and the USA. His work has been nominated for awards at A MAZE and Alt.Ctrl.GDC, and won awards at the IndieCade Festival in 2015 and 2017.
Evan Torner
– PLAYABLE THEATRE –
Evan Torner is a game designer, community organizer, and faculty member in games. He is Associate Professor of German and Film & Media Studies at the University of Cincinnati, where he directs the UC Game Lab. He co-founded the Golden Cobra Challenge and Analog Game Studies, and is a coordinating editor at the International Journal of Role-Playing. He has been an IndieCade judge since the mid-2010s. Much of his games work is in indie tabletop and live-action role-playing games, and is an award-winning designer at Fastaval in Denmark.
His current game-related projects include a short monograph on Apocalypse World for University of Michigan Press, Generation Analog print proceedings, and the forthcoming storytelling game Diamond 20.
Aaron Trammell
– TABLETOP –
Aaron Trammell is an Assistant Professor of Informatics and Core Faculty in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. He write about how Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, and board games inform the lived experiences of their players. Specifically, he is interested in how these games further values of white privilege and exclusion in geek culture. He has two books slated for release in 2022: Repairing Play (MIT Press) is a theory of play that centers BIPOC people and The Privilege of Play (NYU Press) is a history of games and race in the 20th Century.
