GAMESCAPE @ ARTSCAPE in Baltimore,MD  

“A showcase of video games and the creators who make them”

  Artscape is a weekend arts festival where part of the Baltimore City downtown area is filled to the brim with all sorts of sights and sounds of famous and local musical artists to world renowned talents in Rap and R&B.  While walking the streets, you will also bump into locals to share a beer with or find a new food dish to NOM NOM on.  What you normally wouldn’t find until this year is GAMESCAPE, where you can interact with international and local game developers.   You get the opportunity to play new games created by the very ones displaying them – think of a more intimate PAX convention.  There will also be classic arcade titles there for your enjoyment for the first time for you younger gamers, or for nostalgic purposes for us not so older gamers.  With roughly 20+ developers and games available you will find games geared towards all ages from basic color match games and mind puzzles, up to 2D platformers and beyond you will be entertained.  I would suggest if you have children and/or nieces and nephews this too might be a place to bring them to while you’re in town.                                         The fun doesn’t stop after ARTSCAPE ends at night, later you can ham it up with gamers and other lively folks featuring live performances of video game music.  The scheduling for this particular event is July 18th & 19th from 11am to 9pm and July 20th from 11am to 8pm.  Below is a list from the ARTSCAPE 2014    

Participants     University of Baltimore: Aaron Oldenberg Game: Student Work Current work from students and faculty in University of Baltimore’s Simulation and Digital Entertainment program, including senior capstone projects, Global Game Jam competition entries and faculty creative work.   CAVE Team: Jonathan Moriarty Game: CAVE CAVE is a 2D-platformer where the player has to manipulate their perspective on the environment in order to solve puzzles and progress through the cave.   BrinkBit: Bryan Bamford Game: Playing Favorites Playing Favorites was conceived around a campfire in September of 2013. The designers wanted to take the laughter and fun of a house party with best friends and capture that feeling in a mobile game.   Earthborn Interactive: Hadar Silverman Game: Flutter Bombs Flutter Bombs is part of a much larger project exploring physics based player control through the travels of a butterfly.   OriGamic: Shawn Pierre Game: Henka Twist Caper Henka Twist Caper: 1/2 twisting, 1/2 caper, 3/2 madness.  Twist your body.  Twist the controller.  Stay in the box.  Find the sweet spot.  Stop everyone else.   Critical Gameplay: Lindsay Grace Game: Black Like Me What are your color matching skills?  Black Like Me is a simple puzzle game. Match the color to win.  The longer you play, the more the colors look alike.  The game starts easy, but doesn’t stay that way.  This game is mesmerizing, simple and fun.  Can you really tell your colors apart, or in the end does everything just look black to you?   LelexSoft: Alejandro Rodriguez Game: Dungeon Dive Dungeon Dive is a dungeon-crawling game show in which players take on the role of contestants in pursuit of wealth, power and survival in a dungeon that is constantly changing, never providing the same experience twice.   Nice Nice Games: Alexander Grube Game: X-Zip-It This is a mobile game about unzipping zippers.  The game takes advantage of touch controls by having obstacles that require certain gestures to remove.  The goal of the game is to unzip the zippers as fast as possible on each stage and earn gold! Salokin Games:   Andrei Shulgach Game: Elite Force This is a survival game, but players can use a unique set of weapons to defeat the enemies that spawn each round.  Players can upgrade their abilities like in a standard survival shooter, but a few unique aspects like and make the experience more enjoyable and memorable.  The experiences in battle are carried over to the main menu where statistics are updated live on holograms.  All of this is to make the world and atmosphere feel authentic and exciting.   Seven Hills Games: Greg Aring Game: Battle Prism Designed around the theme “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are,” Battle Prism is a multiplayer battle and objective game where you can only interact with tiles and other players that are your color.  Players can switch between three colors (red, green, blue) strategically to navigate colorful, Tetris-like levels, escape and attack opponents, and score points in objective games (capture the flag, oddball, and more.).  Three dimensions of color make for interesting multiplayer interactions and adds a new element to the multiplayer arena battle genre.   Cameron Reigle: Game: Pizza Robot Rush “The genesis of Pizza Robot Rush was attempting to connect my studies of illustration with affection for the 16-bit games of the nineties.  I wanted to explore the unique visual elements that came to be out of crafting of games working under imposing technical restrictions, while also provide an interactive experience to the audience that would be allow them to be interested in what they were seeing, but could be played and quickly moved on from and talked about.  Hence, we have a brightly-colored game with a goofy narrative and sci-fi elements that involves a trio of misfit robots delivering Pizza as quickly as possible.”   UMBC Game Developers Club: Michael Lueng Game: Student Projects “Each year, our student run club produces 2-4 games after stages of pitching, prototyping, and voting.  We then form teams of artists and programmers from a variety of majors at UMBC, and build our games over the course of the year.  After the year ends, we look for opportunities to share our work with the community at events such as Gamescape, Magfest, and URCAD.”   Nice Nice Games: David Kim Game: Null X Void Null x Void is a 1D Fighter with the objective of trying to push your opponent off of the stage.  Contrary to other fighting games which involve two or even three dimensions of movement, Null x Void is restricted to only one dimension.  This forces players to either just push the opponent off the stage or to swap the opponent off the stage as they are getting pushed against.  Players will have the choice of choosing from multiple characters that each have their own unique ability, as well as multiple stages, each with their own twist, to spice things up in battle.   Jacob Fleisher: Game: The Adventures of Crocduck Crocduck is a 2D sidescroller in which you play as a half crocodile, half duck, who spits bees from his mouth, who fights hordes of ghosts, crabs, and clouds, controlled by an evil, sentient, space-faring fern. BatteryStaple GamesL Chris King Game: Echoes of Eridu Echoes is a love letter to Mega Man X, and remixes it with full multiplayer (local and online) and roguelike elements, including randomized level generation, powerups, enemies, and bosses.   Pie for Breakfast Studios: Chris Totten Game: Dead Man’s Trail “We created Dead Man’s Trail after a historical research survey of zombie media and literature.  We wanted to take elements of what makes zombies so terrifying and embody these elements in game mechanics in a survival game.  With DMT, players travel across the country while keeping their party of travelers happy and healthy.  These travelers each have a specialized job that aids the journey, so each is a valuable resource that must be preserved. Players may also loot towns in 3D dungeon crawling levels where they must get in and get out before a horde arrives.”   MABNanZ: Micah Betts Game: Combat Core Combat Core is a 3D arena fighting game that borrows elements from games like Power Stone, Custom Robo, and Super Smash Bros.  It focuses on multiplayer combat using customized fighters, weapon pickups, powerups, and environmental hazards.   Critical Gameplay: Lindsay Grace Game: You You is a game about play and the illusive pursuit of meaningful play.  Each level of the game is about problem solving a space for You to meet objectives while making sense of the in-game content.  Using the player character, You, the player is both making meaning out of nonsense and finding meaning where it is absent.  The game is designed as a light-hearted critical reflection on the intersection of narratology and ludology.   Mindtoggle: Lindsay Grace Games: Penguin Roll and My Child Knows Chinese Penguin Roll: A simple, kid friendly game where players must tilt their device to roll a penguin home. This game hit the top 100 ranking for Action and Arcade games in 3 countries on iOS.   My Child Knows Chinese: A collection of mini games and digital toys to teach toddlers (age 2-3) Mandarin Chinese.   11:11 Studio: Denver Coulson Games: SuperTrip and UDLR:Swipe SuperTrip: This game is not for the faint of heart.  This is for the adventurers, the go getters, and the true heroes of this world.  With SuperTrip, you and your friends will travel to locations you never thought were there.  You may even find hidden gems in your own hometown you’ve never noticed before!  The goal of the game is to reach all the destinations. You’ll choose how many waypoints you’d like to discover, how long of a game you’d like, and go!  You can race your friends or go as a group.  The mechanics of the game will push you a little out of your comfort zone as you travel through possibly the innards of a city or perhaps the backwoods of the country.  Even more, a sense of camaraderie will be built with your team as you share unique experiences that, before SuperTrip, never would have happened.   UDLR:Swipe is a a game focused on the satisfying feeling of swiping. Pixel Bomb Studios: Jonathan Pilley Games: Croq and Brain Blazer “Our approach to games relies heavily on making games that we enjoy developing and that we know gamers will enjoy playing.  We’re particularly focused on mobile at the moment, but expansion onto other platforms (such as Steam or consoles) certainly isn’t out of the question in the future.  Right now, we’re working as hard as we can to make the best games we can and would love to be part of an event such as Gamescape with like-minded and committed groups and individuals.   Starogre: Jon Schubbe Game: InterCubes Intercubes is an installation of suspended cubes and projected graphics, driven by live performance and audio-visuals.  The installation is interactive, and each player controls an arcade button that is connected to one of the three cubes, and plays a social, head-to-head version of Simon Says with a twist and more planned.   Curator  Ben Walsh Ben is the CEO and founder of Pure Bang Games.  Ben is also the founder of Gamescape, and co-founder of Innovate Baltimore, a community development organization aimed at connecting Creative Tech entrepreneurs with the people they need to build and grow their businesses.

Sound off if you will be going to Baltimore’s ARTSCAPE come July 18th-20th. If so, maybe you might bump into a couple of RealOtakuGamer.com staff while you are enjoying the city’s festivities!