DIY Tinycade aims to bring Alt Ctrl (alternative controller) games to the masses

guest · Aug 3, 2022

The initial test games include CLAW, a spin on Space Invaders.
August 3, 2022

What's a frustrated game designer to do when stuck at home during a global pandemic? If that designer is Peter Gyory, a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, you figure out how to make a game out of the piles of discarded cardboard lying around the house.

The result is Tinycade, created by Gyory and several colleagues at UCB's ATLAS Institute. All you need to make your own Tinycade game is some cardboard, a smartphone, two small mirrors, rubber bands, and toothpicks.

"The restriction I gave myself was that if you couldn't go to the grocery store and buy it, I couldn't use it in Tinycade," said Gyory.
He and his collaborators presented their work in June at the Association for Computing Machinery on Creativity and Cognition in Venice, Italy, with a paper published in the conference proceedings.
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Gyory is part of a growing community of game developers interested in building Alt Ctrl (alternative controller) games, which employ novel physical interfaces for players.

"By using common materials and simple crafting approaches, we hope Tinycade games can bridge this gap," the authors wrote. "If a designer can build their game from spare cardboard, then all they need to do is share the crafting instructions with potential players. Furthermore ... we encourage the design of controllers that can be easily disassembled, repurposed, and replaced."
The only electronic component they used was a smartphone.
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There's still room for improvement with Tinycade, most notably the high CPU load of computer vision. Even with a cutting-edge smartphone, there's still an average latency of 0.2 seconds, per the authors, so the controllers aren't as responsive as one would prefer. And the limited camera view also limits the design space.

But Tinycade is sufficiently advanced that hobbyist makers in the Alt Ctrl community can begin crafting and sharing their own custom arcades. And one day, anyone with a smartphone might be able to participate in Game Controller Hackathons.

“Once this system is in place, we want players to be able to say, ‘Here’s Pac-Man. Let’s make a new controller to move Pac-Man around,’” Gyory said.
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DIY Tinycade aims to bring Alt Ctrl (alternative controller) games to the masses

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