Earlier this summer at Volvoxlab's latest edition of TouchIn NYC, I caught up with Noah Norman from Hard Work Party learning for the first time about Third Wave Arcade, the new gaming platform he's been developing, and the video that introduces it. "I started out trying to frame the video as a pretty neutral analysis of using TouchDesigner for making games, geared at intermediate TouchDesigner users or teams choosing a framework early in a project," Noah explained. "Without my noticing, it turned into a bit of a love letter to TouchDesigner, and became more of an effort to understand the circumstances in which it's the best tool for the job. As I say in the video, again and again, for certain types of games, TouchDesigner is a great choice - it's just a matter of understanding which projects are the right fit."
The video above shows exactly what he means. We did feel the love and it conveys Noah’s deep understanding of the software. Greg Hermanovic who knows a lot about TouchDesigner said "This is the most insightful view on TouchDesigner I've ever seen, ever."
The big news is the announcement of Third Wave Arcade, a room-scale immersive gaming platform featuring three walls and floor projection, powered by markerless motion capture. As Noah puts it, "Our goal is to make a standardized platform and simple developer tooling for mocap, display mapping, game lifecycle, and pre-visualization so the insanely creative TouchDesigner community can get reps in on this new medium and do so knowing they can invest in games that will run indefinitely in multiple locations for thousands of players."
Exciting times indeed, full details in the release below.
Third Wave Arcade is building a brand-new room-scale immersive arcade gaming platform. It'll be a freestanding system with three walls and floor projection, driven by markerless motion capture, enabling cinematic, intuitive, sticky, immersive gaming.
This project was instigated by having a million opportunities to build immersive experiences with only the shallowest interaction, but never having the time or leeway to explore those setups for real gaming. These setups are often 'gamified' with some simple objective in the interaction, but we want to make games with sticky mechanics; games that get harder until you lose and immediately want to play again and do better. Competitive and collaborative games with stakes that you get invested in.
The reason folks rarely make real games for immersive setups is a chicken or the egg thing: who would stand up an immersive volume for games that don’t exist? Who would make games for an immersive system that doesn’t exist?
With Third Wave Arcade we want to make a standardized platform and simple developer tooling for mocap, display mapping, game lifecycle, and pre-visualization so the insanely creative TouchDesigner community can get reps in on this new medium and do so knowing they can invest in games that will run indefinitely in multiple locations for thousands of players.
TouchDesigner is perhaps the ideal tool for making the kind of arcade-style games we have in mind — games where the most important thing isn't AAA graphics, deep story, or complex interactions — it's a sticky, addictive gameplay mechanic. TouchDesigner's rapid iteration cycles and flexible prototyping capabilities mean developers can quickly try out dozens of mechanics before committing to a play system, something I think is a critical advantage when trying to find that hook that distinguishes a great game from the rest.
The right mechanic pushes a button in people's heads - the one that makes you want to skill up, overcome challenges, beat your previous best, beat the next person, etc., and we think that with the combination of motion capture and surround screens, there's a huge world of new mechanics to discover.
I’m personally exploding with ideas and I can only imagine that after a couple years of friendly one-upsmanship we’ll have a wild new design language totally specific to the medium.
We’re fundraising now, but even before we build a physical prototype we’re telling our story so potential collaborators and players can follow along, tell us where we’re right and wrong, and use our learnings to make this dream real as a community.
Our first video is all about making games in TouchDesigner - pros, cons, gotchas, best practices etc. Also we talk to Simon Alexander-Adams aka Polyhop about his experience making games in TouchDesigner.
If you like the video, please like and subscribe and tell a TouchDesigner friend or a game dev friend! Our next video will be all about our research in realtime multiplayer multicamera markerless infrared motion capture, and the following video will be about previsualization.
Also if you or someone you know is interested in collaborating or investing, please drop us a line!
