A Dundee games designer is looking for funding after a short clip of a throwaway game idea went viral online.
Alastair Low, who works for Ninja Kiwi, shared a clip of Bib Goes Home, which melds a physical book with digital game play.
A playable character is projected on to the book design and the programming allows the character to appear to land on blocks in the book.
Bib Goes Home is the result of a 48-hour “game jam” event in the V&A to mark the end of the Design/Play/Disrupt exhibition.
Alastair leads three Abertay University students — Jake Bretherton, Zap Fernandez and Matt Stark — in the project.
The stage set for the play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, which uses a large popup book as part of its sets proved inspirational. The set is currently on display at the museum.
Alastair posted a video on social media, which initially went largely unnoticed.
However, a post a month later from a “play party” — in which members of the local gaming community show off what they’ve been working on — took Twitter by storm and has been shared more than 8,000 times with nearly 400,000 views. This spurred the team to look into taking the project further.
Showed of this game at a playparty that me and some students made. Popup book with projection mapping.#popupbooks #paper #prototype #gamejam #indiegamedev #projectionmapping pic.twitter.com/jNyOUn6Xl0
— Alastair Low (@Wallmasterr) October 10, 2019
Only a handful of game levels have been design so far but Alastair hopes with some financial backing they can expand it into a full game.
After the latest clip went viral, Alastair said it is “crazy how it just spread”.
“My phone would not shut up. We’ve had a meeting and are planning a Kickstarter to see if the demand is out there for something like this.
“You turn the pages and the character can jump around the pages with augmented effects such as bubbles in the underwater page and stars in the spaceship page.”
The “paper prototype” of the game was shown off again at the Family Design Day event at the V&A on Saturday.
Alastair recently released A Familiar Fairytale, in which the designer puts players in the shoes of dyslexic people.
The adventure jumbles up text to show how some people with the condition see written words.
The release, which came out last month, is an early version and Alastair is still ironing out some of the bugs. It is available on his Lowtek Games website.
