uChoos Wins Twilio Prize at Game Hack Day
A couple weeks back I attended the NYC GameHackDay. The event is a 24-hour hackfest geared around creating games. Even though I was busy with other projects at the time, I love games and love meeting other game designers so I decided to go. The project I ended up building was an idea I had the day before. It was a simple concept: build a choose your own adventure engine for phones.
I felt it was the right amount of work to accomplish in the time given and I had promised myself that no matter whatever I ended up building, I would only work on it for that day (a promise I ended up breaking). As I put the project together, I had a prototype fairly quickly but I soon realized that if I was going to present it in front of an audience, I would need to create some content for it. So I took the subway home and wrote out a quick story, recorded the audio and rushed back to the hack day. The demo came together just in time and the project was selected by twilio as their favorite game demo, which included a $250 prize. So that was nice. I am a big fan of twilio, they make it really easy to build and launch applications that use Voice and SMS and they recently launched a slew of new features.
I called the project uchoos. You can visit the site here: http://uchoos.com.
The original demo story (Evil Mountain) is still live. Just call 917.338.3991 to hear the story.
As of now, I have no future plans for uChoos but I might work on it a little more once I take some other projects off my plate.
SHARE Conference Club Mobíle
Improv Everywhere - Disco Mobile - Share conference from SHARE Conference on Vimeo.
On April 7th, Robyn Sklaren and I spoke at the SHARE Conference on behalf of Improv Everywhere. It was a terrific experience and as part of the conference they asked that we also offer a 'workshop.' Typically this would be a freeze (a la Frozen Grand Central), but after a discussion with the festival organizers, we learned that there had recently been a similar event a week or two earlier.
After giving it some thought I remembered an idea I had while attending SXSW earlier in the year. SXSW is one giant party and it made me think about a roaming party that you could just jump into. But it needed to be 'cool and exclusive,' so it should have walls and bouncers. I pitched it to Robyn, she liked it and we decided to call it Club Mobíle, Belgrade's hottest moving dance club.
As you can see in the video above, it went really well and we had a terrific turnout. It was an adventure running around the city gathering the materials we needed to produce the piece. It was also surprisingly difficult to find a boom-box. Belgrade was a thrilling experience. It's evident that this generation of Serbians are shaping the world into something amazing and positive. I'm glad we got to be a small part of it.
