Discover. Play. Get inspired.
Welcome to the Innovation Showcase, an “art-gallery” style exhibition in which we display twelve games that we consider innovative. In hope to inspire you to come up with great games ideas, we invite you to come and play these select games for Web and iOS platform at the Innovation Showcase.
Location and hours
Innovation Showcase will take place in Hall 1 Foyer, accessible on February 7-9 from 9am until 6pm.
Supported by Kongregate
Real gamers, real money. With more than 15 million monthly core gamers, Kongregate.com is the best place to distribute and monetize your browser-based games. Selling virtual goods? Games report 50 to 100% higher monetization per user than Facebook or other portals, with no marketing spend required. Add industry-leading ad revenue share, easy technical integration and backing by GameStop, and you simply can't afford not to have your game on Kongregate. Learn more here. email Kongregate to set up a meeting
Supported by mopay
mopay is a global leader in innovative payment solutions for online merchants. mopay’s core platform enables merchants of virtual, digital and physical goods to bill charges directly to consumers’ cell phone and land line accounts. mopay operates in more than 80 countries across the globe, reaching more than 3.3 billion consumers. The company has a blue-chip customer base including major brands such as Bigpoint, Gameforge, Innogames, Sulake and Travian. mopay, part of the MindMatics group, has more than 100 employees at locations in Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom and the United States. email mopay to set up a meeting
INNOVATION SHOWCASE - EUROPE 2012
Simply, Anomaly Warzone Earth is a reversed Tower Defense game where player is tasked with fighting alien invasion. Extraterrestial turrets taken over world’s major cities like Baghdad and Tokyo and you are sent on a mission to investigate what happened and eventually get rid of alien towers. The biggest innovation is that Anomaly is truly a Tower Offense game, where you have the Commander (in PC and Mac versions) to support armor squad with so-called special abilities like Decoy, Smoke Screen, Airstrike and Repair and Tactical View to plan the route for the squad for upcoming battle and where you fight turrets on many tactical levels instead of defending them. To fully utilize iPad and iPhone controls system, we removed the Commander and gave all his actions straight to the player.
The biggest inspirations were indie games experimenting with TD formula: Defense Grid, Plants vs Zombies. Visual inspirations were – among others – C&C series, Ghost In The Shell film or District 9.
- 11bit studios
We thought about how the robots would be built and, more importantly, how they could be destroyed. We decided that these metal monsters had to be so high-tech that the only way to disarm them would be by using brains instead of brawn. We talked about vaults and other puzzle-like systems that we could use. We were also inspired by a popular Dutch board game called Onderuit, in which you have to find the perfect combination of moves to beat your opponent.
- Spil Games
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The game started as a simple prototype with boxes moving around a cube. After seeing the interesting puzzles that could come out of travelling around the sides of a cube going back where you started in a different direction, we decided to turn it into a fully flegded game. The game was made by Fernando Ramallo and Miguel Ángel Pérez Martinez with music by Mattias Häggström Gerdt.
- Fernando Ramallo & Miguel Pérez
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The Wellcome Collection features exhibitions and events exploring the connections between medicine, life and art. A key exhibition in their 2011 calendar was High Society, exploring the history of recreational drugs in our society and culture.
Collaborating with Wellcome, Preloaded created High Tea, as an online game developed to focus on the Opium and Tea trade between Britain and China and the events directly preceding the historic ‘Opium Wars’.
In the game you are invited to take control of your own Independent Trading company off the shores of the Pearl River Delta. Broker the best opium deals possible for sale in China, then buy as much tea as possible to send home and keep Britain happy!
The project set out to demonstrate the power of games to engage a broad audience on a difficult historical subject.
Results have been very encouraging, with gameplays reaching over a million in the first week of release and topical debate springing up as the game begins to proliferate.
Wellcome have published an evaluation report for this project which is freely available here.
- Preloaded.com/Wellcome Collection
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As a concept, Hungry Sumo is the corpulent love child of a number of classic grow and win games: Filler, Hundreds, and Katamari in particular. As often happens, when we hit on a sumo theme, all sorts of things clicked into place, and from there we went on to create a bunch of new enemy types, game mechanics, and powerups. After all, you know you have a fun concept when eating a bit of sushi gives you double damage, slows down time, or gives you super-powered enemy-damaging gas.
- Ninja Kiwi
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Monsters Ate My Condo is a frantic Jenga-like color matching game, with giant monsters, insane power-up and OTT presentation.
The original concept came to me almost as soon as I got an iPhone.
At the time I was playing a lot of Jenga with my son, and the swipe interface on the iPhone seemed like a great way of digitizing that experience.
However, I wanted the game to be more frantic, more casual and have more strategy than just a plain tower of blocks, so I introduced a color-matching and upgrading mechanic that I’d seen used in other puzzle games.
When I handed the idea to our concept art team to visualize, they took it to the next level – turning the “blocks” in to buildings and adding a city and two giant monsters in the background …
As soon as I saw this I was immediately inspired to radically change the design. The monsters clearly had to be eating the buildings, and the whole thing needed to feel like some ludicrous Japanese game show.
The core game became to keep the monsters pacified by continuously feeding them the correct colored buildings – if you didn’t they’d get angry and smash the ground causing the Jenga-tower to fall down.
After that the game design was driven by iteration with the team. Our publisher [Adult Swim] were really understanding: letting us try stuff, willing to let us go to crazy places and generally allowing us to finesse during development.
- Andy Satterthwaite, Executive Producer and Designer, PikPok
GROOVE COASTER combines music and roller coasters. With simple one-finger controls and a backing soundtrack featuring music from a wide selection of genres, it presents a fast and exhilarating thrill ride experience. Additional depth is provided in the form of a leveling mechanic, whereby additional characters can be accessed through play, and an original stage that changes and grows as the player progresses.
A fusion of gaming, music, and graphic art, the game’s stages have been carefully tailored to express the atmosphere of each individual song. GROOVE COASTER was conceived as an effort to explore the appeal and possibilities inherent in music as a medium. The game’s presentation was influenced by music videos, particularly the visual tricks and fast pace seen in Michel Gondry’s club music output (Bjork, Chemical Brothers, etc.), and attempts to offer players a similar music video style audiovisual experience.
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Mos Speedrun - it's an 8-bit retro-style platformer, which gameplay revolves around clearing levels and collecting coins as quickly as possible. What makes it innovative, is a two-button control system, designed specifically for iOS.
We chose this kind of game because we enjoy platformers and we felt that there were not enough good arcade platformers on the iPhone. The character was based on some old drawings that Physmo's CEO Nick Donnelly had done a long time ago. We were inspired by the great platformers from the past like Mario of course and other less well known ones like the NewZealand Story.
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Pixel Ranger is a modern game with an 8-bit feel, which offers the best of both worlds for any shooter fan: Over 50 levels populated by over 70 enemies, each with different attack patterns to overcome. Every enemy you blow into colorful bits drops valuable pixels, which need to be collected to replenish the ammo.
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Soul Brother - is a browser retro-style platformer, in which you control Mr.Soul, which is body-hopping from creature to creature on a quest for wisdom.
This game is unusual, because in order to progress, your character needs to die. Hop from body to body and possess five different characters on your quest to find the 33 Gems of Golden Wisdom.
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A minimal puzzle game centered around a somewhat zany (but ultimately coherent) conspiracy theory. Features five puzzles with four levels each, and twenty unlockable documents for perusal and examination.
The game's biggest inspiration comes from websites like TimeCube.com.
I love these crackpot theory websites–they're crafted with so much love…but they're so misguided. There's definitely something cryptically alluring about them, though. After all, what would it take for a person to come up with something like that? You start thinking about it, and suddenly you're thinking about people and you're thinking about yourself and you're thinking about how you turned out to be you, and it's all because some dude was rambling on his personal website. They might be a little wacky, but if they get people thinking, then they're pretty awesome by my standards.
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Stretch, ping, stick and rebound our little hero through 120 levels of treacherous booby-traps and mystical mechanisms.
To-Fu was formed around the idea of using the touch-screen to manipulate and interact with a character. Touching and dragging seemed like the most obvious place to start which is where the main ping mechanic was born. From there, the game and character naturally evolved.
We were always drawn to the idea of creating a core mechanic that didn't require any additional buttons, prompts or overlays. We love the fact that the player stretches To-Fu and then uses their finger as a guide-marker rather than showing a trajectory line or any other form of feedback. We avoided the need for any on-screen prompts or buttons and we think the game is better for that.
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