A.F.T.E.R.G.L.O.W. and Tank Top Post-mortems

Jerry Belich

Jerry Belich will walk through two of his recent game/art projects: A.F.T.E.R.G.L.O.W. and Tank Top. No detail will be spared: from interfacing rotary phone dials, to scavenging single serving wine bottles for controllers. Both games will be playable. Probably!

A war has been brewing. We have spent all of our resources to develop a machine capable of bringing down fleet after fleet of enemies, but it was too little too late. Use the device, A.F.T.E.R.G.L.O.W. to take as many enemies as you can with us as our country burns to cinder. Jerry Belich developed this hardware based game as an excuse to use a rotary dial from a Bell 500 telephone, using classic games such as Tempest and Missile Command as inspiration for the high score competitive play.

Tank Top is a simple, two-player tank game, inspired by on the Atari, which is played on a custom cylindrical LED display. Two players sit across from each other with the game in between, each with a custom joystick controller to move their tank, and fire. The cylindrical field contains walls that require navigation, which is only performed diagonally. As players move around the cylindar into the natural fog-of-war, it becomes harder to see their player, and more dangerous. Bullets fired bounce around, but can be used strategically to trap and kill the opposing tank.

This custom hardware game was made for Train Jam 2015, an amazing game jam organized by Adriel Wallick which takes place days prior to the Game Developers Conference. Tank Top was built using many items found on the train, such as an ice bucket, Lysol wipes container, dixie cups, and finally two white wine bottles as the player controllers. Creating the custom LED display is a single string of 240 RGB LEDs, wrapped in such a way to create a diagonal coordinate system on which the game plays out. More details about the Train Jam can be found here: http://trainjam.com/