As another year has passed, we are already looking toward the future of Hand Eye’s to-do list, and phew, it’s a long one. But before we step into the New Year, we are going to have one last party and all of you are invited to join us!（ ^_^）o自自o（^_^ ）

Since we missed the HES Ball this year, we thought it would be fun to host a fundraising event on New Year’s Eve where all the money we raise will help fund futures HES programs.  The party is happening at Mây Cafe and will be set up with a plethora of co-op and competitive party games throughout the entire venue. Feel free to enjoy a variety of tapas and drinks which can be purchased at the bar. We will be sharing the space by a comedy group called Witty Women who will be putting on a  New Year’s Eve Comedy Show and will also be MCing the countdown for the venue ＼(◎o◎)／！

Entrance Fee will be $10 for the entire night, including the comedy show and the video game party. If you decide to go to the comedy show, you do not have to pay a second time to stay for the HES New Year’s Party ♪┏(・o･)┛♪┗ ( ･o･) ┓

Here are some of the games that are rumoured to appear at the party… (∩`-´)⊃━☆ﾟ.*･｡ﾟ

Work together with your fellow chefs in Overcooked to make a meal that you will never forget!

Battle your friends, take on a spooky dungeon, and terrorize the last-standing human/monster in Crawl…

Prove who can wield their sword the best in Nidhogg!

And more… keep an eye out on our Facebook Event page for more updates!

Do you have a game that you think would be awesome in a party setting? E-mail Ken Cho at ken@handeyesociety.com and show us what you’ve got! If we think that your game would work, then you will get a complimentary ticket for you and a plus one ヽ(´ー`)人(´∇｀)ノ

Wanna let us know that you plan on coming? Secure yourself a ticket on our Eventbrite page! As there is a maximum capacity of 150 people at Mây Cafe, we would like an estimate of the number of tickets we will sell so as not to go over capacity. Please note that although tickets are free on our Eventbrite page, we will be collecting the entrance fee at the door as well as checking your name on the list. You also do not have to sign up on Eventbrite to join us, we are using it as a tool to roughly track attendance. 

The Deets

Facebook Event page: An HES 2017 New Year’s Eve Party!

Eventbrite page: Hand Eye 2017 New Year’s Eve Party 

When?

Sunday, December 31st, starting at 8pm-till close.

From 8pm-10pm, Witty Women will take the stage with their comedy act.

From 10pm-till close, the Hand Eye Society TAKE OVER ft. Hand Eye’s very own Kadeem Dunn who will be DJing! ♪(┌・。・)┌

Where?

Mây Cafe (876 Dundas St W, Toronto, ON M6J 1W1)

Very special thanks to Ken Cho, Kadeem Dunn and Sagan Yee who are donating their time to put this party together!

If you have any questions, email us at info@handeyesociety.com. Hope to see you there!

Annual General Meeting 2017

Come on out to learn more about the organization and our plans for 2017, register or renew your membership, meet cool people in the gaming arts, and check out another game-friendly tech space in Toronto! Snacks and coffee will be provided.

*** RSVP FORM ***

Electric Perfume – 805 Danforth Ave (short walk from Pape Station)
Saturday March 11
1 – 2:30 PUBLIC / 2:30 – 4 MEMBERS ONLY

Remixed Gravity Skeleton Party: DOBOTONE at May Cafe

Come join the Hand Eye Society for a fun, informal evening social as we welcome international game developers Videogamo (Máximo Balestrini and Hernán Sáez) to Toronto! Videogamo’s DOBOTONE  (also on display at TIFF DigiPlayspace!) is an award-winning 5-player alternative controller arcade console specially designed for parties. Four players compete in a variety of built-in mini games using two-button controllers, while a fifth person takes on the role of a powerful Game Remixer who can change the variables of the game – including the camera zoom, speed, gravity, and even the amount of “glitch” – in real time through the console’s special knobs and buttons. The results are baffling, chaotic and hilarious, no matter your familiarity with video games.

May Cafe – 876 Dundas Street West
7 PM – FREE!

Intro to Unity Shaders Workshop

Tired of everything in your games looking kind of the same? Amp up your style with shaders! These GPU marvels are at the heart of nearly all game visuals – from realistic lighting and shadows to stylized toon shading, natural foliage, water reflections and sci-fi forcefields and sorcery. Using the Unity game engine, we’ll demystify how shaders work their magic, and try out recipes for common effects. Participants will leave with the building blocks to begin making and customizing their own shader creations.

*** Tickets on sale Saturday at 11 PM ***
 $45+HST for general, $30+HST for Hand Eye Society members. Not a member? Sign up here!

Electric Perfume, 805 Danforth Ave
Saturday Feb 25
1 – 4:30 PM

INSTRUCTOR: Douglas Gregory is a game designer at Ubisoft Toronto, teacher at Sheridan College, avid game jammer, and regular on GameDev.StackExchange. Ten years developing games for the Wii, PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and special exhibitions fostered his fascination with graphics technology and the weirdly wonderful ways shaders bring math to life. His latest game, Last One Standing, will be featured at this year’s TIFF DigiPlayspace.

Enter our Holiday Skills Swap: a casual mentorship opportunity and skill exchange. On the cusp of New Year’s, this will be an early start on tackling resolutions to learn something or get better at a game-making aspect.

TL;DR Deets

Hand Eye Holiday Skills Swap
Mây / 876 Dundas Street W.
Friday, December 30
6 p.m. – 9 p.m.
Free, Bring Your Own Laptop
Facebook event

HOW IT WORKS: Split into four 30 min sessions, mentors will be giving live demos or talks regarding their field of expertise to groups of participants. During this, participants are encouraged to engage with mentors, take notes, and follow along with demos. After the first hour, the event will open for individuals to crank open their own projects, get support or feedback on their work, or help others.

The Mentors

We will have mentors who will be demoing how they work, and will be on-hand to answer any questions. Mentors will be announced as they are added. If you would like to step up as one, let al@handeyesociety.com know.

Kadeem Dunn: RPG Maker, Unity, GameMaker
Kimberly Koronya: 3D Modelling, VR
Liam Gallagher: music and sound composition
Douglas Gregory: Unity

FAQ

I don’t have any skills to swap, can I still attend?

Yes! You may think you have nothing to offer, but having a warm body and asking questions can be more helpful than you think.

What do I need to bring?

Just your fine self, and any laptop/equipment you may need to take notes, show your work to others, or follow along with demos. We’ll have some snacks available, and May will also have food and drinks available for purchase.

What should I know before attending?

Our Safer Spaces policy! All of our events require attendees to adhere to it. No harassment will be tolerated at the Skills Swap.

We also hope that folks attend in keeping with the spirit of sharing. Shaming others for not knowing things or “speaking down” to people ain’t cool. Everybody’s a newbie at something!

**To join the skills swap, please fill in our participant application form.**

Game Curious is our game literacy program devoted to the exploration and discussion of video games as an artform, for people of all ages and backgrounds. Program coordinator Sagan Yee gives a summary of the program that ran from September 13 – Dec 6, for a total of 12 weeks, and at one point involved forcing Russians to be vegetarians. We are currently running the program at Glendower neighbourhood in Scarborough.

Last fall, the Hand Eye Society partnered with the Digital Innovation Hub at the Toronto Reference Library to bring the second run of Game Curious to the world! We were very excited to introduce a six week game-making workshop in addition to the original programming, for a grand total of twelve weeks of gaming and discussion. For a write-up of the MAKE session workshops, please refer to Ab Velasco’s post here.

The first six sessions, which we are now calling the PLAY sessions, consisted of 2-hour weekly gatherings in the Browsery area on the library’s first floor. We set up six computer stations (we really like the number 6, apparently) installed with a number of games based on a certain theme, and a large TV hooked up to whatever console suited our needs at the time. The first hour was “free play” time, where participants could walk around, try the games, and ask questions. The second hour was devoted to presentations and group discussion, where we would examine each game showcased on that day and talk about the observations and experiences people had while playing them.

During these sessions, anyone who wanted to present a game was welcome to do so, and we got a wide variety of volunteers bringing their favourite games to showcase for the other participants. As no registration was necessary and we were situated in a very public area of the library, there were many people who were simply browsing or wandering through who were eventually drawn in by the spirited gameplay and discussion. Everyone from parents and their children to couples to youth to curious folk of all backgrounds- anyone who happened to be in the library that day was welcome to join in, and quite frequently they did! (We also got a few noise complaints, but that’s inevitable when you introduce Nidhogg to a library…) There was a lot of opportunity to engage with people in discussion about their interest in games and field any questions they had about the medium.

Here’s a breakdown of each PLAY session with game titles and discussion highlights. NOTE: If you were a participant or volunteer at Game Curious and would like to contribute any impressions, corrections or additions, please contact me at <sagan@handeyesociety.com> and I will be happy to update the post!

1. PLAYED IN TORONTO

We looked at games set in Toronto or made by local developers! I decided to lead with this topic as it’s a good way to immediately draw people in with a familiar setting, while introducing the idea that game design and narrative can be inspired by personal experience and one’s own environment. Whether wandering a Queen Street West of the near-past in Benjamin Rivers’s Snow, dodging TTC logos in Alex Leitch’s Psychlepath, or noting the Brutalist aesthetic link between the Robarts Library and N+, playing these titles provided plenty of opportunities to look at games outside of the usual fantasy/sci-fi setting. It was also a good way to showcase the work of local studios such as Spooky Squid, Metanet, Capybara, Drinkbox and others.

As this was 2014, we also looked at a number of games inspired by a certain infamous mayor. These included City Council Chaos (Julia Alexander, Kimberly Koronya, Tanner Rogalsky), Stay Mayor (Extra! Extra! Games) and a Civilization V mod in which Rob Ford joins the ranks of Genghis Khan and George Washington as a playable world leader.

GAMES: Snow (Benjamin River), Scott Pilgrim VS the World, Psychlepath (Alex Leitch), Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure, City Council Chaos, Rob Ford Civ V mod, Stay Mayor, Guacamelee, N+, They Bleed Pixels, The Yawhg, Superbrothers Sword and Sworcery EP

2. LOVE, LIFE, AND RELATIONSHIPS

This was a very broad theme and does not include nearly as many titles as I could probably come up with, but I think it’s a pretty respectable selection. The goal of this session was to provide examples of the emotional and thematic range of games, and the ways in which the medium is able to tell stories that are distinct from film and novels. These games represent a variety of narratives drawn from their creators’ personal experiences or desire to explore the depth of their fictional creations. Many of the games dealt with topics like child abuse, dysfunctional families, mental health, social anxiety, aging, and other everyday struggles not often represented in more mainstream titles. Others were simply well-told stories with engaging characters. It’s pretty exciting that there were so many titles to choose from that I couldn’t fit them all in one session; however, suggestions are always welcome!

GAMES: Dys4ia, Papers Please, Home (Increpare), Lim, Depression Quest, Gamer Mom, Everybody Dies, Cart Life, Gone Home, Passage/Gravitation, To The Moon, Journey, Papa & Yo

PRESENTATION: Krystle Mackenzie,  a long-time volunteer since Game Curious’ first run at the Academy of the Impossible in 2013, presented Persona 4. The complex social system within the game made a good fit for the session theme.

3. INNER AND OUTER WORLDS

This was a really fun and diverse session as it was basically a catch-all for the many weird and experimental titles out there. Shadow of the Colossus, Fez, and Jazzpunk were very popular with the participants, and there was a lively response to a reading of a humorous review of David O’Reilly’s “anti-game” Mountain. This also turned out to be the ideal session to field questions about video game addiction, as many of these games are quite brief and provide a counterpoint to time-sucking ventures like Bejewelled and World of Warcraft.

GAMES: Shadow of the Colossus, Jazzpunk, Mountain (David O’Reilly), Paradis Perdus, Fez, Kentucky Route Zero, Katamari Forever, Dyad, Goblet Grotto, Aisle

PRESENTATION: Miguel Sternberg of Spooky Squid Games (They Bleed Pixels) did a great live demo of an obscure Playstation rhythm game called Vib Ribbon that was released only in Japan. Krystle Mackenzie presented Chrono Trigger as one of her favourite games and an exemplary example of pixel art. It was a good tie-in as Miguel also noted that Chrono Trigger was one of his inspirations as a pixel artist. Finally, Dave Murphy presented some video clips showing a variety of site-specific game installations, including projects by Babycastles, Toca Loca’s Halo Ballet, and Dancingularity.

4. MAKING GAMES

In this session we focused on free game-making programs such as Stencyl, GameMaker Studio, Twine and Unity, as well as stories about game development and the creative process. We looked at Portal’s origins in the oddly-named student project Narbacular Drop, as well as how thatgamecompany’s Flower has design echoes its early prototype Cloud. Games like Cave Story, I Wanna Be the Guy, and the results of game jams show what kind of projects can result from individual developers or small teams.

GAMES: Cave Story, Narbacular Drop, Portal 1+2, Cloud, Flower, I Wanna Be the Guy, games from the Artsy Games Incubator: Animation Edition

PROGRAMS: Construct 2, Stencyl, GameMaker Studio, Twine, RPG Maker, Unity

PRESENTATION: Yifat Shaik and Kim Koronya talked about their creative process and independent game projects they’ve worked on. Ken Cho helped demonstrate game-making software in action, and Joshua P’ng presented a video clip of Beyond Good and Evil, one of his favourite games.

5. PLAYING POLITICS, SCIENCE AND EDUCATION

This session was of particular interest to parents and educators, as many of them were naturally interested in what kind of games could be used to enrich and educate the lives of children and students. We started with Oregon Trail, one of the most well-known of the early “edutainment” computer games, and moved all the way to the complex interactive systems of Fort McMoney and Fate of the World. Other topics included Minecraft and Portal in the classroom, games as ironic commentary on historical and current events, the politics of Sim City, and the gamification of protein folding in Foldit.

GAMES: Cat and the Coup, Foldit, Unmanned, McDonald’s Game, Portal 2, Minecraft, Sim City, Fort McMoney, September 12, Oregon Trail

PRESENTATION: Adam Blake led the audience in a collective playthrough of Fate of the World, where we all tried to save the earth from global warming by manipulating various socio-economic forces. For example, we decided to turn all of Russia into vegetarians. This did not win us any popularity points with the Russians.

6. COMMUNITY (PARTY GAMES)

For the final session, we brought out a variety of multiplayer and co-op games for all to enjoy! Some of the games excited the participants so much that they were yelling at the screen. Although all of the games involved more than one player in some way, not all of them emphasized competition; for example, the ever-popular Lovers In A Dangerous Space Time requires players to work together to pilot a neon pink spaceship to rescue rabbit-like creatures from evil aliens. These games opened up the “community” theme to discussion, where I talked briefly about Hand Eye Society as well as other Toronto game organizations such as Dames Making Games and Vector Game Art Festival. I also spoke about the future of Game Curious, which is currently undergoing its third iteration at Glendower in collaboration with Art Starts.

GAMES: Space Race, Lovers In A Dangerous Space Time, Tether, Nidhogg, Retron 5 (Bubble Bobble), A Friendship In Four Colours, others

PROGRAM COORDINATOR: Sagan Yee

PROGRAM MANAGER: Jim Munroe

VIDEO AND PHOTOS: Brian Bernard

THANKS TO: Ab Velasco, Alex Dimitrov, Randall Ball, Baher Ramzy, Sukhdeep Brar, Krystle Mackenzie, Carrie, Daniel Case, Dave Murphy, Ken Cho, Adam Blake, Joshua P’ng, Art Starts, the Ontario Trillium Grant Foundation, all our guest presenters and developers, and many others without whom this would not have been possible! (If you volunteered at any point during Game Curious and were not mentioned here, please let me know and I will add your name to the list.)

2014 ADVISORY COUNCIL: John Porter, Jaime Woo, Emma Westecott, Sara Grimes

(Click the detail above for the desktop-background-sized pic by Tom Anderson.)

The next Hand Eye Social will feature a post-mortem of the Super Street Fire project by Project Lead Seth Hardy and Software Team Lead Callum Hay.

For those of you who have been wearing awesome-deflecting blinders for the last year, Super Street Fire is a fiery live-action adaptation of Street Fighter II by our Site 3 hardware hacker pals. Kotaku covered its 2012 Burning Man appearance complete with video over here.

This 30 minute presentation will get into the hardware hijinx and software shenanigans of SSF and give a peek of future firey game projects Riskee Ball and The Charcade. After which will be the usual drinking and Socializing. From the game-curious to the game-obsessed, all are welcome!

Thursday April 11th, 7pm
Monarch Tavern (12 Clinton St.)
FREE
RSVP on Facebook

A decade ago, a guy handed me a 3.5″ floppy with NETHACK scrawled on it, muttering something about rogues. I never put that disc anywhere near my computer, and to this day I don’t know if it would have sent me down an infinite rabbithole of frustration and despair or opened a portal of sublime wonder and adventure.

On Friday Dec. 7th at 7pm Raigan Burns from Metanet Software is going to solve this mystery for me (and YOU) at the next Hand Eye Social by answering the question: “What the Hell is a Roguelike?” Sure, you could just go and look it up, but would it be able to communicate what makes them so good with Raigan’s trademark intensi-passion? How its minimalist proceduralism inspired indie hits like Spelunky? That it introduced the notion of permadeath as an antidote to the poisonous excess of infinite lives? I’ll answer for you: No.

As if that wasn’t enough, Metanet has also flown in Kornel Kisielewicz from Poland to speak about his roguelike DoomRL.

As always, there will be lots of time to drink and Socialize after the short talks in our sweet new digs at the Monarch Tavern (12 Clinton St., close enough to Little Italy to be convenient, but far enough from Little Italy to be tolerable).  The Monarch currently hosts the fabled Torontron Twinstick — excellent for dispelling moments of awkward standing around. It’s free and open to the public.

UPDATE: We’ve put the first ten minutes of Raigan’s talk and some links to the games he talked about here.

Further reading/playing:

roguelikes
DoomRL: http://doom.chaosforge.org/
Brogue: https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/
ZapM: http://zapm.org/
POWDER: http://www.zincland.com/powder

roguelike-likes
Probability 0: http://www.droqen.com/probability0.html
Teleglitch: http://www.teleglitch.com
Red Rogue: http://www.redrogue.net/
Transcendence: http://neurohack.com/transcendence
Strange Adventures In Infinite Space: www.digital-eel.com/sais/
http://www.infinitespacegames.com/weirdworlds/

sites
Temple of the Roguelike (roguelike news and articles):
http://www.roguetemple.com/
Roguebasin (huge list of roguelikes, finished and in-dev):
http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org
7drl (annual game jam): http://7drl.org/
Roguelike Radio (podcast about roguelikes): http://www.roguelikeradio.com/
Unangband dev’s blog: http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.com
Let’s Play Nethack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6weTaUGATkg

other interesting roguelikes and roguelike-likes:
ThiefRL: https://sites.google.com/site/mcneja/thiefrl
Zomband: http://zooptek.net/games/zomband
DiabloRL: http://diablo.chaosforge.org/
Zaga-33: http://mightyvision.blogspot.ca/2012/04/zaga-33.html
slashie.net is sadly down..

traditional roguelikes:
DCSS: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/
Nethack: http://www.nethack.org/
Angband: http://rephial.org/
ADOM: http://www.adom.de/
ToME: http://te4.org/

Hand Eye followers will probably know Jonathan Guberman’s game physicalization projects — his Portal Turrets Plushies perhaps, or maybe his Pactuator — and now the mad inventor is releasing his first commercial product, the Pianocade.

A chiptunes synthesizer and midi controller, it’s feature packed and about as far from “one note” as you could imagine. You can see it in action at the preview party at Bento Miso this Wednesday at 7:30:

Join Jonathan for a chance to try the Pianocade, take in a performance by Electric Playground reporter and chiptune dance floor assassin Shaun Hatton, engage in technical discussion and be among the first to preorder one of these incredible machines.

Here’s hoping Shaun straps it on and demos its keytar feature! Tickets are free but you need to RSVP.

As previously posted, we’re having our first ever outdoor Hand Eye Social on Saturday afternoon — 1pm at Cloud Gardens, Facebook RSVP. Nice little write up in the Grid this week about an earlier staging of The Wire (The Game).

Later on Saturday the Jeuxly Showcase and Reception is happening — Jeuxly is the second incubator run by the Toronto women-in-games initiative Dames Making Games. Seven women are working together to make games for the first time, July 4-August 11, 2012. They’ve been doing an amazing job of documenting the sessions here, both informationally and photographically. More info and RSVP to this free event here.

It’s high time for another social, don’t you think? This time, we’ll be taking advantage of the excruciatingly great weather, and taking things outdoors. Don’t worry, there’s still a beer-related component.

Saturday August 18
1PM, Cloud Gardens (http://goo.gl/maps/rxXVF)
Meet up in an urban oasis for some original games that like to be played outside, from local & international designers. Games will include Gargoyles by Jaime Woo, a physical game that combines elements of beloved classics like Twister and Operation and examines the idea of comfortable spaces between strangers; and The Wire (The Game) by Fuzzy Dunlop, an intersection of multiple simultaneous street games that probably does not offer a nuanced commentary on the modern urban crime environment. Plus, David Fono will probably be bringing an international game or two fresh from the Playpublik Festival for Playful Public Spaces in Berlin.

2:30PM, Duke of Richmond (http://goo.gl/maps/itFmB)
After the strenuous hard work of playing games, chill out over lunch and such.

P.S. Super stellar people will RSVP on the Facebook event, so we can get an idea of numbers.

Comedy Bar – 945 Bloor Street W Toronto
Thursday July 19th at 6:30 PM
FREE! (A $5 donation for the performers in encouraged)
Social and Prize Giveaway to Follow

See who’s coming on Facebook!

We’re not doing a Hand Eye Social in February, so we’re co-presenting D-Pad instead. D-Pad is a new series at Interaccess, an art gallery that has hosted the Torontron, put on by Skot Deeming, the organizer of Winnipeg’s Data Dances and other videogame event goodness.

Friday Feb. 3rd, door at 8pm (performances at 9:30)
Interaccess Gallery (9 Ossington Ave. at Queen W.)
$5

Check out the Interaccess page and the Facebook page.