TOP For Exhibitor Sense of Wonder Night Award Winners Kyoto / Eddie Lee
Eddie Lee
|2013 Best Arts Award
I've worked before in a studio in Kyoto, Japan called Q-Games where I worked on a few titles including Pixeljunk 4am, NomNomGalaxy and Tomorrow's Children.. I've since left the studio and started my own studio based in Los Angeles called Funktronic Labs.
I've spent several months developing "Kyoto". During the duration of the development, the concept and mechanics have evolved drastically.
The game "Kyoto" was a homage to the beautiful city that I've lived in. When I first moved there, I was so in awe of the beauty and majesty of the city that I wanted to pay homage to it in the only way I knew how -- which was to make a interactive game experience out of it!
We used our own custom engine called "FunkEngine". It is a C++/OpenGL based engine that we've used to develop other titles like Collider and Nova-111.
Alot of usability testing to make the puzzle mechanics a bit more clear. Also alot of brushing up on the visuals.
The game is released publicly for free. Since then, it has been suprisingly well-received and been show in various museums/exhibitions around the world.
To create meaningful interactive experiences through the power of games and other interactive technologies.
Experiment and be free! There is still so much to explore. :)
I came up with the concept when I was trying to sleep. I was trying to come up with an idea that I could implement in 2 weeks and still be interesting. Since I couldn't do art, I knew the game would probably involve objects as simple as a white cube.
I had the idea for a hyper-dimensional game in college, maybe around 2005? When you program a 3D game, every object’s position is represented using three numbers (usually called x, y and z), but that concept easily generalizes.
Mirage was first of all an experiment with the goal to create an interesting character. From that starting point I started developing the world and the visual style around it.
Ultima Online was the first MMO I played when I grew up. It was very impressive to see so many players all across the world play the same game! I wanted to be able to build the world together with my friends. I began building early builds of a game that allowed multiple people to build in the world together. It was very basic, but even early on it was fun to build together.
I frequently played video games with my friends and family. In that setting, the question that was always in the back of my mind was whether there was a game that more people could enjoy playing together.