Tinycade

ATLAS PhD student Peter Gyory's research aims to bridge the gap between game developers and Alt Controls through the use of everyday materials and crafting techniques.

Tinycade is a platform designed to help game designers build their own mini arcade games by hand. With this platform, one can craft functioning game controllers out of everyday materials such as cardboard and toothpicks. In this pictorial, the authors discuss the functionality of Tinycade and showcase three games that demonstrate the variety of controls possible with this platform.

Researchers from ATLAS Institute’s ACME Lab will present one pictorial and two Graduate Student Symposium papers at the 14th ACM Creativity & Cognition (C&C), which will take place June 20-23 in Venice, Italy. The theme of this year's conference is "Creativity, Craft and Design."

Limited by materials available at home during the pandemic, ATLAS PhD student Peter Gyory and a team of ACME Lab researchers developed Tinycade—a platform for DIY game controllers that anyone, including novices, can use to design and build arcade-like games using household materials such as cardboard, mirrors and hot glue.