Platform: Card Game Spellbound is a challenging, multiplayer word game, where you and your friends are wizards. Wizards who partied a little too hard last night. Now you’re hungover and cursed. Really cursed. The curses can be broken by saying certain magic words, but your hungover and cursed brains have a very limited vocabulary. Work together to break as many curses as possible, and avoid the mockery of the wizarding world! FEATURES Grappling with vocabulary Humourous communication Drunk and cursed wizards Spellbound requires a timer, a sorted set of letter tiles, along with our deck of magic word cards. We’d be happy to set up a game for you, and can be reached at donlon@usc.edu and perlow@usc.edu. Spellbound’s origins lie in the affordance project for CTIN 488. We had such a blast making and playing Spellbound that we’ve been planning on revisiting the project. TEAM Brenden Donlon Rama Gosula Maura Perlow Gunnar Washington

Platform: Board Game A 3-5 player cooperative communication game where one player must tell other players to complete a certain task. That one player is not allowed to speak or gesture, and must utilize their creativity to manipulate the given word cards in order to communicate with others. FEATURES Use 20 words to try to get your friends to do silly things in over 40 challenges Laugh and cry at the same time at your friends’ inability to decipheryour mangled mess of messages. Feel smug and smart when you somehow manage to guess your friend’s tangled web of words Watch as your friend’s eyes pop wide open as they finally understand what you’re trying to say. Hi-Five your friends! Do a secret handshake! Pretend to be a dinosaur! It was made as a final project for CTIN 488 Spring 2016. TEAM Michel Wong – Lead Sam Shipp – Producer, Will Guthier – Designer Vincent Yang – Designer Timothi Lim – Box Art Artist

Platform: Card Game Cat-A-Pillar! is a 3-6 player card game about building long cats out of things like dragon wings, or shark fins, or…cherry blossoms? Use your special limbs to dismember your friends’ cats, then add their limbs to your own body to become the longest (and best) cat on the table! FEATURES Build a really long cat out of really weird things Be the best cat that you could ever hope to be Dismember your friends! (Or at least, their cats) (Or at least, cats made of cards)   Cat-A-Pillar! started as the final project for IMGD’s CTIN-488, also known as the board game class. The team loved it a lot, and was given the chance to bring it to the experimental Polishing Class in spring of 2016, where it was beaten down and forged into something that they could really be proud of. The game Kickstarted successfully in July of this year, and showed at Indiecade in the Board Game section as an Indiecade Select. The team is extremely proud of how far they’ve come, and are more than happy to show it off at Winteractive this year. TEAM Katie Yu – Art + Design Mia Sarrio – Game Director + Design Katie Moses – PR and Design Follow them on Twitter and Facebook!

Platform: Installation Game The Locker is a mixed-reality installation game in which you explore physical artifacts with your hands and reveal memories using a bewitched magnifying glass. When you receive a note from Jade, a mysterious student at your high school who has recently gone missing, you decide to do some snooping. Inside her locker, you’ll find diary entries to read, physical puzzles to solve, artifacts to investigate, and memories to reveal. FEATURES Snoop through the locker of a student who has recently gone missing Reveal her memories using a bewitched magnifying glass Solve physical puzzles and clues she left behind The act of exploration doesn’t just belong on a screen. When we’re immersed in story, we want to smell it, touch it, probe it, engage with it. The Locker empowers players to physically snoop through the personal belongings of the protagonist and solve the puzzles she left behind. With each clue they uncover, players reveal bits of her story through film. The Locker seeks to seamlessly blend these physical and digital elements, and find a way to do that with an augmented reality lens. To bring out the player’s inner detective, The Locker embedded that lens in a magnifying glass. Players grab the handle and examine objects just as they would have seen in an old Shelby Woo episode. As players peer through the magnifying glass at an artifact, they reveal the protagonist’s memories of that artifact in the form of a film vignette. The power to see the history of objects was inspired by Octavia Butler’s “Mind of My Mind,” an Afro-Futurist novel about a secret international community of telepaths. The Locker was envisioned by an unlikely pair—a maker of tactile experiences and an interactive film designer—who joined forces in a graduate production course taught by Richard Lemarchand at USC. We combined our strengths by weaving puzzle solving, physical exploration, and non-linear storytelling into a cohesive mystery-solving experience. The Locker began life as a shoebox filled with papers and, following Lemarchand’s iterative playtesting methodology, evolved into a metal school locker filled with personal artifacts. The film sequences began as hastily drawn storyboard cartoons and blossomed into film vignettes produced with a full cast and crew. Since its completion, The Locker has been featured at Indiecade 2016 and at showcases around campus. As a portable experience contained in a single locker, it just might pop up where you least expect it. TEAM Lishan AZ – Game Designer, Director, Writer Chao Chen: Game Designer, Editor Alex Heinrich: Composer Other Contributing Artists: Jinghui Dong, Patrick Quah WRDO Film Crew: Christopher Ortega, Jheanelle Brown, Olivia Taylor-Butler, Jazmine Hill, Kelley Kali Film Cast: Cherita Armstrong, Alexis Snell, Gregory Kennedy, Robert Streit Learn more at playthelocker.com

Platform: PC/Mobile Game A time travel stealth/action game. FEATURES Do a day’s worth of tasks in mere minutes! Avoid your past selves! Don’t die from a paradox! Complete your cheapskate boss’ requests! The team had worked together in the past with some success; once at the White House, another time at USC rival Chapman University; but never all of us together at the same time. It ends up – we make even cooler stuff when it is all together! And so Scope Creep was born, becoming Global Game Jam 2016’s only entry at USC to win multiple awards. TEAM Aaron Craft – Sound Elise Fachon – Art James Fiacco – Tech Brian Handy – Design Follow and learn more at scopecreepgame.com.

Platform: iOS Game Tiler Teller is an educational game that comes with an interactive toy (a sponge cube with 6 different tiles attached with an tablet app) for kids. The game integrates digital storytelling with physical puzzle solving and teaches kids about shape, color and number recognition. FEATURES Make an enjoyable family storytime for both kids and their parents. Combining digital fairytale book with tangible interface. Unlock story pieces on screen by solving physical puzzles. Use unique combination of sensors to recognize the puzzle pattern in play, connecting the device over Bluetooth to tablets running iOS or Android. We are making this project for CTIN-532 Interactive Design and Production I. In a team of 2, we were asked to make an interactive project throughout the whole semester. Being interested in alternative controls and educational games, both of us agreed on making an interactive experience for families so that parents and kids can spend time together playing games and creating stories. At the same time, we wanted to help kids practice their ability to recognize colors and shapes and improve creativity through solving puzzles. TEAM Xian Lu – Programmer, Assorted Xiaoliang Shen – Producer, Assorted

Platform: PC w/ iPad Game Co-Operatives is a cross-platform asymmetric cooperative game for 2 players. One player takes the role of a Secret agent-in-training, while the other takes the role of his Remote Handler as they attempt to overcome the International Espionage Academy’s most deadly simulation. FEATURES Solve puzzles collaboratively as you work with a friend to put your complementary skills, information and play-styles together to undertake your final exam at spy school. Created for Richard Lemarchand’s production class. TEAM Julian Ceipek – Design and Development Patrick Quah – Design and Writing Julie Buchanan – Audio Design

Platform: Twine Game A woman is married to a man who teases her about a locked Armoire that he keeps in her chambers. One night, while he sleeps, she decides to investigate the manor and open it. FEATURES Gothic Horror Mystery Adaptation Female Protagonist This game was made in Richard’s class and then made better in a polishing class taught by Sean and Jesse. TEAM Co-creators: Bethany Martin, Kyle Moses Play the game here!

Platform: Twine Game A found poetry/ruins exploration game in which you explore hypothetical versions of nuclear waste disposal sites created to keep people out for ten thousand years. FEATURES Type poignant words of found poetry and explore them. Watch villages grow and die. Pass like a shade through the world, changing nothing, hoping that the ancient danger underground goes undisturbed. Pet your cat. This game was inspired by an article a friend shared with me (http://bit.ly/1uPFFi7) about constructing a nuclear waste disposal site such that it will be left undisturbed for 10,000 years. The article’s powerful wording took my imagination by storm and I quickly realized I had to create my idea of these locations through the medium of games. TEAM Heather Robertson – Everything Click here to play!

Platform: PC Game The Curious Tale of an Unexpected Visit is a side scrolling adventure game about the balance between self-affirmation and social expectations. With its unique combination of Victorian steampunk collage art and a comedic absurdism inspired by theatrical farces, the game explores the dramatic potential and emotional resonance of a mundane situation. As clumsy robot Charlie, the player faces the chaotic task of cleaning up its owner’s living room minutes before an unexpected visit. FEATURES Players control clumsy robot Charlie, moving around a rich collage world. Players can grab and drop objects, and rearrange the environment. The world and NPCs procedurally respond to player’s choices. About 99% of the visuals of this game are public domain images from the Internet Archive Book Images, which has over 14 million images from 2 million public domain eBooks that span over 500 years of content. Every single prop and furniture has been carefully selected among thousands of images, and put together with Photoshop to create the game’s environment. Fun fact: Both Amelia and Ferdinand characters come from a 1911 Macy’s Spring/Summer Catalog. The artist is fascinated by the idea of remixing public domain art from old books and catalogs to create something entirely new, while playing with the meaning we ascribe to objects. For this game, the visuals have inspired much of the narrative and feel, aiming to produce a fresh perspective on the original material and the context in which it first existed. This game is being made for this semester’s CTIN-532 class with Richard Lemarchand. The Curious Tale of an Unexpected Visit evolved from the idea of rituals in our day-by-day lives, and finding interesting experiences and absurdity in the mundane. It came about after a series of individual prototypes from both team members magically came together in terms of thematic and player dynamics. TEAM Gabriela Gomes – Designer, Lead Artist, Narrative Designer, Sound Designer Dave Yan – Designer, Lead Programmer, Animator, Sound Designer