RockageSJ was February 6 thru 8 and the Game Development Club at SJSU was WELL represented there. We presented four of our Arcade cabinets, added in the Winnitron SJ and Funk’d Up by Ricardo Cortez. All told it was six arcade cabinets of awesome!

We named the cabinets based on function or appearance, they are (left to right), “Coin-Op” “Emerging Games” “Single Player” and “Competitive”

“Coin-Op” is the newest cabinet, build at TechShop over the summer and finished by Andrew Puentes in January and February. The arcade team worked very hard, though we did have a bit of a lul in fall as our lead was distracted by full time employment. The team consisted of: Matt Hoffman, Andrew Puentes, Angelica Cabanlit, Antonio Jimenez, Erin Gunderud, Elmer Wang, JP Bruneau and James Morgan. The cabinet hosted the following games: Prismic Shift, Spellcraft, Floats Your Boat, Bako Ikimashou, Clashing Code, Furry Beatdown, Don’t Blow Up. The strategy here was to put classic games on this cabinet and mix them with some old favorites.

The “Emerging Games” cabinet was the first one build (also at techshop, but for the Cooperative Gaming Coop show at Works). I loaded this cabinet will all of the new games I could get my hands on, fresh from the devs at Global Game Jam 2015 as well as games developed by the Game Dev Club in Fall 2014 and even a few games out of my Art/CS 108 class. This also hosted the first dating sim in our cabinets. Included games: Floats Your Boat, Samurai 13, Puzzleblock, Splitbrain, Leapy Sheep, Spellcraft, 4sides, Recyclegame, Lasercat y Laserdog, Running with Weapons, Starcafe.

The “Single Player” cabinet didn’t start out that way, but due to a failure in the X-Arcade board we had to shut it down to one player. Thanks to Henry Tran’s amazing launcher no one would be the wiser. Games: I Love You But You Kiss Like A Girl, Taking Candy from a Baby, Don’t Blow Up X, Puzzle Block, Floats Your Boat, Recycle Game, Spellcraft, Day 10, Misfit Ninja, Nepenthes, Dadius, Swiftly Working Poland, Trapped in an Arcade, Candycorn Spider, Megarena, Don’t Blow Up, World of Dads, 4 Sides, Leapy Sheep, Running with Weapons. Before you yell at me and point out “Kiss Like a Girl” is a two player game, I left this on the list because it got a bunch of play on Friday before the hardware failure.

“Competitive Games” or the one tagged with Sports is an old soldier from the coop and has just been a super solid piece of hardware. I had hoped to turn it into a 4-player cabinet, but it just did not happen this time around, perhaps for Maker Fair in May (or Fanime if they invite us, shhh). Games included: Prismic Shift, Megarena, Fairy Invasion, I Love You But You Kiss Like A Girl, Mystik Cavalry, Bako Ikimashou, Candycorn Spider, Clashing Code, Splitbrain, Scavanger, Spellcraft, Recyclegame, Floats Your Boat, Fight Knight, Furry Beatdown, Don’t Blow Up X, Lasercat y Laserdog.



We rounded out our arcade presentation with the WinnitronSJ which made a good showing with Nidhogg yet again and last but not least Funk’d Up a funky beat-box simulator by Tijuana Rick. Having Funk’d up in the mix was so cool because it was like being back at the coop, I really do love having an art cabinet in the line up. I think it helps to point to my passion and break people out of the status quo.

Something that most of our players didn’t notice was the new launcher we had by Henry Tran. This thing is really amazing and a step forward with speed and versatility, not only did it serve up the games, but enabled the curation of the cabinets and was crucial to dealing with our hardware issue on the single player cabinet. Guess what, that is not all, we also have stats from each of the cabinets!

http://ruby-yacht.github.io/rockagesj2015/index.html if you prefer text links. I am still fishing through the data, and will continue to update, but this represents the first round of data. Notice that if you mouse over a piece of the pie it will tell you the game name and the numerical value. In addition the new launcher made it pretty easy to use a repository to store and deploy games, the most challenging part of this was getting the network to cooperate campus.

Last but certainly not least I want to point out that there were a lot of hands and minds in operation here. Most of our labor and wisdom came from the Game Development Club at SJSU under the leadership of Angelica Cabanlit. I also want to thank Eric Fanali for being a staunch supporter and friend of the club an gaming and music in San Jose.

Group Hug.