The Arcade
Starting in 2017, Playcrafting has teamed up with some of the biggest brands in the world to facilitate the development of dozens of games and showcase them at events ranging from award shows and film festivals to game expos and even the Super Bowl.
Our Brand Partners
ASUS ROG was on a mission to discover the possibilities of game development on its new Zephyrus Duo 15 when they approached Playcrafting to unlock the gaming potential of the hardware. The partnership challenged game developers to design and build unique games that highlight the features of Zephyrus Duo 15. Through the ROG Game Jam, creators were tasked to create game prototypes in just one week. The final products were presented on ASUS ROG’s Twitch channel.
(Ape) Escape Velocity
(Ape) Escape Velocity
Play as an ape astronaut seeking bananas in a galaxy far, far away. In (Ape) Escape Velocity, the lower touch screen of the Zephyrus Duo serves as the central command of your ship as you control speed, pitch, and more to dodge asteroids and planets in your path. The main screen gives you a view of the ship hurtling through space and a peek inside the cockpit. Your journey comes to life through the beautifully-animated ape reacting to every shift of your ship. Are you destined to reach your fruity reward or will you crash along the way?
Ascension 67
Ascension 67
Climb the levels of a fully 3D factory on your way to freedom as a robot with a mission. Ascension 67 puts you in the mind of the robot itself with the lower touch screen serving as the sensors that will help you avert your captors. Sonar helps track nearby enemies. Your compass points your way to the nearest elevator to ascend to the next level. If one of your sensors is knocked out, use Contact to listen in on other robots so you can steal their parts to replace your own. The gritty dystopian reality of Ascension 67 represents a desperate struggle for survival in the harshest of settings, across 2 screens.
Triangle Square Circle
Triangle Square Circle
Like a piece of alien technology, Triangle Square Circle transforms the touch screen into a device, unlike anything you’ve seen before. Touch the shapes on the screen to impact the psychedelic beats and flourishes beaming from the main screen. This is as much a game as it is a toy, setting the stage for you to deliver an otherworldly performance. It’s both meditative and exhilarating in its simplicity. The perfect antidote to the chaotic world we live in.
Wigglefishing
Wigglefishing
You are Crouton, a mischievous house cat fascinated by the fish in your owner’s aquarium. Paw your way through a seemingly endless array of fish while your master is off in the distance grilling burgers in the backyard. Your finger becomes Crouton’s paw as you swipe and slide around the lower screen. Wigglefishing gives you two views of the action, both of which you need to pay attention to. Keep an eye on your master in the upper screen to make sure he’s looking away. The lower screen is from the perspective of Crouton himself, peering into the fish tank below where the game’s fish-swatting action takes place. The mixture of perspectives and multi-dimensional visual styles come together for a whimsical experience.
And Then We Will Know
And Then We Will Know
Uncover the secrets of a mysterious and lush planet as a team of field researchers. With beautifully-drawn vistas, the lower touch screen allows you to expand and interact with each of the 3 team members’ views simultaneously. The sensation of expanding and tapping 3 landscapes at once using the lower screen is exhilarating. Controlling 3 crew members could easily get overly complicated. But the game’s relaxing painterly aesthetic and simple UI encourages you to explore while making the experience adaptable for players of all experience levels.
Playcrafting united independent creators and studios across the country to participate in two Verizon 5G game jams. More than $100,000 was handed out to selected developers who helped to create games that underscored the importance of Verizon 5G on multiplayer, augmented reality, and console-quality gaming on mobile devices. Several of the top games were shown off at E3 2019 in Verizon’s booth.
Knights On A Rocket
Knights On A Rocket
Knights On A Rocket is a competitive multiplayer game, where two players joust while riding a single rocket. Each player may influence the direction of the rocket. Players can attack and parry. Successful attacks (or parries) will briefly stun the other player – granting one player temporary control of the rocket. Players must cooperate to avoid obstacles, lest they both perish in shame. Who will win..Red Knight? Blue Knight? Or…the Rocket?!
Island Hopper
Island Hopper
Island Hopper is a mobile AR game about saving stump people from a volcano eruption. Saving them involves searching around and under the island for resources to build a bridge for the islanders to cross to a new paradise.
Flock Up
Flock Up
Flock up is about a flock of mysterious entities rising up a cyberpunk tower. You must weave your techno-organic flock in and out of randomized neon signposts and overhanging rooms as you soar up the tower’s soot-covered walls. Every time you hit something, part of your flock will scatter, until none remain. The higher you go, the faster you’ll rise. How far can you get before your flock scatters to the winds?
Temple of Ooze
Temple of Ooze
Temple of Ooze is an exploration puzzle game made for Verizon Game Jam. To play, use WASD or arrow keys with the mouse or left and right joysticks buttons on the gaming controller. The goal of the game is to find the Crystal of Ooze and stay alive. The player has to avoid colliding with black ooze, the fifth ooze hit will end the game. To deactivate ooze sources, the player has to look for switches and solve simple spatial puzzles. The beautiful pieces of art are scattered across the temple for aesthetic enjoyment but eventually will become a part of the game mechanic. The player will collect them and unlock more new rooms and masterpieces. Dynamic fluids are notoriously hard to simulate on mobile devices. In addition, we are using NVIDIA flex frameworks to simulate ooze and this library is only supported by powerful NVIDIA GPU. 5G streaming technology unlocks such precise and beautiful fluid simulations for mobile devices and unleashes the creativity of the game developers. Temple of Ooze can become one of the first games that weren’t possible to run on mobile devices before 5G.
Hell Truck
Hell Truck
Hell Truck gives you the power of an invincible truck in an extremely fragile, fully destructible sandbox world. Drive through houses and drift through crowds of ghosts. Made for the Verizon 5G game jam in which developers were tasked with making compute/graphics-intensive games to be played on a mobile phone via 5G streaming.
TV Party
TV Party
Famed developer Rockstar Games sponsored the 2020 Play NYC Graffiti Games installation. Each year, a carefully selected group of game developers are commissioned to create and show a game that speaks to them and is representative of their own inspirations as well as the year’s theme. In 2020, the games, which were curated by Decoy Games, spotlighted the works of five talented Black developers.
Sheep Herder Nay
Sheep Herder Nay
Sheep Herder Nay is a cute and simple-yet-challenging puzzle game where you are trying to help Namora get all of her sheep across roads and lead them to paradise before the big bad wolf comes! Play through 10 fun levels and see if you have what it takes to herd these adorable sheep!
Hello Lantern
Hello Lantern
Hello Lantern is an interactive storybook that uniquely mixes gameplay and traditional storytelling. Follow a little girl named Fiy as she experiences her first sky lantern festival and the whimsical events that take place.
Oni Fighter Yasuke
Oni Fighter Yasuke
Oni Fighter Yasuke is a close-grips 2D action role-playing game styled as a black and white anime. Taken from a page in history, lead as the legendary African samurai and face against the oni warlord Shuten Dōji and their army of yokai.
To Be With You
To Be With You
Content Warnings: Mental illness, emotional abuse, gaslighting, divorce.
After finally moving in with her childhood friend and long-distance boyfriend James, Alsie finds herself struggling to keep their relationship together. Can you help her save this relationship from ruin? To Be With You is a semi-autobiographical interactive visual novel exploring one woman’s journey through a relationship that seems to be falling apart. Over the course of her time with James, Alsie must come to grips with her past and present if she wants to create a better future. The game has multiple endings and is roughly an hour-long (variable according to reading speed).
Love Self
Love Self
Love Self is FPS style vision, where your heart is the weapon you use to make some friends and spread love across the neighborhood.
In partnership with IBM, Playcrafting hosted an acceleration-themed game jam in 2018. Fifteen New York independent game developers were asked to create new games using IBM Watson technology in just 48 hours. The three games — Computer …!, Speeeeeed 2, and Tongue Twister Tom were all playable at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival.
The impact the technology may have on game development was also discussed in a Tribeca Talk that year.
Speeeeed 2!
Speeeeed 2!
You don’t need a MetroCard to get on this constantly accelerating bus! In this frantic 2 player co-op game, you must skillfully swerve to avoid obstacles on the road while your friend solves word puzzles to slow the bus down. Watch out! If you hit too many obstacles, the bus will explode! And you thought the MTA was bad.
Tongue Twister Tom
Tongue Twister Tom
Oh No! The aliens are taking away our animals!! Quick, call Tom the super cop to the rescue! Powered by IBM Watson Unity SDK’s speech to text feature, players will use tongue twisters to speed up the hero. The more accurate you can speak, the more powerful he will get. Can you master the tongue twisters and help save the town?
Computer…!
Computer...!
A voice-activated game about a space commander trying to go home after completing an important mission. Defend the spaceship by ordering the advanced AI assistant to fire lasers at asteroids and wipe space bugs from windshields, and more importantly, make toast. All it takes is saying, “Computer…!”
In the weeks leading up to the launch of its games platform in 2018, Facebook teamed up with Playcrafting to host The Instant Game Jam. During the jam, 20 developers created four games exclusively for Instant Games. The titles were all launched at Facebook’s GDC booth in San Francisco.
Potion Panic!
Potion Panics!
Collaborate with your friends via Instant Games to grow and tend to your plant! Help it reach new heights and save it from pests as you cooperate to nurture it across Facebook Messenger.
Uncle Walter’s All-American Stack-Em-Up
Uncle Walter's All-American Stack-Em-Up
Uncle Walter needs your help! Stack up all manner of food, utensils and more in an effort to reach the highest heights. Compete with your friends on Facebook Instant Games to see who can stack the highest. But watch out! These plates are miiiighty slippery.
Let’s Grow!
Let's Grow!
Collaborate with your friends via Instant Games to grow and tend to your plant! Help it reach new heights and save it from pests as you cooperate to nurture it across Facebook Messenger.
Verizon and the NFL teamed up with Playcrafting in 2019 to find talented developers from around the country to create the first-ever games that make use of the Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband. Five finalist teams of developers were selected to create their concepts during a weekend-long game jam at the Verizon 5G Labs, and two were selected to receive $400,000 each to fine-tune their titles in preparation for showing them off at Super Bowl LIV in Miami.
ENDZONE
ENDZONE
In End Zone, you become an NFL player navigating a series of mazes to reach the end zone and score a touchdown. The mazes are three-dimensional environments that create a unique mental challenge by easily changing shape depending on how you move. Like a real NFL game, End Zone is about overcoming obstacles and adapting to adversity.
NFL Ultra Toss
NFL Ultra Toss
In Ultra Toss, players become a Super QB and join 80,000 other players in simultaneously throwing a football towards a pick-up truck parked on the 50-yard line at a sold-out NFL stadium. Take aim, charge your throw and let it rip! Incredible console-like 3D graphics immerse players in this one-of-a-kind, “ultra massive multiplayer” experience only made possible by the power of Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband.
FumbleDash
FumbleDash
FumbleDash took the excitement of a fumble and added an insane twist. Play as the football itself, sprouting its own cartoonish arms and legs to run away from gargantuan NFL players!
Playcrafting hosted a 48-hour game jam at the Simple Machine studio in New York City in 2017 for Schick Hydro and The Game Awards. During the jam, ten gaming studios collaborated to make four games inspired by Schick Hydro’s “protect and defend” mission. The games were later showcased at the Indie Game Jam Arcade in Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles during The Game Awards 2017. Schick Hydro also sponsored that year’s Best Debut Indie Game award at the show.
ASAP (As Smooth As Possible)
ASAP (As Smooth As Possible)
There is a problem. You are not smooth. You are doomed to a rough and scraggly future. This is your fate, unless… your legs have anything to say about it. Play as your legs on a hover board taking on a quest to clear all the hair from over 5 unique skin zones. Find some prizes hidden in lumps! You can find a fidget spinner in there sometimes! I love fidget spinners.
Mono A Mono
Mono A Mono
MONO A MONO is the fast-paced arcade RTS where you lead a synchronized primate army. Use gorillas to capture monkey-generating shrines, or send your sword-wielding monkeys to thin the enemy horde. Protect and defend the central sanctuary from the enemy horde that threatens the jungle!
Clustersweep
Clustersweep
Humanity is gone. All life is virtually destroyed. A single defense robot is responsible for the last form of life – a growing amoeba under siege from an aggressive and unrelentless virus. It is 1990. Welcome to Clustersweep.
In May 2020, Schick launched Shave the Day, a head-shaving mobile game which has Schick Xtreme turning players’ in-game points into cash donations to help fund childhood cancer research. The company pledged to donate up to $250,00 to St Baldrick’s Foundation on behalf of the game. The game was designed by Playcrafting, which worked to ensure the game was fun while showcasing the Schick brand and raising money for a charity. With the rise of COVID-19, the game has become a major element of Schick’s fundraising approach in 2020.
Playcrafting’s 2019 Global Game Jam was host to workshops by Epic Games, kicking off a partnership between the two companies. The Game Jam also included a Best Unreal Engine Game category. Unreal Engine returned later that year to feature an indie-designed game at its booth during Play NYC as well as the ability for attendees to create art for new levels in the game and an on-stage competition.
Shave The Day
Shave The Day
In Shave The Day, you play as XtremeMan, a fearless bald superhero. Your mission – shave as many heads as possible to raise money for childhood cancer research. Using your Schick Xtreme® razor as a hover board, dodge oncoming obstacles to shave heads and rack up Bald Bucks. But beware, the longer you play, the harder the shaving gets. Do you have what it takes to Shave The Day?
Rats, Roaches, & Roombas
Rats, Roaches, & Roombas
Rats, Roaches, & Roombas is an ode to New York City living. With the latest hi-tech vacuuming technology, you must race to clean as much of your living space as possible. But beware! It’s not just trash that you need to collect…. New York City locals are lurking.
A year-long alliance between Playcrafting and Bose led to the creation of 32 unique audio augmented reality games designed specifically for Bose AR-enabled sunglasses and headphones. The creations were the result of paid, 48-hour game jams in Boston, New York City, San Francisco, and San Diego in July 2019, hosted by both companies.
The results include a mix of titles that enable players to do everything from duel and dodge in an audio-only wild west shootout, to participating in a seance, to launching livestock with a catapult at an enemy castle. The games were all playable at PAX East & PAX West in 2019.
Bumblebee Jam
Bumblebee Jam
A musical choose-your-own-adventure of layered songs, set in a world where flowers produce music.
Headbop Hero
Sonic Samurai
Sonic Samurai
A timed audio attack game for the Bose AR Frames in which the player must slay as many adversaries as possible before time runs out.
Death Within Earshot
Death Within Earshot
A mystery AR game where you play as a detective investigating the murder of Lord Reginald Skipwith with the assistance of butler Bosely.
War of the Worlds
War of the Worlds
An action-adventure game featuring a hip podcast, ASMR, a snooty digital assistant, classic memes and Shia LaBeouf. Your mission is to free the human prisoners held captive by the Martian Tripod Forces.
Whispers of the Wind
Whispers of the Wind
A relaxing experience where the player guides a freshly fallen seed astride the wind to its new home on a distant island.
Dead Drop Desperado
Dead Drop Desperado
Set in the Wild Wild West, the game pits two players in a “Matrix”-style bullet dodging duel where they take turns shooting and dodging in slow-motion.
Hide N’ Sound Seek
Hide N' Sound Seek
A multiplayer geospatial game of hide and go seek using Bose AR hardware.
The Other
The Other
You’re being hunted in a city where mobs work together to round you up. Your only hope for escape is a stranger who claims they can give you a safe passage.
Haunt AR
Haunt AR
A classic escape-the-room style game with an auditory twist. Your goal is to search for various objects in the room to find the exit keys without attracting a lurking monster.
Overherd
Overherd
You play as an English nobleman in charge of a bovine catapult unit. Your assignment? Demolish your opponent’s castle by launching livestock at it.
The Worst Grim Reaper
The Worst Grim Reaper
A music game where you help Sebastian, a Grim Reaper and aspiring songwriter, write the lyrics and musical accompaniment that responds to your actions.
The foundation sponsored the 2018 and 2019 Graffiti Games installations, which focused on the talent and stories of first-generation immigrant developers and then celebrated the voices, talent, and impact of the LGBTQ+ community, respectively.
Bizarre Barber
Bizarre Barber
“Bizarre Barber” is a fast-paced, VR action game that lets players become an underground barber, providing stylish haircuts for an eccentric, out-of-this-world clientele. The only catch is…instead of a traditional barber shop, you offer your services in a busy subway station. And further, instead of the comfy rolling chair you’d see in most barber shops, all of your clients sit on the passing trains! See how many perfect cuts can you do before you make a mistake and lose your earnings. Can you keep up with the ever-increasing pace of the bustling alien metropolis?
Staring Can Be A Form of Harassment
Staring Can Be A Form of Harassment
Players dodge hateful laser-like stares from disembodied eyeballs and cast cold glances back at their aggressors. “Staring” doesn’t try to sugarcoat the experience of being queer in the city, but it is ultimately about celebrating the power and importance of supporting and loving one another. If players are running low on health they can look into each others’ eyes for reaffirming, loving (and healing) support.
Rebel Runner
Rebel Runner
Rebel Runner is multiplayer infinite runner where you’re doing rebellious things with rebellious pals! Choose one of four unique characters to destroy stuff, redistribute the wealth or run from the cops in the location of your choosing
