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Alt.Ctrl.GDC Inspirations: SpaceBeagles' Butt Sniffin Pugs

isten up, game makers: Organizers of the 2019 Game Developers Conference have once again issued a call for submissions to Alt.Ctrl.GDC, the perennially popular on-site showcase that highlights unique control methods for playing games.

 

The deadline for submissions to the showcase is Friday, November 30th, and organizers welcome any and all one-of-a-kind game peripherals, contraptions, and novelties which enhance game experiences and challenge our expectations.

 

The showcase itself will take place March 20-22 of next year, during the final three days of GDC 2019. Teams for each submission chosen will be asked to showcase their game to GDC attendees at the Alt.Ctrl.GDC exhibit area; they’ll also receive a pair of All-Access Passes and a pair of Expo Passes, for a total of four free passes to GDC 2019!

 

To help inspire you, we thought it might be nice to highlight some standout submissions from Alt.Ctrl.GDCs past, starting with Spacebeagles' incredibly charming sniff-'em-up Butt Sniffin Pugs! 

 

You might remember seeing photos of this game circulating a few years back, when it was officially selected to appear in the Alt.Ctrl.GDC pavilion of GDC 2015. It's a charming game about living the life of a pixel art pug, and it really captured attention at Alt.Ctrl.GDC because of the unique, one-of-a-kind "ball and butt" controller that was built to play it:

 

The giant tennis ball (see above) is a trackball that controls pug movement, while the stuffed pug butt is a fuzzy way of making the "sniff" button comfortably pushable by a human face. While the final game (expected later this year) will be playable across multiple platforms and controllers, the effort and ingenuity that went into designing and building these accessible one-of-a-kind controllers is just the sort of thing we want to celebrate with Alt.Ctrl.GDC. Work like this inspires us, and we hope it inspires you too! 

 

Alt.Ctrl.GDC is part of the Game Developers Conference 2019, which takes place March 18th through March 22nd of next year at San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center. More information about Game Developers Conference 2019 is available via its official website.

 

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