Video: Designing a puzzle game to be played with non-human senses

Creative game developers have long been experimenting with making games that impair the player's ability to see the world around them -- Somethin' Else's Papa Sangre , for example, or Tiger & Squid's Beyond Eyes .

But what kind of game could you make if you swapped the player's sight for another, completely non-human sense -- like 3D visual scanning?

Indie game maker and photographer Ivan Notaros did just that with his game Scanner , which challenges players to solve puzzles while looking at the world through the lens of a "poor man's 3D scanning thing" -- a photo-based visual scanner.

By designing a game around that scanner, Notaros discovered strange new ways to design puzzle games -- allowing the player to explore the real world from a fresh perspective by "seeing through" certain walls and barriers, for example, or capturing the movement of objects through time by scanning a 3D space multiple times in quick succession.

His presentation of what he learned, a roughly six-minute segment of the full hour-long European Innovative Games Showcase at GDC Europe 2015, is worth your time to watch for free over on the official GDC YouTube channel .

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