Last December, Daniel, Bartu, and I did the Cynteract Christmas Game Jam in Aachen. 10 hours to build a game from scratch, with one rule: it had to run on the Cynteract Cushion.

The Hardware

Cynteract makes a round, soft motion-sensing cushion for medical rehabilitation. You tilt it, and that tilt is your input. Every team at the jam had to use it as their only controller.

A collection of Cynteract Cushions in various colors, displayed in front of the company's award wall
The Cynteract Cushions.

You get tilt on two axes. That's the whole input surface.

The Idea

We threw around a few concepts before landing on a bar serving game. You're a waiter holding a tray, tilting the cushion to reach spots on the bar, trying not to drop the drinks. We called it Bar Frenzy. People picked it up and understood it straight away, which was what we needed.

Building It

Right at the start we hit a problem: all three of us had MacBooks, and the Cynteract C# library didn't support Mac. Instead of finding a Windows machine, we spent the first hour or two writing Mac support for the library ourselves. It worked, and we built the rest of the jam on top of that.

The team working at computers during the game jam, with the Unity editor visible on screen
Building Bar Frenzy during the jam.

10 hours goes fast. The atmosphere was good though: waffles and Kinderpunsch, other teams building around you, everyone in the same crunch.

Bar Frenzy running on the monitor with a Cynteract Cushion in the foreground
Bar Frenzy running on screen.

The Result

Bar Frenzy won, sweeping all four categories.

First time using Unity in a while for me. Building on physical hardware is a different experience: you hand it to someone and they either get it immediately or they don't. When they do, that's when you know it worked.

Thanks to Cynteract and Autak for organizing it, and to Daniel and Bartu for ten solid hours.