The making of Voss, Kohutek, Regner, & Siemon's GridMaster

gamedeveloper.com:

The 2023 Game Developers Conference will once again feature Alt.Ctrl.GDC, an exhibition dedicated to games that use alternative control schemes and interactions in new, exciting, and clever ways. Ahead of GDC 2023, Game Developer will be talking to the developers of each of the games that have been selected for the showcase.

GridMaster sees a pair of dancers going head-to-head, taking turns tapping their feet on a dance floor controller to send increasingly complex inputs over to the other player. This gives both players control of how the game flows, allowing them to adjust it to create a unique dance experience that gets sent to their partner.

Game Developer spoke with team member Jonathan Voss about creating a next-gen hopscotch that would draw out players' sense of childish play, what thoughts went into bringing players into the process of creating the dances, and more.

What’s your name, and what was your role on this project?

My name is Jonathan Voss, and I did pretty much everything: designing the experience, building the step pads, programming the microcontroller, coding the game, and making the graphics for GridMaster.

How do you describe your innovative controller to someone who’s completely unfamiliar with it?

GridMaster is like a competitive Dance Dance Revolution where you stand on the screen. There is a 10ft long "screen" on the ground with step pads on either end, and the game is projected over it all. One player stands on each side, and as one player dances to make a pattern of tiles, the other player must try to match the pattern, creating an interactive dance competition game.

What's your background in making games?

I actually started off with a final project for an electrical and computer engineering class at