This week on Maker Update we’re at the Game Developers Conference covering the awesomely weird, maker-made games of Alt CTRL.

This week on Maker Update, crowdsourcing hospital equipment repair, lessons from Josef Prusa’s medical shield manufacturing, and the games we never got to play at Alt.Ctrl GDC.

This week on Maker Update, a freeform LED ball, a preview of Alt Control GDC, rolling your own image sensor, touchy triangles, cardboard Sithcraft, hydro-dipping, and optical punching.

This week on Maker Update, a special episode from the show floor at the 2019 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. We’ll take a look at some of the most interesting maker-made games from the alt.ctrl showcase, including a couch co-op game controlled by your butt.

This week on Maker Update, a MIDI compatible music box, alternative controller indie games at GDC, an Arduino for your knife, controlling your computer with zombie heads, free game developer software, and Hackspace issue 5. This week’s Cool Tool is the Makey Makey Kit.

The annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco is a wonderfully outrageous, high tech fantasy land where corporations like Microsoft, Facebook, Sony and Google, hold court with their latest zombie-blasting simulators and VR headsets. But it has a secret.

Off in the back (technically in a whole separate building), away from the buzz and hustle of the main show floor, is a small cluster of 20 curated, one-of-a-kind games under a banner labeled “alt.ctrl”. Here, the creators of these games encourage people to come over and play their project. They call themselves Developers, but I see them as Makers like myself. People who take their fun from mixing equal parts Art and Engineering. 

This week on Maker Update, an automatic dice spinner, a desktop CT scanner, what taggers can teach us about permanent markers, and powering your Raspberry Pi from lithium iron phosphate. This week’s Cool Tool is the Krink K-70 Permanent Ink Marker.