Category: In House

  • Hybrid Puppeteering

    Collaborative NPC Design to Build Immersive Playable Worlds

    As part of Shaman Garage’s series on collaborative world-building workshops, this session explores storytelling through NPC (Non-Player Character) design. The workshop is purely hands-on, inviting participants of all backgrounds to collectively craft character appearances and personalities through a playful approach.

    Using tangible materials such as stickers, crayons, templates, and cards, the process encourages experimentation and ensures accessibility regardless of technical skill. The characters created are digitized by a custom, locally-run algorithm and transformed into Godot “Packed Scenes,” ready to be arranged into a game level.

    By the end of the workshop, the group produces a short narrative exploration game featuring the rich characters they have designed. This session guides participants to collaborate on character design and dialogue, combining their efforts to bring a world to life. As part of a broader series utilizing hands-on materials like clay and cardboard, the workshop aims to make game asset creation collaborative and accessible, fostering a diversity of voices in the construction of playable digital worlds.

    This workshop has been conducted at:

  • Loopscroll

    An arcade machine inspired by slot machines mixed with a post social media imaginary.

    LOOPSCROLL is an installation that tricks its users to invest time in a simple yet addictive game. Through this altar, players worship a living imagery that demands frustration, competition, and obsession. It will keep you wanting to start over, never leaving the machine. Shaman garage invites us to “play” at doomscrolling. Is it fun? Using classical game mechanics “difficulty levels, frustrations and rewards” LOOPSCROLL highlights how these are very close to the ones used on social media platforms and how they become addictive.

    In this playful installation, we wanted to reflect on the context we understand social media, the narratives it generates and the behaviors it forces on us. While the arcade reproduces the addictive mechanics of money driven socialmedia, foolingthe playersin minifeedback loops;it isalso presented as an object of worship, revealing the internet folklore as a treasure from the past, a complex and fascinating mythology.

    For this project we conducted an archival exercise, realising that the memesphere needs careful hands to preserve its symbols, icons and narratives. “Memes privilege emotion and vitality over reason and accuracy; they reward the absurd and theexaggerated. Thisis preciselywhy wewant to“rescue” them,to preserve their value.”

    Picture by Arash Hosseini
    3D Render by Yuxuan Zhao
    Picture by Arash Hosseini
    Video by Timo Brems

  • Human Souvenir

    Human Souvenir is an interactive piece that explores themes of commodification, ownership, and the abstraction of human identity within a playful, toy-like framework. The work presents a speculative scenario in which an extraterrestrial traveler, having exhausted their time on Earth, seeks to extend their experience through the acquisition of a Human Souvenir—an objectified, interactive version of an Earth Human designed for amusement and display.

    Through the mechanics of an arcade-style simulation, the piece interrogates the ways in which cultural encounters are often reduced to consumable experiences. The Human Souvenir, modified to fit within its constraints, exhibits an exaggerated need for attention and care, reflecting both the complexities of human nature and the distortions that occur when life is recontextualized as a product. A party mode recreates social rituals, reducing human movement and behavior to spectacle, while the system of reincarnation ensures an endless supply of disposable subjects.

    Human Souvenir operates as both a playful engagement and a critical reflection on the ethics of possession, interaction, and entertainment in digital and physical spaces.

  • Data Garden

    Data Garden is a textless, interactive work that situates itself at the intersection of digital narrative, data consumption, and user interaction.

    Through a minimalist click-and-advance mechanic, the piece presents a virtual routine of a content consumer whose daily interactions across various platforms contribute to an ever-growing ecosystem of data. This data, once extracted and processed, takes form within the Data Garden, a persistent and evolving archive where digital traces endure beyond their initial context.

    Originating fromthe undergraduatethesis NewNarratives andDigital Ergonomics in the Era of Hyperconnectivity, the project examines the ways in which we engage with information in an era of content saturation. By adopting the visual language of comics as a framework, Data Garden proposes alternative modes of reading and understanding data.

    The game critically reflects on the ergonomics of hyperconnectivity, questioning the agency of users in an ecosystem where engagement itself becomes a resource. By reducing interaction to a single-button input, the work highlights the paradox of digital agency—where ease of access and participation often mask deeper structures of control, surveillance, and commodification.

    In a space where every action generates data, who truly owns the narrative? Are we active participants, or merely passive cultivators of an ever-expanding digital landscape?

  • Hybrid Worlding

    Based on our research in comic language, we present Hybrid Worlding, a workshop that explores world-building as a narrative engine. This hands-on experience merges physical and digital creation, inviting participants to collectively shape a playable environment.

    By using clay as a modeling tool, attendees engage in a tangible process of spatial storytelling before translating their creations into a digital format using 3D scanning technology. The workshop draws from comic book theory, examining how time, rhythm, and spatial composition guide a reader— principles that can be applied to interactive environments and architectural storytelling.

    The outcome is more than a game space; it is a living digital artifact, reflecting the collective imagination of its creators. Each iteration expands a shared virtual world, documenting the collaborative process of its participants.

    Hybrid Worlding challenges industrial approaches to game development, offering an alternative methodology that prioritizes accessibility, collective authorship, and the organic evolution of digital spaces.

    This project fosters a new perspective on immersive world-building, where playful experimentation, storytelling, and spatial design merge into an evolving digital landscape.

  • LCD Odyssey

    LCD Odyssey is a digital piece that revisits and reinterprets a distinct moment in gaming history—the era of LCD handheld consoles. Developed in Godot, this microgame functions as both a tribute and a reimagination of the visual and mechanical constraints that defined early handheld gaming, particularly the iconic Game & Watch series. Players engage with a minimalistic challenge: avoiding aliens and collecting sparks, echoing the rigid yet compelling design logic of early gaming hardware.

    By transposing this historically specific format into a contemporary digital space, LCD Odyssey raises questions about the persistence of obsolete media, the aestheticization of technical limitations, and the role of nostalgia in interactive experiences. The project does not merely simulate an outdated technology—it positions the LCD handheld as a conceptual framework, exploring how constraints shape both game design and player interaction.

    Released on itch.io, the work situates itself within a broader digital archive, where past and present media coexist, inviting reflection on the ways gaming history is preserved, repurposed, and re-experienced.