A Change of Heart

Global Game Jam 2013

A 48-hour jam win: an endless runner you steer with earphones in your pocket, used backwards as a motion sensor.

A 48-hour Global Game Jam build with a small team. The theme was "Heart."

We took the theme literally: an endless runner where you are an ambulance racing a donor heart across the city to its transplant before it expires.

The fun was the controller. You never touch the screen. You put your earphones in your pocket and we used them as a microphone instead of a speaker, reading the noise the fabric made as they jostled. The more you moved, the louder it got, and that volume drove the ambulance's speed. Your own body, and a pair of headphones used backwards, became the input.

It is a silly hack with a serious instinct inside it, the same one in the toys-to-life work and the procedural systems: turn an everyday object into an input until the technology disappears into play. We won the demo session.

Gallery

• The 48-hour demo, earphone controller included. We won the demo session.