Created by Michael Frei, Mario von Rickenbachthe and the Zurich based Etter Studio, and nominated for the Nuovo award at the Independent Games Festival 2015, Plug & Play is a short film and a game for your digital device. The game invites you to explore the feelings of anthropoid creatures that go beyond sexuality and reproduction: love. It is a surreal play with plugs, with you in the role of one that controls how they come together or apart.

Following a number of awards in 2013, Michael Frei teamed up with Mario von Rickenbach and Etter Studio to develop the interactive version of his animated short. The original film’s duration is about 6 minutes and you can experience the interactive version in 10–15 minutes of continuos play.

The idea was to give the viewers, who are all so eager to jump around the narrative, more control over his movie. At the same time he wanted to have more control over the way the audience experiences the film by not allowing to skip the narrative without interacting with it and therefore become part of it.

The game was made using Unity3D. Based on the animation of the film which was drawn with 12 frames per second, the team started to investigate how they can add interactivity in a natural way, without losing the qualities of the film. While the existing animation works well for some scenes, they needed something that allows more direct feedback. This is why they started to build physical puppets based on the already existing assets that allow more direct feedback to the player’s actions.

One of the big technical challenges, Christian (Etter Studio) tells CAN, was to make the cuts work without loading delays. Especially on mobile devices where we don’t have a lot of RAM, it’s not possible to keep all the scenes in the RAM, but they have to be ready immediately as soon a cut occurs without any loading screen. It took a lot of trial and error to figure out when and how much to load in the background.

Plug & Play is released worldwide today (2nd of Feb 15) for USD 2.99 and was coproduced by Etter Studio and SRG SSR, the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation. It is nominated for the IGF Nuovo Award 2015 at GDC, held in San Francisco in March 2015.

Find out more about Plug & Play at the links below.

Project Page | Download on iTunes | Michael Frei | Mario Rickenbach | Etter Studio