April showers come and play games for 3 hours! YOU are invited to April Games Y’all. Join us for a selection of regional projects from across central Texas featuring play styles such as Roguelite, Shoot em up, Narrative based, and Fish Capitalism!
This event will be held at The Museum of Human Achievement. There is a large parking lot as well as street parking available. MoHA is a large warehouse space and is not climate controlled, please dress according to weather.
Games Y’all is a monthly meetup presented by the Museum of Human Achievement for indie devs, digital artists, and games fans. We showcase indie games and digital art projects from our local community and beyond. You can come to our meetups to play games, experience digital art, and connect with the local Austin games community.
The Museum of Human Achievement is a multi-disciplinary art space and non-profit organization in Austin, Texas. We cultivate new work, community, and vibe by providing radically affordable arts space to support artists and audiences in the creation of new ideas.
This event will be indoors and outdoors. We strongly encourage that everyone be vaccinated or have recently tested negative for COVID. Do not attend if you feel ill or were recently exposed to COVID. Hand sanitizer and masks will be available. Masks are welcome!
Speedway survival is a survival horror game that takes you to the darkest hour at UT. As Sola, you have to defeat shadow monsters wreaking havoc on UT’s speedway with your magical flashlight. Fighting your way through Speedway, you have to rescue Sola’s sister Luna.
Skyler Kweon - Game Designer, Arts and Entertainment Technologies Sophomore @ UT Austin
Rachel Cannon - Artist, Sustainability Studies Senior @ UT Austin
Sebastian Davoli - Artist, Mechanical Engineer at Quaise Energy, UT Austin ME Graduate
Kalem Edlin - Audio Engineer, UT Austin CS Graduate
Money-Driven Fish Tank Game is a game I built and designed on the popular children’s platform, Roblox. I built the game on the Roblox platform after reading that, although mostly for children, strip clubs and sex clubs kept appearing, and the platform had to hire more moderators to get them deleted. This was a huge “scandal” for the platform. As much of my work investigates how sex work operates in the contemporary landscape, thematically and conceptually, Roblox was an interesting starting point for me.
In the game, the idea is to collect as much currency as possible (which the avatar can collect in the form of stacks of hundreds and green rectangles), avoid a giant shark that can kill you, avoid tiny cute fish that can kill you, listen to various characters that deliver extremely cliche and strange fables, and get through a difficult golden/damask maze to your home space. Also, if you make an account on Roblox, you are able to play it anytime and donate real money to me in-game, where your account name would show up as a forever dancing avatar man as a “TOP DONOR” The character often sits down, refusing to move until the player props her up with the X button. (She’s tired). The soundscape is a sped-up moody piano score, edited in with vintage-y game-y bubble sounds and fishbone sounds.
Dahlia Bloomstone (b.1995) is a Puerto Rican/American artist and Hunter College MFA (NY, 2022) graduate with a BFA from Bard College (NY, 2018). Bloomstone has exhibited with Hauser & Wirth (NY), 205 Hudson Gallery (NY), Rhizome (NY), Millennium Film Workshop (NY), Do Not Research (NY), CICA Museum (ROK), Hyacinth Gallery (NY), and Mass Gallery (TX), among others. Dahlia’s work is also affiliated with the White Columns Gallery (NY) artist registry. She is the recipient of the SPCUNY Actionist grant from the Mellon Foundation, the Master’s Thesis grant from Hunter College, the Ox-Bow CIP scholarship, and a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture fellowship. She has participated in residencies through the School of Visual Arts, Ox-Bow, and Foreign Objekt and recently attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She was a Teaching Assistant at Hunter College from 2020-2022 and a Visiting Artist/Professor at UTAustin in 2023. At present, she is an LMCC resident on Governor’s Island and a New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellow at Theater Mitu. Dahlia lives and works in New York.
Sunsear: Avian Combat is a bullet heaven/roguelite shoot-em-up where you select the best upgrades to win the fight against legions of imperial ships! - Collect upgrades for extra power and defenses - Withstand foes for 7 minutes, and then take down the region’s Flagship This is a solo project that is an update to the game I released in August 2021
VisionBreak is a solo enterprise run by Adrian Walker, a software engineer with over 10 years of experience. Before running a studio, he created games self-taught as hobby, using accessible engines like RPG Maker. His work varies from story based role-playing games inspired by long-dead toylines to action-packed adventures starring a fearless gunship-piloting bird. He specializes in back-end development and video game music composition.
Waiting Room is an RPG Maker game made as a companion piece to an undergraduate thesis on Yume Nikki and RPG maker space/time. We consider it "temporarily finished" as
Elliot Bear Yu and Kendle Chloe White are game designers, looking to make funny little projects and occasionally games(?) that work (but mostly ones that don’t)
Untitled (Dragon Warrior glitches) is an evolving HTML hypertext collection of captured handmade hex glitches from the NES titles Dragon Warrior II, III, and IV paired with prose poems that explore game mechanics, narratives, and genre legacies, queering each through the glitch process. Themes questioned include heteronormativity, binary thinking, colonization, and the neoliberal values inherent in these and all games’ mechanics and goals. Not only are the games’ digital/physical boundaries broken and expanded, but the implied ones, too. The myth of the hero is shattered, the protagonist finally made vulnerable.
Nilson Carroll is the Assistant Curator and Preservation Specialist at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY. A barista-ROM hacker, Nilson explores 16mm expanded cinema, video projection performance, and makes queer video game installations. He is a champion and curator of anti-fascist, feminist, pro-affection games and art. He co-founded the Queer Games Bundle and the DIY queer art games collective swampbabes.
Long-lost family secrets. Hints of a hidden fortune. And miles to go before they sleep. Tess Devine’s relationship with her mom has never been easy, but they’re about to set out together on a journey into the past that they’ll never forget.
Established in 2016, Annapurna Interactive works with game creators from around the world, helping them create and release personal experiences for everyone. The company is a division of Annapurna Pictures.
Some notable games we’ve released include WHAT REMAINS OF EDITH FINCH, OUTER WILDS, NEON WHITE, and STRAY.
Games Y'all is a meetup presented by The Museum of Human Achievement. We endeavor to celebrate, amplify, and support the unique and underrepresented within indie games and beyond.