The game ‘Up, Down, Left, Right’ was as experiment made during a course at Umeå Institute of Design where the aim was to learn how to interface with HIDs (Human Interface Devices) such as gamepads.

Gameplay

Concept

The simple purpose of the game is for you, the black square, to escape the red square. The red square gets progressively faster as the game goes on making evasion harder and harder.

‘Up, Down, Left, Right’ can be played in two different ways, either you hold down the buttons of your gamepad to move around in nigh real-time, getting chased by the red square. Or you do deliberate moves one at a time with the red square making one move for every move you do.

Every time you die, and die you will, a ghost is created that follows your previous movements. Every successive play generates a new ghost eventually making your playing field littered with past iterations of yourself, and their inevitable failure.