Alex Ocias creates interactive toys for internet browsers.
Why?
Because it’s who I am, I am a person who makes these things.
Videogames is a vice medium, its father is famine under King Atys of Lydia and its mother is nuclear war defense systems.
It is important to understand that games are not like film, where some consensus has been reached about language and shape:
Every game is its own medium.
This is a frontier medium and I explore it.
I try to make things that can’t exist in other mediums, I look how the form can directly involve the player and change them.
I pioneer interactive art in new web technologies, in opposition to the wills of Silicon Valley’s capital. The internet is still a powerful evolution of culture that humanity has yet to reckon with:
Art that can be infinitely reproduced for free for anyone on earth is radical and a true realisation of the dreams behind the industrial revolution.
A Polish-born Australian, I started creating videogames using RPG Maker 2000 at a young age and now craft digital experiments from my apartment in Sydney.
🃏 My most well known work Loved has been played more than 3 million times, featured in every game publication that mattered to me, exhibited in galleries and museums and studied in academic contexts around the world.
🗼 Moving People of Shibuya won the Shibuya Pixel Art 2020 Pixel Art Game award, judged by Kazuko Shibuya (Final Fantasy 4,5,6), Tetsuya Mizuguchi (Tetris Effect, Rez) and eboy.
💨 Created the world’s most cutting edge fluid simulation in a browser, with 2nd-order advection-reflection with arbitrary boundaries.
🏆 Judged the Freeplay Festival Awards in 2018 and 2019, and presented the design award both times.
💃 GirlJail, my gamejam collaboration with Alcopopstar, has been downloaded around 100,000 times, featured in Waypoint, and holds a 4.5/5 star rating.
🎨 The visual style of Dwarf Fortress' graphical mode was based on the techniques pioneered by my Jolly Bastion mod.
🖥 My tools and guide for displaying pixel art in modern game engines are very well received and used widely in the field. Unity Corporation used it as a basis for their rendering tools.
📺 Built a non-contact multi-screen playful interactive video wall that automatically detects who is standing in front of it, for a biomedical plant in Singapore. Still don’t think there’s anything else like it out there.
🐧 Put a hundred thousand penguins in a feature film.
🧭 My work was part of a pioneering front of videogame art redefining the medium beyond disposability, and inspired a new generation of artists.
☢️ I went into an active nuclear reactor and designed a game about it.
📱 My touch movement system is the most novel, elegant and kinaesthetic form of navigating worlds on touch screens.