The demo nobody watched
We built a ninety-second game to open a workshop and put it on phones the day before. Nobody watched it. Everyone played.
In August we built a small arcade game to open a workshop at the TRAE Open House in London. Ninety seconds at the front, get a laugh, get on with the session.
The day before, we made it work on a phone.
Ninety seconds became the first ten minutes of every session, because nobody watches a game. The questions changed shape too: not "how did you make that", which is a question about us, but "can you reset the leaderboard", which is a question about them. Seventeen names ended up on the board.
Then the sessions did what they came to do. 22 working things, each built from a single sentence, by people who mostly hadn't made anything with AI before that morning. All of them are here: play.wavetable.net/tt/showcase.
Two hours after the last session, with the room long empty, sixteen more runs appeared on the leaderboard inside eleven minutes. People had gone back to their desks and were still playing.
The bit we got wrong: the ask for email addresses sat on the closing slide. Six people gave one. They had spent half an hour inside something we made, and we asked for their details while they were putting their coats on. Next time that ask goes in at minute four, while the leaderboard is still open.
The game is still up if you want a go: play.wavetable.net. Fair warning: it is harder than it looks, and Howard is not in the top ten at surviving his own workshop.