My latest weird idea, Polygon’s Indie Developer Science Fair, is a package of 17 projects that we asked developers to make to show their games in creative ways. An augmented reality app, a Twine game, screenshots that work with cardboard 3-D glasses, etc.

This partly came about because I’d been building a list of developer requests that I thought could stand out beyond the typical screenshots and video footage. Things that we could run as sidebars for longer stories. At one point I looked at that list and thought it would be interesting to just pack a bunch of those together and make the extras the centerpiece.

I think it worked out pretty well. In retrospect, I would have loved to do some original photography and more art for the interior pages to tie them together better, but we ran out of time. I was also a little worried that the concept would feel too much like marketing, but no one seemed too concerned about that when it went live. And we got to hire PaRappa the Rapper artist Rodney Greenblat for the cover art, which was probably the work highlight of my month.

Art: Rodney Greenblat