Last year's best tech demo is now a game: Museum of Simulation Technology

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Early in 2014, a small team of Carnegie Mellon University students released a YouTube video that briefly set the internet on fire: "Tech Demo for Pillow Castle's First Person Puzzler," a proof-of-concept for a puzzle game built around the optical illusion of forced perspective. The demo, which was posted last January, demonstrated an idea for a first-person puzzle game along the lines of Portal or Antichamber, built around a unique core core mechanic: any object you pick up and set down in the environment is immediately, invisibly resized to be as large as possible – which usually isn't obvious until the player moves to see it from another angle. It's a mechanic easier seen than described, and Pillow Castle's video showed it off perfectly, earning them a Reddit post calling their game "the new Portal" that remains /r/gaming's fourth most upvoted submission to date.

The answer: yes. While the rest of the team of CMU students working on the project have graduated and gone their separate ways, Albert Shih, the lead programmer, designer and creator of Museum of Simulation Technology, continues to work steadily on the project.

Polygon got the chance to catch up with Shih and his game this weekend at the Indiecade Festival, where Museum of Simulation Technology was an official Indiecade award nominee. The game, which was playable to attendees, featured new puzzles, an interesting new mechanic, and an updated, cleaned-up art style (which Shih says he still considers temporary 'programmer art'.)

Above, watch a full playthrough of Museum of Simulation Technology's Indiecade demo. For more on Museum of Simulation Technology, check out Pillow Castle's website or follow them on Twitter.