Neurotag
Neurogaming · physical PvP installation · Alexey Sukhariev · Design engineer
A physical PvP game where two players move a levitating puck with their brainwaves. The calmer you are, the harder your side hits. I took it from an MVP to 30,000+ players — rules, hardware, brand and code.
It's tag. You just run with your calm instead of your legs.
Two people sit at a table. Each wears an EEG headset. Between them floats a puck — the Tagger. Nobody touches it. It moves because the players' brains move it.
The game's own pitch deck put it best: a futuristic version of the children's game "Toca-Toca" — tag. That single line does more work than any explanation of alpha rhythms, and it is why the game is called Neuro·tag.
The twist is what counts as running fast. The calmer you are, the harder your side hits. A visitor in the event footage explains the whole design in one sentence: "My advice to the players is not to think about winning… and just have a good time and no one is going to win." That is the paradox the product is built on, and it is the reason people queue for it. Every competitive instinct you bring — try harder, push, tense up — makes you weaker.
What I inherited
In 2023 I was asked to redesign the interface of a game that already existed. It was an MVP with an idea inside it: a table, a levitating object, two players, EEG headsets. The interface was rough and underbuilt, and the whole thing was not ready to stand in front of a crowd.
Redesigning that screen was the entry point. It turned into three years of rebuilding the product across every layer it has — rules, hardware, brand, and now the code that runs it.
The hard part was not design
The difficult part of this project was that design decisions kept requiring knowledge I did not have. To make the calls, I had to go and learn other people's professions: neuroscience, enough to understand what an EEG signal actually reports and what it cannot; engineering and CAD, to draw parts a machine can actually produce; electronics, for the boards, LEDs and wiring that go inside the bases and the Tagger; game balance, inventing mechanics and then tuning them against real players; and backend, the hardest single task in the project.
That is the honest answer to what was hardest here. Not a screen. The gap between designing an object and being able to make it exist.
The rule kept changing — that's the real story
Most case studies show a product that got prettier. This one got re-decided. Three times we changed not the balance, not the colors, but the condition under which you lose.
First version: the Tagger moved toward whoever was less calm. It reached your base — you lost. Calm was a shield, and you were running away.
The 3D version: bases became levitating platforms with characters standing on them. The Tagger struck the platform, the character lost balance and fell. Calm was defense, and you were staying upright. This is also where the game got playable characters, an announcer and damage numbers.
Now: the bases push. Each base sends impulses into the Tagger, driving it toward the opponent's base. The calmer the player, the stronger their impulses, and the harder the Tagger flies into the other side.
The direction of travel across all three is one idea getting sharper: calm stopped being protection and became the weapon. You no longer survive by being relaxed — you attack by being relaxed. Every one of those changes came out of testing: focus groups, then live events, then measurements, then the next decision. Standing next to a queue of strangers for three days is a brutally honest usability lab.
The screen had to be readable from three meters away
Early screens were instrument panels: activity graphs, thin type, a lot of numbers. They worked for the two people sitting down and failed for everyone standing around. So the interface moved toward a scoreboard — big score, two names, one live curve per player, and the state of the match legible from the back of the crowd.
The metric itself went through naming: it started as Chill level, became Chillax level, and on the live installation reads as Chillax points with a tagging progress percentage — because a tag charges up rather than snapping shut.
The screen also has to narrate a match with no visible action, so it calls its own events out loud: WINNING · 53% TAGGING PROGRESS while the charge builds, and a full-screen CESAR EARNED A STAR when a player scores. The crowd around the table follows the match by reading those, not by watching two people sit still.
Winning and losing are not two states
The player screen is built as a state system, and most of the states are not endings. There is Default, Winning, Losing, Danger, Ten seconds left, then Won and Lost, then Reward and No reward, and a start sequence of Ready → Steady → Go. The point of the middle states is that a brain-controlled match has no visible action: if you don't show momentum, players can't tell whether what they are doing is working.
There is also a second family of states that a normal game UI never needs — the hardware ones. Headset offline. Connection error. Searching for connection. Online, connected. A physical installation played by strangers means a headset can slip mid-match, and the screen has to say so without breaking the match for the crowd.
It's designed as a broadcast, not just a game
The interface carries LIVE in the corner, a camera label at the bottom, a match timeline and a replay. There is a third role in the flow next to Player 1 and Player 2: Viewer, with screens of its own. That comes from where the product lives. On a show floor the people watching outnumber the people playing by a wide margin, and their attention is the actual product being sold to the venue.
From Blender to a soldered board
The table, the bases and the Tagger are hardware I designed and produced: modeled in Blender, detailed in CAD with real dimensions, printed on a Prusa, then fitted with LED strips and boards. The iteration count is the honest measure of that work — the slicer files show the cube part at version 32. Not thirty-two ideas: thirty-two physical prints, each one revealing a tolerance, a wall thickness or a mounting point that only exists once you hold it.
What is not mine, and should be said plainly: the EEG headsets are MyndPlay units, and the seated cabins at some installations are Cluvens. My work is the table, the bases, the Tagger, the electronics inside them, the interface and the software.
The zone around the table
An installation is not furniture, it's a floor plan: player zones, the arena, a spectator screen, lighting, and circulation for a queue. It is documented as a layout — roughly 2.5 × 4.5 m, about 10–15 m² for the full setup with a 65–86″ spectator screen.
The format is measured too: 1v1, 20–30 players per hour per installation, about 10 minutes in the zone, open to anyone from age 10 with no prior experience, and adapted for players with reduced mobility.
The mascot became the logo
The game has an announcer character — Satoriko — who introduces matches and comments on them. His shape ended up inside the company's identity: the eight-pointed star that replaces the O in the NEUROTAG wordmark, and repeats across the brand as a standalone element.
I built the brand on both levels — the game's identity and the parent company's: logos, wordmarks, brand book, event graphics, merch, print, and the banners standing on the show floor.
The product carries someone else's brand
The commercial model is that a venue or a sponsor puts their name inside the experience, so the interface was designed with that slot built in from the start: a sponsor mark on the player screen, on the spectator screen, and physically on the table.
It is not a mockup promise. On the live installation the table reads NEUROGAMING WITH intel., the Tagger puck carries an engraved Intel logo, and the in-game spectator screen shows Supported by VLC GAME CITY. The same slot has been filled by IoT Sparks on a corporate build.
Where it lives
Neurotag runs as the live experience of CyberZen's NeuroGaming ecosystem: 30,000+ direct participants across 20+ corporate and public events since 2024, 85% of passing traffic converting into active audience, and 70% of players coming back for another match. It has been played at Feria Valencia (OWN), VLC Game City, MERGE Madrid, Valencia Digital Summit, Bilbao Slush'D and IoT Sparks, among others. Clients and sponsors of the company include Intel, Microsoft, Ericsson, Sony, Siemens, GGTech and Andorra Business.
Today I build the product's updates end to end — backend, frontend, prototyping, testing, character and effect animation — using AI tooling heavily to keep that scope moving as one person.
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