At Bay-Tek I’ve had the opportunity to do everything from industrial design, to 3D animation, to game design. I’ve even written music and done voice overs. Here are some of my favorites.

Willy Crash

I wanted to make a game that was as fun to lose as it was to win.

The idea for Willy Crash was hatched while I was playing around with the ragdoll physics in Unity. My friend Rob, one of the software engineers at Bay Tek,, and I came up with the idea of shooting a guy out of a cannon toward a row of buildings. If a player landed on top of a building they got a reward. But if they missed the ragdoll would bash into balconies, AC units, and awnings on the way down. It was fun to lose.

I was able to slap together a prototype game in Unity. The prototype helped make a lot of the artistic decisions. Though the game takes place in a 3D environment, the game play is essentially 2D. At its core, this was no different than a game where you shot a ball toward slots with dividers. Sure, our ball was a ragdoll, but the concept was the same. I wanted to reinforce this feeling so I made the slot dividers very obvious by making the line of buildings dark and everything in the background pastel tones. Below is a shot from the finished game.

A lot of work went into timing the camera transitions correctly. I wanted a smooth zoom-in effect. If the camera moved too quickly the players might lose a sense of what they were shooting at. So the buildings had to be in view as long as possible. But if the camera moved to slow it would miss the action when the ragdoll crashed into obstacles. It was tough to find a good compromise.

When the prototype game was where I wanted it Rob and Mark (another software engineer) spent some personal time getting the game off my computer and into an actual game cabinet that could be evaluated by a larger audience at Bay Tek. We often push games over to our factory where multiple people can play and offer opinions. We knew we had something good because people in the factory were playing the game so much they were getting yelled at to get back to work.

A team of artists and another programmer from our sister company, Zymo Interactive, were added to the project so we could do app and arcade development at the same time. I served as creative director for the project.

At this point we decided to really dive into who the character was. I wanted to pay homage to Evel Knievel, but not create a parody. We decided the character would be a young redneck that has dreams of becoming a famous stunt man. Cody, a great 3D artist at Zymo, was going to take on Willy’s modeling and animation. I asked him to create a look that was a cross between a superhero and a country music star.

Here is a version of Cody’s model that I painted over to create one of the game-over illustrations. I tried to walk the line between comedy and violence. After Willy crashed players would see that he was pretty banged up, but still in good spirits and always ready to try again.

Part of the fun in creating this game was hiding a ton of Bay Tek jokes into the content. Several of the background buildings and obstacles feature Bay Tek employees, past game titles, or real businesses in Pulaski, WI. Here are some shots from inside the editor.

Here is the final game cabinet.

Squiggle

I’m constantly surfing the web looking for forgotten games and toys. This research has paid off more than once. The game play for Squiggle started with finding a video for a 1970’s board game called Beat the Black Ball. In this game a large black marble spins down a hyperbolic funnel. Four players wait for just the right moment to drop their smaller marbles. The idea is to be the very last person to drop your marble. But if you wait too long you won’t beat the black one down and you’re disqualified.

I became fascinated with this idea, both because no one had used it in the ticket redemption industry and because people like watching things spin down hyperbolic funnels. But there was a big problem. How could this work as a single player game?

In the board game there is what I’ll term a single “timing ball” and four player controlled balls. I decided to reverse the situation. In our game the player would only control a single ball while the computer dropped several timing balls. The goal would be to get your ball directly in the center of the timing balls. The closer you got to the center of the stack the more tickets you received. The game play wasn’t just something new for Bay Tek, it was new for the entire industry.

I used a physics simulation in Cinema 4D to make a mock up. As you can see, at this stage I was still using hyperbolic funnels and that would prove to be a problem. Floor space is precious in a game room. Big funnels weren’t going to work. So I tried to figure out how to make the game work on a 2D surface. I changed the design so the timing balls would drop down a squiggly path and the player ball would drop down a separate path. Obviously, this is when the name Squiggle came to me.

At Bay Tek we often make plywood mockups called a whitewoods. Here is a video of the first Squiggle whitewood. As you can see it is very crude. Someone has to release the balls with their hands and it is all reloaded manually. But it got the point across and helped prove out the idea.

From here I did more testing with physics simulations. This was around the time I started to use the Unity game engine. It was a huge help in nailing down the eventual shape of the play field. Finally I made a rendering of a possible cabinet design.

At this stage the project was green lit and Bay Tek’s Concept team took the project over. A mechanical engineer started designing a working game cabinet. Among other things, the concept team’s job is to make a minimum viable product that we can test in an actual arcade. If a game makes it past the concept stage it is passed on to a development team who works out all the bugs and gets it ready for production.

To make a very long story short, this game was a very involved project because it is highly mechanical. We went though several changes in the playfield design, made numerous changes to hardware and software and we discussed several alternatives to the game play. This whole process took over a year. But after all that, the finished version of Squiggle is almost identical to the first cabinet rendering.

It’s pretty cool so see an idea you hatched become a product sold all over the world. Here is a shot of Squiggle cabinets rolling down the production line.