New Arcade: Shoots N’ Splatters

Shoots and Splatters was made for Fall 2022’s New Arcade class at NYU’s ITP program. It is a fully functional arcade cabinet running off of a micro PC, with the game built in Unity. My collaborators were Dave Stein and Jinny Kang. They handled the bulk of the coding and graphics respectively.

Shoots N’ Splatters was an idea that I had bouncing around inside of my head for a long time. I absolutely love arcade games, and found the battle royale style game to be particularly fun to play. With this in mind, I came up with an isometric 3D game that would be played from the side view, with each player controlling a ball. The objective of the game would be to knock the other players off of the side of a playing field, with the last one standing being the winner.

This is not entirely what we ended up developing, as we made the game in the top-down perspective, with no upgrades and only a charge attack and a peashooter to knock the other players off of the battlefield.

The game was originally going to allow for up to six players, but we realized that player orientation would limit this from being possible. Instead we went for a 4 player maximum approach, with the two players facing each other being the main orientation.

We demonstrated this game to the crowd at Wonderville, which is an indie arcade bar in Brooklyn NY, owned and operated by the professor of the class Mark Kleback. It was a real joy to be able to show off our hard work, and have people come and enjoy our project. And of course, the built in cup-holders came quite in handy during the show!

The cabinet was designed and built primarily by me, with assistance on the joystick assembly by my co-creators. It was the most complicated large scale thing I have built up to that point.

Cabinet side view rendered in Fusion 360

The whole assembly came together in about a week. You can see the delirium setting in on Jinny’s face.

Production of the Cabinet

I designed the cabinet in Fusion 360, intending to build it out of lumber. This was incredibly useful for getting dimensions accurately, and allowing for milling of the face plate and top plate.

Because the lumber was too large to cut on a CNC machine, we resorted to using the OtherMill router, which uses a tracking system to guide the drill bit.

On the left is the printed vinyl front, top, and back of the cabinet. The designs by Jinny Kang are really wonderful, and bring a lot of life and personality to the marbles that you play as!

To the right is the finished product of the interior, with holes for the speakers and side mounted play boxes.

This was an arduous process, but well worth it for the result!

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