#arcade devblog

Oh hi there, didn’t see you come in. Welcome to my extremely improvised home woodworking studio.

What’s this I’m building? It’s the arcade of tomorrow! I call it the “Instant Arcade - just add venue!”. It is inspired by the Babycade which was made by my dear friends at Glitchnap. But I want to make Automat’s version a bit more versatile. 

The idea is to have a complete indie arcade kit that you can easily transport on a tram or possibly in large car I guess. It must contain everything you might need to set up an indie arcade. This list includes: arcade cabinets (probably small ones), a f*ck-ton of controllers, wired power (with a long-ass cable), speakers, projector, lights, soap bubble machine? and whatever we find that’s funny and interesting! Oh and it should also look very cool and interesting! We’ll get to that later.

The materials used to build the machine so far are our old babystroller, a wooden table-like board and a chopped up drawing board for kids that I found in our trash room. #trashgames amirite? See you next time players, lovers and friends!

ARCADE DEVBLOG #02

Second build day, second blog post.  My initial plan to build the Wang Electronics cabinet has been put on hold until probably my next build day. This is because a pressing issue came up:

Me and couple of peeps from Indiespelgbg.se are organizing a gamejam in collaboration with Retrospelsmässan here in Gothenburg. We had the idea that it would be cool to show the jam games on arcade cabinets during Retrospelsmässan. RISE kindly let us borrow hardware and we decided to build with cardboard which is a cheap and easily manipulated material perfect for these temporary cabinets.

We made two cabinets that put special limitations on the game. The two-screened one obviously demands that the game uses two screens with players facing eachother (or maybe one player running around the cabinet), just like the Bennifer Cabinet. The other cabinet has its screen facing the ceiling, which is sort of asking for a top down game, for maybe 4 players, similar to the Buttfighter or Knô. It will be interesting to see what the jammers come up with.

One of the cabinets will possibly be dedicated to Pico-8, since that is a handy way of switching between games (in the event of multiple games on the same machine) and also has very retro aesthetics.

Stay tuned for updates on the cabinets and the games that will run on them.