It's undeniable that backyard games are a lot of fun to play. They let you challenge your friends and laugh as you hone the particular skills needed to succeed at the game.
For the past few weeks, @CO and I have been working on our interpretation of the backyard game called "Wall Ball" - a vertical maze that challenges players to navigate a ball to a goal atop a wall, while avoiding pitfalls and obstacles. It's incredibly fun and requires players to become skillful at manipulating the tension on two cables to move the ball left, right, up, and down to navigate the maze.
As video gaming nerds and children who grew up dumping quarters into stand up arcade games, we fairly quickly decided that our version of wall ball would showcase a few of our favorite 80's arcade games. Dig Dug and Mr. Do!
We designed the game boards in SOLIDWORKS for Makers, by simply patterning a basic square block and then deleting/skipping the ones we didn't need.
Although we were tempted to cut these parts on the CNC, we took the time to lay things out by hand and cut them with a jigsaw - that way, people could see that a fun game like this could be made with basic tools.
The base layer of the game graphics were hand painted with acrylic paint
...then details were added using a stencil or 3D printed stamps
Check out our previous post to learn more about how we experimented with 3D printing our stamps:
Each video game character was brought to life as a 3D Print. This time, we used xDesign to model a pixelated version and then specified face colors in Bambu Studio to print each on out.
Once glued in place on the board, these accessories will act as obstacles the player needs to avoid while navigating the maze.
The frames around the playing fields are made of maple veneer plywood that's edge banded to give a finished look. The pieces were cut with typical woodworking power tools and coated with polycrylic to give a nice contrast to the colorful games.
A set of simple legs cut from some more plywood raise the game boards to a comfortable playing height. To consistently make the rounded ends, we designed and 3D printed a simple template we could use to route the shape.
The cradle that carries the ball upward was modeled in xDesign and then 3D printed.
It took us a few iterations to get it to perform the way we wanted it to, but in the end, we had a well balanced cradle with some pretty cool graphics. I just love the retro quarter slot!
As a small, fun detail, we styled the handles to look like retro arcade joysticks. Drilling a hole in the wooden spheres was made much safer using this simple jig we designed in SOLIDWORKS and 3D printed.
To cap off the build and make our creation really look like a stand up arcade from the 80s, we 3D printed the title graphics from each game. Each differently colored element was modeled in xDesign and split up to fit on our 10" x 10" printer bed. Then all of the pieces were super glued to a piece of painted plywood.
All in all, we are thrilled with the results!
Check out this video to see how the whole project came together:
