Giant Joysticks For Comic-Con

We’ve long been fans of old-school video games, in fact some of us played them when they were new. We were excited to create a classic video game experience that could be fun with a crowd in an outdoor space and debuted during Comic-Con!

This project had two major components, the custom Space Invaders-style game projected onto the side of a neighboring building and two five-foot tall working joysticks that we were tasked to design and build.

The game itself was created in Unity and is an updated take on a classic. We actually own an original Space Invaders arcade game in our studio in Chicago, from 1977. We tried to maintain the fun of the Space Invaders-type game while making it a more visually exciting 3D experience, including new power ups and, of course, a high score leaderboard.

We built the joysticks in-house. The bases were built from MDF, which was easy, but it made them heavy. Lesson learned that MDF is great in small doses, but we should have used 1/2” plywood. It is easy damaged, which we found out during shipping. Once it was painted flat black, we attached 3D printed orange accents to look like an Atari joystick. The flexible part that attaches the stick to the base was the hardest thing to source. We searched for weeks to find a suitable material for it and eventually found a weird looking flexible black stool at a furniture store, which looked perfect for our needs.

The stick is made from a 6” PVC tube. We built a custom button from a PVC end-cap and copper tape was used to make the connection, while the light up ball on top was created from plastic lamp covers. Inside each ball was an LED bulb.

We used an Arduino Uno in each joystick for the custom fire button and two microswitches to control left and right movement. Audio from the game was fed back in to make the lights react to the exploding noises from defeated enemies.

Author: Mike Wszalek