Thought Repository

Booth 2002: Batcave


is year the overall theme was Inside-Out. Our choice for overall theme was "Famous People's Houses, Real or Imaginary". We basically did that anyway, by doing Batman. It was inside out, though, because you enter the batcave which is visible from the outside, and then Gotham City (outside) was inside that. Above the batcave on the outside was a really good looking facade of Wayne Manor. The batcave, manned by Alfred had a neat Batcomputer which would teach you all about the batmobile and the Penguin. It also had a cute little story about why bats fly at night, for the kids. Alfred was there to inform you that the Penguin had poisoned Batman and his henchmen where running loose in the city, some carrying the antidote. When you got furth inside you were on a city street in Gotham City. On the street was the Batmobile we built out of fiberglass and car parts from a junkyard (the chairs are in my room now). The game was to drive the Batmobile, capture the Penguins henchmen (little penguins under mind-control, you don't kill them only fix them and return them to the zoo), and find the antidote to save Batman. The city was projected in front of them. One person had to drive with a steering wheel and pedals, the other had to navigate (with the GPS monitor on the floor) and shoot the baterang to capture the penguins.

I was the game guy again. There were a bunch of really tough challenges. The environment was much more expansive than the year before. We needed a whole model of Gotham City, which we bought from some friends of mine, Reagan and Gabe, who are experts at that. It had to figure out collision detection, stay on a non-flat ground, how to make realistic driving, and more. We had a working speedometer thanks to Jason Small and awesome soundtrack and sound effects thanks to Alex Perry. Designing the map was really fun.

There was a lot worth remembering this year. It was really cool going to the junkyard to pick out seats for the car. The scariness of people lifting Wayne Manor in place. We basically did all the work on that and other piece at the house so no one saw us working on midway for most of that week and so we surprised them all the night we brought over the house and the car. Cutting the steering wheel to make it look like the Batmobile's steering wheel Jason Small whacked me in the face with a hacksaw and chipped my tooth. I had to rebuild part of the game twice on Thursday afternoon when it got corrupt. Wednesday night wasn't nearly as bad as Thursday night when I was so tired from being up forever and running the game all night, but it still crashed alot and if I didn't fix it that night it was really going to suck to run for 2 more days and would have been hard to teach someone else. I went to Denny's and was so tired that I thought the buffalo chicken sandwich had hallucinogenic drugs in it. In the end when I got up early that morning I was able to fix it and make it great.

My Booth 2002 portfolio page (has pictures and videos)

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