How we made an arcade game machine.

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Hello there

We at VIMOTION were recently contacted by a company SILVERBURN SHIPPING GROUP with a task that at first glimpse seemed to be out of our area of expertise.

(About Silverburn)

Silverburn Shipping Group is a worldwide shipowner and operator rendering such services as ship management, chartering, technical support, repair and maintenance, provision of spare parts, crew management, and accounting. The Company has at its disposal a large number of vessels including unlimited class barges, RoRo pontoons, multipurpose tugs, chemical tankers, and accommodation vessels.

SSG annually takes part in cross-sector exhibitions and wants their stand to attract attention of visitors.

While we were not much familiar with the exhibition content we definitely didn't want to travel the path of VR or huge complex constructions.

Additionally, to that moment the client had a clear vision of how their stand is going to look like and there shouldn't have been done any significant changes in it.

That was all about the technical specifications.

OK, GO

Whaaat? 💥💥💥

After several failed presentation we came to a surprising and an odd (even for us) idea…

… what if we designed a retro slot machine? Though the company deals with complex technical processes its business is still not lacking in some sea romance. Moreover, visitors and participants of the event have definitely played gaming consoles, slot games or sailed toy boats on a river in childhood …

We have decided to give adult respectable people such an opportunity to flashback into childhood and indulge in nostalgia.

The client approved. The only we needed was to understand how to design that slot machine.

The game was meant to be connected with the sea and should have had a simple interface with plain rules, as well as short gaming sessions.

We have chosen the runner genre that requires a user to dodge obstacles while speeding up and collecting points. The more points one has the higher in the score table he is ranked.

8-bit graphic styling with a suitable music.

Also the screen was designed by the rules of the genre with quite primitive animation simulating technical capabilities of those times.

Do you remember that advertisements of the games have always pretentious displayed the content and graphics while the game itself fell far short of image complicity on cartridges and banners?

Here you go! ))