IBM Crunchers

Table-top game, projected on a dome in Las Vegas

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  • 2016
  • Studio: The Barbarian Group
  • Client: IBM
  • Role: Cinder Developer
  • Tech Used: Cinder, Box2D physics library, Spout

As part of IBM’s annual InterConnect conference, The Barbarian Group built a custom table-top game, called Crunchers, to showcase IBM’s cloud software platform products, collectively known as BlueMix. Crunchers is a 1-4 player game played on a 46” table-top touch screen which was controlled by 4 arcade style buttons in a custom fabricated rig. A second version of the game was also projected on the inside of an 80 ft dome using the Spout texture sharing library. Crunchers was built with Cinder by a team of 3 developers over the course of 3 weeks.

The goal of the game is to consume as many marbles as possible within 60 seconds, only using your single arcade button controller. To make the game more interesting, there were 5 power-up marbles, each which gave the consumer of the marble an advantage over the other players. Each power-up was analogous to an IBM Cloudmix product to exemplify the consumed product's killer feature. With each power-up, the physics of the game changed in fun and unexpected ways. My primary responsibility was the display and animation of the UI, including score display, power up graphics, and game play indicators.

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