Grab those cheesy poofs, get comfy on the sofa, and tune into this mini behind the scenes with devotid!
This week, we’ll be looking at the iconic DUNKO machine 🦆
Which real life machine inspired the idea of the DUNKO coin pusher?
When I was around 10 I lived in a small town that would host a traveling carnival. I only lived about a block away from the park so I would ride my bike there every summer. They had a couple traveling trailers full of “shady” coin pushers. They were the older wooden pushers that you could pause the game and load em up for a good push. I would play them for hours and annoy the workers so much that they would send me away to the local party store for snacks and made up orders. I loved them as I felt like I was “in control”. All the other games required fighter pilot precision, popeye throwing arm or just straight up luck. The coin pushers were a way for me to get the prizes I wanted… but it took time. Lots and lots of time but as a 9 year old kid in a small town, one thing I had was lots of time. Haha.
Where did the name DUNKO come from?
It was inspired by the “PLINKO” game on The TV show “The Price Is Right”. I mean.. Who didn’t love that game?. Very early on when I prototyped the gameboard for the Dunko coin pusher I thought a “plinko inspired” theme would be fun to drop coins into and it would add a little to the first step of the game. Making it a little harder to “aim” your shot. The interior of Dunko was supposed to be a spin on the old “water/oil” filled hand held games of the 70-80’s. I put a bunch of bubbles inside to try to make it look like it was full of water. But when I put actual water textures in there it just felt too silly. Hence the bubbles magically floating in air now. Things sometimes work funny on islandville.
PLINKO on The Price is Right
What is your favourite arcade memory of the machine that inspired DUNKO?
The Dunko coin pusher’s gameboard was one of the first physics systems I built in Unity back in 08-09 when I was just getting started. I basically started my game dev journey with just that main machine. I went on to create a couple other games in other genres and then one day I opened up that old project to play with some physics ideas and The Coin Game was born.
When making the DUNKO machine, did you know that you wanted it to be in Larry’s Arcade originally?
Originally the game was just going to be inside Larry’s Arcade. It had a small parking lot with a tall fence around it. It was about 5% of the size of the current island. Early on I was just focusing on getting more machines into the game and thought the single location would be enough. Then one night I was playing with a tool called “Gaia” (back then it was a new Unity Asset for building huge realistic terrains). I was having a blast generating random islands and mountains in another test project and then it hit me. Why not have a bunch of arcades and cool stuff from that same era?
A very early DUNKO build!
How long did the DUNKO machine take to create in game?
About 3 years… hahah. If you count the time the original prototype sat on my hard drive when I was working on D Series Off Road Simulation and RC Simulation 2.0. But to be serious, once I was committed full time on The Coin Game I would say it was about 2 months to finish it up. An average machine in the game takes about 1-2 months to complete. I start with the model, texture, add physics, create game logic and then add score keeping with leaderboards. I finish with lots and lots of play testing and tweaking.
The early build to the iconic machine in game!
Now we ask you, Islandvillers…what is/was YOUR favourite game at the arcade? We would love to hear your answers in our Steam Discussions! Follow the link here to join our dev diary discussion of the week.