Product Design student Jaeseong Yi, along with MFA Design and Technology students Andrew Genualdi and Henry Lam, created Crank Tank as their final project for Collaboration: New Arcade, an MFA DT course taught by Bryan Ma in fall 2015.

The game was selected as a finalist for a showcase called Alt. Ctrl GDC at the 2016 Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. It has received positive press in such major technology publications as The Verge, Tech Radar and Engadget. It was also recently exhibited at the Museum of the Moving Image as a part of an annually held exhibition called Indiecade.

The following is the team’s description of the game:

Crank Tank is an experimental arcade game + controller combo powered by Arduino Leonardo and Unity 5.2. The game can be played by either 4 or 2 players. Players must coordinate their cranking movements in order to drive their tank to the enemy base, and destroy it. The controller cabinets were laser cut out of 3/4” baltic birch, and are powered by a single Arduino Leonardo. Each crank controls an individual, hand-made rotary encoder which relays speed and directional information to Unity. CrankTank was an experiment in creating non-standard arcade controllers(i.e. moving away from the joystick/button tradition), and as a result produced an engaging and exciting new way to play.