Below is the second in a series of posts documenting the final development of Deluxe Turbo Racing 360 for GDC. I hope to continue the posts up through GDC and after.

Part 2: Painting Controllers

This will be a pretty quick post because this happened.

 

 

 

 

I intended to get this post up about midweek. Instead I’ve been doing donuts and fishtailing around corners, er… I mean snowed in. Work has slowed as files are split between home and the office, resulting in numerous trips between the two. On top of that, our heat went out in the office last Wednesday!

 

Ahem, back to DTR. After fabricating the boxes it was time to paint. I waited a few days until temperatures were as high as they would get for awhile, trying to clear 40 degrees so the spray paint would dry properly. Once the day arrived, spray painting started around noon.

 

Things started out well, sanding and priming going as expected. Unfortunately, things just seemed to keep going wrong. When I took the first controller apart to paint the top piece of the outer case,  I did not expect were the inner pieces to be different between the controllers I had taken apart the day before as a dry run (the Game Stop controller had cheaper components than the Official Xbox controller). I had to call in a favor, asking John to drop off a phillips head screwdriver for small electronics to get the dpad out of the controller. To add frustration, I stripped the screws on the first controller, meaning I needed to take a part a fifth controller to get the outer casing.

 

With the constant issues popping up I ran out of daylight. Fortunately our friend Dima offered his studio to finish painting that night, so I packed up and headed off to the University of Kentucky Art Building, my old stomping ground.

 

By 10:30 everything was set up in the studio, some Tool playing on the laptop to set the mood. You know, all like “Deal with it wood, I am going to spray paint you and shit.”

 

 

Once each box had three coats of solid color, I waited for the paint to dry before blocking off the painted areas and finishing up. During this time I wrote the first blog post. If only I had know when I finished up the post with a couple lines about painting that that was not what was in store!

 

After an hour I went back to the studio, pulled all of the tape and paper off, and masked out everything that had been painted. After three coats on each box I pulled off the paint to admire the final product–maybe it was the lack of ventilation, perhaps I should have read the instructions before spraying, either way–when I pulled the paper off, half of it stuck to the paint…

 

You will have to trust me on this one. 2 AM, in a room with no ventilation or windows that open, working on finishing up controllers that took a week longer than expected, well I just about had it. I wanted to smash the controllers into the wall, freeing myself from their horrible curse! but I couldn’t make a foolish decision like that with weeks until GDC. Instead, in complete frustration, I sat down and sanded the boxes back to square one.

 

I won’t bore you with how things went the second time around, other than to say I had dinner at 4:30 AM at the local college restaurant, got home at 6:30 AM, and went back the next night to mask off the painted side so there was no way there would be wet paint again!

 

 

 

Well that is it. Next post, maybe something about the board!