Recreating a Pokemon Battle | ENGI 210: Prototyping and Fabrication

By Tony Xu and Lulu Shih

For this Midterm project, my partner and I aim to recreate a Pokemon Battle.

Brainstorming

The goal started out as recreating a Gameboy (video game device). We wanted 5 different parts: A rolling text, the health bar, a Pikachu that faints, a Sylveon that attacks and wins, and an attack effect.

The story board we made for the first design. Although the Gameboy design wasn’t implemented at the end, the story board stayed the same (only difference is that we got rid of the health bar)

A quick brainstorm of how to incorporate each part of our design including which layer each part will go in.

A first brainstorm of how each motion will be achieved.

Soon we realized it was too difficult to fit so many intricate parts within a small box (especially since we wanted to recreate the scale as well), and our approach to the health bar took up way too much space. After some discussion, we realized that the idea is too complicated and the allowed fabrication methods doesn’t have the capability to manufacture the design. So we moved on to a simpler design without the health bar.

The second design, which is really similar to our final.

With this design in mind, we started creating low fidelity prototypes for each different component.

Low Fidelity Proof of Concept

Sylveon’s Jumping Motion

Concept of how we would make the Sylveon jump when it attacks and wins the battle.

A low fidelity prototype made out of cardboard to show represent the mechanism we will use to make Sylveon jump.

Moonblast (Attack Effect)

Concept drawing of how the attack effect will be installed. The attack will be on a rod which is free to move up and down but is put in a hole of a rotating surface. Under the rotating surface is a track that controls the height of the effect.

We made this low-fidelity prototype with wood to make sure we’re getting an accurate representation of the friction between the track and the effect.

The final prototype. Here we created a track by stacking 4 semi-circle tracks and sanding off an edge to create a rising angle.

A clearer photo of the first iteration of the track.

Text Box

Concept drawing of how the text box would work. This was one of the simplest parts of the project. It’ll just be a rectangular prism with words engraved on it.

Low fidelity text box. Just a long rectangular prism with a dowel going through it attached to bearings to allow spinning.

Note that we didn’t make a low fidelity Pikachu because at this point we have given-up on the idea. However, the Pikachu mechanism is implemented in the last prototype and will be mentioned later.

Design Gear Set to Match Story Board

For the mid-fidelity checkpoint, we decided it’s the most important to finalize our gear plans to make sure all the timing are right. One big decision we made is to have the gears stuck between two layers of walls (as can be seen in the illustrator file there are two rows of finger joints for the walls), both for aesthetic purposes and so they can be held in place better.

A design plan that shows where each piece will go. We wanted 8 rotations on the handle to be exactly 1 full cycle, so we had gears to slow down the rotation and a long dowel that distributes the new rotation frequency to the separate parts. One might notice this design shows a square design while our final prototype is a rectangle. This is because later we realized we miscalculated the volume taken up by the text box (forgot to leave it enough space to rotate), so we had to make the box slightly longer.

Trying to figure out the ratio in rotation between the gears.

Once we had the plan, we printed out acrylic gears because we thought these will be more rigid. Later on we were suggested to replace them with double-layer wooden gears, which is what we used in our final prototype.

Our mid-fidelity gear set up.

We also created a bevel gear since we will need something like this for our final prototype (for changing the axis of rotation to the attack effect). However, at the end we realized just have two perpendicular gear worked fine, so this was not implemented in our final prototype.

Inspiration from the 507 mechanical movements of how we changed axis of rotation.

By this point, the gears were working really well and smoothly.

A video of the acrylic gears turning really smoothly.

Here we were suggested to switch the gears to double wooden gears, so we redesigned the box (since the thickness of the gears are completely different) and remade the gears for our final high fidelity prototype.

Before we started building the final prototype, Tony had a light bulb moment for the mechanism of Pikachu.

Concept mechanism of how to stand Pikachu up after it’s knock over. This is the mechanism used in the final design. Before this point, we were going to ask the user to manually pull up Pikachu, but with this mechanism installed the whole scene becomes a lot smoother.

The best thing about this mechanism is that we could just let it rotate the whole time since it won’t interfere with the standing Pikachu. Before this, the biggest difficulty was to slow the rate of rotation down with so little space, but now we didn’t have to slow it down anymore.

High Fidelity Prototype – Gears

Printing out new wooden gears and some washers for the final prototype.

The first 3 sides of the high fidelity prototype. We added a levitated floor layer to make sure the bearings have enough space (since they’re slightly thicker than the wood plank) and won’t make the bottom uneven. We also evolved our track using steps of supports to support one single piece of track instead of having a solid block. This also allowed us to have gears go through the bottom easily.

Rough draft of the new track using supports instead of sanding down a solid block.

In order to ensure smooth movements of the attack effect, Tony also created a metal piece with a wheel on the bottom and bought linear bearings. These can still be seen in the final prototype.

The rotating piece that moves the attack effect around the track. We implemented two linear bearings, one for the actual attack effect and the other one as a counterweight.

The photo above was taken when we were testing out the center rotating disk. The four holes near the center was used later to add supports to ensure this rotating disk stays horizontal throughout the way. However, before we added this center disk, the more difficult and important thing is to make sure the gears run smoothly.

Implementing the gears. Once we switched to wooden gears we started noticing a lot more issues when spinning. We believe it’s because of kerf differences between the wooden gears and the acrylic gears, but also because we are starting to pursue very smooth motions. To make sure the placements of each gear is really precise, in addition to using the wooden washers we printed, we also used metal washers from the OEDK.

After a long night of playing around with the gears, we are finally satisfied with the motion of the gears.

The last step was decoration, which was the easiest but also a quite tedious part.

Decoration

Pokemon

First step was to create the Pikachu and Sylveon. This was an easy process. We found png files from Bulbapedia (the Pokemon Wikipedia). We first converted them to svg files online and used that to cut out the outline, then engraved on the photo (we had to make sure we cut through, then engrave to minimize burning marks). We tried different engraving settings, and at the end also decided to engrave the Pikachu on a piece of wood that we sprayed yellow beforehand. We couldn’t do the same for Sylveon since it didn’t have a signature color.

A photo of the comparison between the first and last Pikachu we made.

Moonblast

We used the water jet to cut out the Moonblast since this piece had to be really small and really precise in size. Later, we felt like the silver color just didn’t stand out really much and didn’t represent the attack effect really well, so we sand blasted it and spray painted it pink.

The sand blasted Moonblast before it was colored.

Back board

We drew the layers of background in AI. The trees were found on the Nounproject and copy pasted to create the forest feeling. Everything else was hand drawn.

Drawing the houses in the background based on the Pokemon Pearl and Diamond game.

Then these were cut out, spray painted and glued together.

We also forgot to engrave on the mechanical movement, so we added it after we glued everything together.

Zoom in on the back board. We also used the vinyl sticker to spray paint only the roofs and fences of the house.

Grass

The grass was also laser cut. The design was to cover up the marks of the finger joints on the top of the prototype, but also to create the pixel, video game feeling.

Laser cutting out the different pieces for the grass.

Spray painted the grasses different shades of green. On the left we also made a board with grass design on top to put behind the text box so we can cover all the gears behind the text box.

Then these pieces were glued onto the top alongside with some actual standing pieces of grass.

We also wanted to paint the sides of the box red and white to match the Pokemon ball colors, but we were concerned about spraying into the bearings and other parts, so instead we made an exterior box that covers all the burn marks and some crooked parts (from assembling and dissembling it too much) and spray painted that.

Finally we came to our final build.