Hey folks, I wanted to introduce myself and my company. I'm Slaymetender on the boards, which is my gaming handle. You might also see me post under my real name, Barry Berman. I've started an LLC as an offshoot of my gallery to produce arcade and pinball machines. My background is in visual effects for film, games, tv, theme park rides, you name it. Although I program in four languages (MEL, javascript, python, and tcl), I still have hired a lead programmer for our games. I will be doing the art direction, design, and creative direction.

The company is still small, but we do have 5 employees in different capacities. These include my sister who is the COO and marketing person. She will handle the day to day stuff. I have an artist, lead programmer, and senior electronic engineer too. Each has day jobs working for their own high tech companies, but we are all committed to developing a seriously cool machine. On our website, there are more in depth bios for each person.

I can't give away much about what the pinball machine's theme will be at the moment. We are still finalizing the design, and it would be better to show closer to final artwork. We are however, starting the flush out our website, and will be posting snippets of each milestone met for our machines. One of which just finished this weekend for our arcade machine, a stained glass sign. Yes, this particular machine is very unique in its design and does demand that kind of detail.

Our pinball machine will be unique in its own right also, and we'll show more as time goes by. I know a lot of people are going to ask about funding for the company, or if we will take preorders, etc. We won't be doing any sort of crowd funding campaign. We did for the arcade machine, and it's enough to complete it. Once finished, that machine already has a couple bookings at art galleries. For pinball, we plan on selling direct to collectors. There will be a small deposit, once we do start taking preorders. We won't be doing this until we know definite dates that machines will be finished. I want our customers to have confidence we will meet our shipping dates, and not wait years on product after they've paid.

As you know building a pinball machine is a very complicated task. We are aligning ourselves with companies to share the load as affiliates. The first being Multimorphic. We are using their boards to control the bulk of the usual pinball parts. We are however, designing our own boards to control the more customized unique features in the game. We've got experience in this already. All I can say is it's great to have a senior EE working with us. The second affiliate is Masters FX. They are a Hollywood special effects company. I've worked there before in their digital department. They will be building the toys, and other unique shapes for the machine. This company has an extraordinary amount of experience doing practical effects. I can strongly say that our toys will be like no others. Oh, Masters FX is also helping to build some of the more complex parts of the arcade machine.

These are our first two. I haven't reached out to many companies yet, and would like to extend a handshake to any that would like to help and be involved. We will of course need to source parts and create a BOM for each machine.

Anyway, long winded, I'm sure I've missed tons of things to tell everybody about. I will say, that we will try to be very transparent about everything. In fact, I invite everyone to come over when we have our artwalk nights. You can see the development progress on each machine, see the gallery, workshop, and play some pinball. We will have a WOZ:LE for the foreseeable future in the gallery set to free-play. We hope to see you here.

I'll try an answer questions from here and sent to me directly. I do have a day job, but I'm pretty good at keeping up on the internet. If you visit our site, I'd love for you to sign up for our newsletter, and join our Facebook page. We'll keep you updated.

Barry Berman
The Rebel Unit, LLC
[email protected]
http://www.therebelunit.com
https://www.facebook.com/TheRebelUnit

We are looking for springtime to have a playable prototype. We'll have a lot more to show beforehand though, final artwork, programming, dev center, tour of the workshop, interviews with the crew and more. I can't wait to show our concepts.

More than likely, I'll be using Williams. I've already got a lot of the assemblies in my workshop, so by proximity it will probably win

Yes, the games will have coin slots and mechs. In fact my last art session was exclusively just on slots and mechs. One of the first things I did with my concept team was work on a token design, this was so that people coming to our booth could use our tokens in our games, or keep them as a business card. Our tokens are shown on our site along with the joystick on the home page. I'm very much a fan of having coin slots.

We will be looking for a company to partner with for production down the line. We do not plan on doing the manufacturing ourselves.

We'll approach them when the time is right. It is possible we'll partner with them. For now, I want to get the design done, build a one off in the garage, then look for a building partner