/Pop_The_Bubbles

Along with their fountain machines, Pepsi also commissioned Firstborn to create the touch screen interface for their new touch-screen bottle vending system, dubbed Pepsi Interactive Vending.

Lee Felarca led the project that implemented a complex beverage vending UI that supported many additional features such as multimedia campaigns, remote beverage gift-giving, and its own executable platform.

One of such executables created for this machine was “Pop the Bubbles”, a quick touch-screen game where consumers could either try to reach a certain score, or try to win a free beverage.

While simple in functionality, the game featured some complex effects to simulate the bubbles and maintain the desired framerate. Many of the common game development tricks - such as object pooling and ray casting - had to be used, ensuring this was indeed a fun project to implement.

The Pepsi Interactive Vending system was first tried out at the Penn State University, with plans to roll it out to other markets at a later time.