The Hess Toy Truck has been a holiday tradition since 1964. By the time Marxent was contracted to build a companion mobile game, the truck had 50 years of nostalgic weight behind it. Our job was to make something kids aged 4–8 actually wanted to play — without losing the adults who'd been collecting these trucks since childhood.

I led game design, produced the creative brief, pitched to Hess leadership in New Jersey, art directed the 3D assets, built the space station model, and shipped a free runner game with no in-app purchases. Engadget called it "a pretty decent game." For a 3D visualization company's first mobile game, that lands.

I'd never met my project manager before flying to New Jersey. When I arrived at Hess HQ, I found her sitting on a picnic table outside, in tears. The executive running the project on the Hess side had a reputation: sharp, difficult, not particularly patient. She'd been handling him alone.

I introduced myself, and we walked in together.

The pitch went well. The executive was enthusiastic, excitable, and kept floating the idea of microtransactions. I had to explain, as clearly as I could, that embedding microtransactions in a game designed for four-to-eight-year-olds would be a COPPA violation. That idea was set aside.

We also learned in that meeting what the game was actually about. We hadn't known the vehicle until then. It was a spaceship. We agreed to find a way to work in augmented reality: "somehow." I flew back to St. Petersburg to design a game about a space cruiser.

Kids and nostalgic adults want different things from the same experience. The design question was where those two audiences actually overlap — and the answer was arcade games.

Arcade games are not gentle. They were built to take quarters. That means they have to be immediately enticing, simple enough to remember between sessions, and difficult enough to keep pulling you back. The coveted high score is the whole point; I have a JOE stamped on the Twilight Zone pinball machine at Microsoft that held the top spot for three months.

For the Hess game: kids got visual affordances and an in-game shop stocked with power-ups (extra lives, shields, force fields), earnable and free, no purchase required. Adults got play depth, escalating difficulty, and high score tracking to come back and sharpen their skills. The loop was the same for both (dodge asteroids, collect coins, reach the station), but the ceiling was high enough to reward mastery.

The executive wanted a microtransaction shop. We shipped a free one instead.

The Space Cruiser model came directly from Hess — they were meticulous about how their asset looked and moved. Asteroids and coins were sourced and art directed. The space station the player is trying to reach through the asteroid field is my work: modeled, UV'd, and textured in Maya.

The "somehow" AR feature became "Your Space": the game overlaid on the rear-facing camera, putting the Space Cruiser in whatever room you were sitting in. The sounds from the physical toy truck were pulled into the game for owners of both.

It shipped free. No in-app purchases. Engadget reviewed it: "the graphics are solid and there aren't any in-app purchases, which is always refreshing." For a brand built on a 50-year tradition of quality, clean was the only acceptable outcome.