In 3 days, they got game

Designer David Heisserer and crew would be some handy people to have around the house. Or a desert island, or the moon.

They can make anything out of anything -- or so it seemed last weekend, when the Minneapolis team calling itself 1.21 Jigwatts had 72 hours to dream up and build a winning game in this year's Red Bull Creation competition.

"OK, we have just a few more precious hours," said Heisserer on Sunday afternoon.

He wore the semi-delirious, semi-intent expression of a mad scientist as he wove between tables stacked willy-nilly with random parts and tools, borrowed machines and congealing cheeseburgers at the Mill, a rentable workspace in northeast Minneapolis that's dedicated to the DIY movement.

Having won last year's contest by building a dot-matrix printer out of spray paint cans and electronics towed behind a giant "hamster wheel," Heisserer, 34, and the other team members were keen to defend that 2011 title.

Online voting begins Wed-nesday; the winner will go to the World Maker Faire, the ultimate science fair for grownups, in New York in September.

By this time, the two dozen engineers, artists, tinkerers and marketing types on this year's Minneapolis team looked beat and sweaty, but satisfied, as they put finishing touches on a simulated submarine made of box-beam steel, plywood, PVC pipe, garden-sprinkler valves, and various dials and gadgets. "Hunt for Red September" was ready to test. Right on cue, it rose and bucked on its mechan-ical haunches like some sort of scrap-heap "Star Wars" contraption.

Their brainchild works like a carnival game, Heisserer said, testing players' memories and challenging them with six different programmed events in about one minute.

"The player is warned of an event by name and has a second or two to find the lever or button with that name to avert that catastrophe and avoid getting sprayed with water," he said. "If they avoid each problem quickly, they stay dry. If they get through all the problems in less than a minute their time is recorded and put on a best-score list."

One particularly ingenious bonus: A webcam is mounted inside so people can remotely tweet a "depth charge" to see the resulting dousing of the player.

As to how the thing was made and actually works, well, that's a bit more complicated.

"The solenoids turn the water off and on," he said. "The structural hull members were designed first in 3-D using Sketchup, and then cut from plywood using a CNC router called a Shopbot.

OK, OK, you had us at solenoids.

So, did the hot mess that our weather has been for weeks on end play a role in inspiring a game that douses you with water?

"Oh, yeah, definitely," Heisserer said. "It was 98 in here."

Alex Schroeder, a sculptor, said that having multiple areas of expertise on hand was crucial to the process.

"One person thinks of how to do something, and then another builds on that, and it keeps going from there," he said.

The team finished their project "at the final buzzer, so to speak, 8 p.m. our time," Heisserer said. Now they'll await word on whether they'll take their big wood-and-steel baby to New York.

"Hunt for Red September" wasn't the only product achieved over the weekend, however. On Saturday night, during an open house barbecue that the team held for friends and fans, they realized no one had brought a spatula to flip burgers.

No problem.

In about 10 minutes, they'd made one on a plasma cutter "out of mild steel, probably about 12-gauge sheet, cut flat and bent to shape," Heisserer said.

Of course they did.