Initial Design
My initial design had 5 main features. A 3D Hole that players should try to hit, OB (Out of Bounds) sections that hurt scores, A Hyzer and Anhyzer line (The different ways you can throw a disc), a putting bumper (It’s almost like you’re actually putting!), and a missed mando section (Explained Later) that would give you a multiball. The recurring theme throughout this design process was that the missed mando section was nearly impossible to get right.
As seen above, the initial build remained very similar to the initial sketch. The biggest difference is that added sections above the flippers for the ball to bounce off of and to. give the missed mando section a clear line to take. These parts made the box feel more like classic pinball, and gave the ball more interesting bounce dynamics when it got to the bottom of the box.
After this layout, I quickly realized 2 main problems. Firstly, I never 3D Printed a basket for the hole, the main thing players are supposed to try to hit. Secondly, If I place any physical objects on the missed mando section as it were, when the player shot the ball, it would just hit the missed mando section. These problems led to solutions of varying success. Firstly, I changed the 3D hole to a 2D image of one that could spin around. This was a great change. As you can see in the design, there are 2 main walls the player can try to play to hit the hole, the hyzer and anhyzer lines, but with a 3D basket, a player would have no reason to go for one over the other. With a 2D plane as the basket, sometimes the flat side will face one line or the other. This encouraged players to go for different lines to get a better hit to spin the basket. The solution for the other problem was not as big an improvement, I just moved the missed mando hits to be passed the launch section.
Final Design
The final design yielding one more major change. Originally, I cardboard next to the hyzer and anhyzer lines to force a player to directly hit the shot. In the final design, I decided to get rid of these because it made the game less fun. This is not supposed to be an insanely difficult real pinball machine, it’s supposed to be a fun, casual cardboard pinball machine, and removing these parts helped fulfill its design purpose.
Playtesting and Feedback
My original rules and scoring for this box were way too complicated. It had score calculations based on the number of shots it took to hit the basket, it involved subtracting 1 from your score when you hit an OB section. This was too confusing. Players didn’t even try to calculate their scores. Additionally, players were confused by what it meant to hit an OB section. I quickly realized that the rules were too complicated, so I boiled them down to the 2 main mechanics. Hitting the basket gave you +1 point, and hitting the 3 missed mando colors would give you multiball. Except how do you do live multiball on a cardboard pinball machine? I simply changed it to just give you an extra life.
These changes yielded much more positive feedback for my box, but one problem still remained. WHAT DOES THE MISSED MANDO MEAN!?!?!? Let me explain, and show why I couldn’t fix it.
Mando in disc golf stands for mandatory. It requires players to throw their discs on a specific side of something, like a tree. If you miss the mando and throw to the wrong side, you take a stroke penalty and have to throw at a drop zone. Why does it give you extra balls? This comes from a house rule of my friends and I when we play. If all players miss a mando, we let ourselves rethrow it. I wanted to put this idea into my game. So I put the section in and put 3 different targets for 3 different players. In hindsight, maybe it would have been better to have 1 small target than 3. Players didn’t understand why there were 3 things you were meant to hit. In their defense, it didn’t make sense (or wasn’t explained clearly). I realized this kind of feature is not intuitively designed, and that was kind of the biggest problem with the box.
Other than this, feedback for my game was mostly positive. I credit its greatest strength as playing well. It feels like a pinball machine, obstacles are spaced fairly, and you can learn to hit the shots. Despite the missed mando problem, I would still refer to this box as a success!