As with most projects, I had expected to not stick with my initial prototype designs and make changes to it as I went along; however, what I didn’t expect was how much I would be changing it.
Designing & Building
My initial thoughts when designing the playing field was to keep the base mechanics of the game the same while adding in a few additional elements in the form of ramps that would complicate the gameplay at the same time.
As I started to build and pseudo playtest, I realized that there wasn’t something that was quite satisfying as I imagined it would have been with the ramps. After some additional brainstorming and more testing, I had come up with by combining the functionality of the curved ball catchers and ramps.
Although I had forgotten to mark them for how many points they are worth, every single curved ramp/catcher is worth points while the top ones also function as ramps for balls to interact with and users to use for skill shots.
Once I had figured out how to remedy my discontent with the design, finishing the build wasn’t too hard. But if given the opportunity to build another. I’d like to build it by 3D printing instead of working with cardboard as getting the ramps to have a nice curve to them to maintain a natural flow when interacting with the balls took a lot more than I had bargained for.
Feedbacks
One of the most mentioned feedback was what seemed like an incomplete theme or the lack of one. I suppose this was because I had been to busy playing other peoples’ builds and wasn’t there to explain but my theme was to keep things simple.
I wanted to keep my final build plain and simple to mimic the simplistic builds of earlier bagatelle machines that were just wood and pins; as well as making sure the players would be able to completely focus on the game with no possible distractions at all.
Otherwise, it seemed like everyone who had tried playing was satisfied with how the game plays out and how the ball interacts with the ramp/ball catcher fusioned elements.
There were a few comments that pointed out the lack of points, but as mentioned above, I had unfortunately forgotten but would have been as shown by the image below. The rules were that players would get 3 shots to get a high score and if a ball fell through, they get to shoot it again.
Results
Overall, the machine was still playable with everyone who had played it trying to get the ball in the bottom left pocket and either succeeding or failing and there isn’t much I would do differently other than the already mentioned changing the material I would work with to build if given the time and opportunity.