Month: December 2019

With Outrun I have ended the semester on a high note. I implemented an additional mechanics, refactored the board based on player feedback, and added more visual elements and instructions to the board.

Regarding the Theme, people really liked the implementation of the outrun / vaporwave aesthetic. It made for a unique pinball experience. The sounds and the music were what really sold it for people though. Hearing HOME – Resonance really gave it that future funk feel, in conjunction with the backglass it sold the aesthetic.

Some of the issues people had with the last iteration were fixed. The goal was unclear, but I added instructions and messages on the backglass to inform players of what they are supposed to do. It was not obvious that the elevated platform was elevated and player lost track of the ball when it was behind it, I moved the board down and made it semi-transparent to remedy this problem. The problems I had, the lack of lights and low jpeg quality decals, were fixed. There is now a set of lights that indicate your place in the race of the game, and light that indicate your fuel level.

Overall, I’m happy with my progress and that I ended the semester with a polished machine.

Backglass Source
HOME – Resonance Source

I felt that this iteration went fairly smoothly to build. I didn’t really run into any major issues with the software and was able to implement my design how I wanted it.

Themewise, people really liked the implementation of the Devil May Cry IP. They felt it made for a cool pinball experience. The sounds and the music were what really sold it for people though. Some of the targets were difficult to see though so that’s something I’ll have to adjust before the Strong museum.

People still have an issue where it’s too easy to hit the ball into the outlanes, so I’m going to adjust the size of them, and add a Royal Guard kicker to both sides to prevent that from happening too often.

Overall, though I’d say with some minor tweaking, this machine will be very good and I’m happy with my progress so far.

Citations:

https://www.uhdpaper.com/2019/04/devil-may-cry-5-dante-and-vergil-4k-194.html

https://devilmaycry.fandom.com/wiki/Yamato

http://www.gamethemesongs.com/Devil_May_Cry_3_-_Vergil_Battle_2.html

https://www.sounds-resource.com/playstation_2/dmc3/

https://www.sounds-resource.com/pc_computer/devilmaycry4specialedition/

https://www.sounds-resource.com/pc_computer/ultimatemarvelvscapcom3/sound/10021/

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9rSBXIUMGOo/maxresdefault.jpg

https://wallpapercave.com/devil-may-cry-3-wallpaper-hd

For my second iteration of my visual pinball, I want to continue working on my Devil May Cry design. The original version focused primarily on just hooking up code to all of the objects which allowed them to play numerous sounds. Now I want to focus more on complex scoring and possibly some layout changes.

Numerical scoring is a must this time around but I want to make it interesting. I was thinking of incorporating DMC’s style ranking system where the player gets more red orbs for the higher the ranking is during combat. I’d translate that simply into a score multiplier that activates based on how well the player is doing. I haven’t decided how I want to implement that yet however.

I want to tone down the difficulty a bit somewhat as well since players seemed to have a difficult time defeating Vergil even once. So I’m deciding to make it 5 balls instead of 3, and lowering the amount of hp Vergil has to see how much that helps.

Stretch goal would be to incorporate the devil trigger mechanic somehow where the player fills up a gauge and then transforms Dante into his demon form where he’s more powerful. I’m not sure how to tie that into gameplay mechanics yet though. Maybe he does more damage to Vergil during that state? I’m not sure yet, but that’s not a priority yet.

At the strong I had a version that fixed many issues. I had a few kids play it and many of them were even able to increment the song. theedd highest score that day was 950k+. What I learned is that kids like the music on my machine more.

Overall my experience at the strong went well. Everyone who played the game seemed to like it. I’d say my biggest takeaway from the experience was something George Gomez talked about with us. I think I needed to add more on my machine to draw players in. Unfortunately, my laptop’s internal speakers were not working that day, so I had the audio going to a pair of Bluetooth headphones. I realized once I was there that I should’ve brought an external speaker to let the game’s music attract players. I also think that while they were simpler, the pinboxes were more approachable and interesting to the average museum goer. While many of the visual pinball machines were better designed, the pinboxes had a nice feel to them that I think interested people. I think I should’ve brought one of my physical machines as well, to really attract more players. Overall, I think the playtest went well though and taught me a lot about getting a player’s attention

After playtesting my advanced machine in class, a few key issues popped up. I was grateful for these, because I knew exactly how to fix my machine for the strong playtest.

The first issue was with the drop targets. The way I had them allowed players to hit one or two and then get their ball stuck behind one that was still up. To remedy this, I put up an additional target behind them that doesn’t drop until all of the targets are down. This blocks players from getting into this area until they’ve hit all the targets. I also changed the textures on these targets. The original texture was too abstract and they don’t particularly read as targets. Now, the targets have a specific character on each one that makes them much clearer.

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Another issue I had was with the music. There was a typo in my code which caused the final song not play. This was very jarring as it cut off the previous song to go to silence. I also noticed some funkiness with the ramps. The right ramp tended to act not as expected.

I felt that my experience at the strong was positive if a little light on players. I did have several kids come up and play my machine and the feedback was always positive. I’d say the most common feedback I received was about the sound design which makes sense since that was a major focus of my machine. I couldn’t see people as they played but it seemed that no one played long enough to beat Vergil once but that might also have been an atmosphere thing, it’s probably uncomfortable to play for a long time in the middle of a room while someone is staring at you, so I understand that. Overall though everyone who played looked like they were having fun, so I felt it was worth it. From the feedback I got from classmates, I think I’d change the elasticity on the outlanes so the ball bounces less predictably but that’s probably the only major change I’d make.

I think being able to playtest at The Strong was very useful in getting feedback from people who do not normally game a lot. A lot of the testers that tried my game were kids between 5-13 with their parents sometimes trying as well. It was nice to see the various skill levels of the testers and what elements of the game different people found difficult. There was one young girl who was able to consistently hit every target with easy and found the game enjoyable, while the adult with her struggled to hit a single target over two play throughs. I would love the ability to refine my game even more and test it at The Strong again or even on campus with various students. Hopefully other classes see this as a success and start to integrate outside play testing into their courses.

Alright, the final post! The Strong was a surprisingly fun experience(pun intended) I had plenty of people come and play my machines. The most interesting part had to have been seeing kids play the games and completely refusing to play the digital machine. I don’t think this was a fault with the field itself, as I think aesthetically, the digital field came out better. What I do think this shows is the appeal of something physical. A digital field can be interesting and cool, but it will never be able to meet the appeal of a physical machine. I would also agree with this, a physical pinball machine just feels right.

I was happy to see that people genuinely enjoyed the board, as I saw parents have to literally pull their kids from my pinbox. It was also funny to watch. In terms of like actual feedback, I did not get much, though I saw ways that I could improve the board, one of which being doing a better job of getting the visuals onto the board. If I simply colored the ramps, and used the backdrop of my digital board, the field would definitely pop a lot more than it does.

This is the final playtes! Hooray! During my playtest I learned a few things. The first was where there several hit collision locations, this just required me to add some walls so that the ball did not have weird interactions with ramps. These were easy fixes, and were simply a result of testing.

I also received the feedback that the targets were difficult to see, even with my completed visual design. Again, this wasn’t a very difficult fix, as I simply added more lights to each target, and I think this fixed that visual discrepancy.

The next thing on list of things that needed to fixing was my right ramp, which, combined with my visually busy (in a good way) board, was too distracting. I needed to make the color more solid, so that it did not clash as much with my board. This was probably the most disappointing change I had to make, as I loved how the ramp looked with the image that I overlayed onto it, but I understood why the change needed to be made.

So that was my final playtest for The Experience, at least for now. It was a fun ride, now the only thing left is to show off my work at The Strong Museum.