Initial Thoughts
Having built a number of designs throughout the semester, I listed out things that I liked to have in my designs being: ramps, smooth ball flow, and skill shots. I was thinking of a theme that could incorporate the three design choices and what I came up with was Skee-Ball.
Designing it
Initially, I thought of having a central ramp/bank that the player can shoot off towards three different targets that are at different elevations and have railings that would bring the ball back towards the flippers.
But during the designing of it, I didn’t account for the binary nature of the flippers in Visual Pinball as they are either on or off and there seems to be no in-between; making it almost impossible to not hit a ball and full power. That meant that my initial design would not work without being able to change the flipper’s strength settings, which I wasn’t able to figure out.
Improvising
As I went through several different variations, this was the one I had settled for.
There were three different targets that have a ramp there to catch the ball coming off from the central ramp and a bumper to push the ball back into the playing field.
One is in the center while the other two are angled towards the central ramp to the left and right of it.
The center target is there to represent the normal way of throwing a skee ball down the ramp while the two on the sides are there to represent bank shots that are done by banking the skee ball off the sides of the ramps.
Other than the three main components, there are two kickers and railings on each side for more interesting interactions other than just the three targets.
In the end
It’s far from perfect or the most interesting thing out there, but I think it’s a good design when considering all the variations I had gone through after deviating from my initial design due to technical difficulties.