For the strong museum presentation, I decided to bring my advanced visual pinball machine. This was because I was quite happy with my first visual pinball machine. I figured using what I could learn, I could make something even better. I liked my pinbox creations but I felt limited in my own ability to craft them. I felt like I didn’t have the skill to really iterate and enhance my physical machines in the given time.
Also, after attending the Maker Fair and being across from a Pinbox display, I saw how susceptible to damage they were after sustained play. This booth had around 10 machines and by the end of the day, more than half of them had been broken. I didn’t want to have to be repairing my machines on sight, so I knew I wanted to take one of my digital machines
Overall I was very happy with how the game came out, it had all the elements I wanted including the Timed boss fight. Even though it was near the end of the semester (the projectocalypse) I had enough time to dedicate to this project that I could be really proud of the final product. The biggest things that I think really made this machine shine was the audio, and the model of hornet spinning around during the boss fight. These elements are big callbacks to the actual game tying in the theme in the way I wanted.
Another big thing that I wanted to do was have multiple goals such as the drop target charms and the Trigger Bosses. This was my big advancement when compared to the basic game. By having multiple levels of game play it brings in the user for more. If I had more time I would have wanted to have some extra things to trigger multi balls or a different boss fight mechanic but I think I got my point across without too much loss.
The biggest issues I had with making this machine is the fact that there is just so little documentation when it comes to scripting. A lot of this came from googling very specific things and looking at other code to figure out what to do. One example of this was with the audio. There are like 4 play sound functions but the one I needed doesn’t even get auto completed almost like it doesn’t exist. But even with all of the lack of documentation I did manage to figure out some major bugs such as the lack of movement of a primitive due to a weird setting.
My theme was very well received as this is a very popular game. So I think it wasn’t so much getting people to like my theme as much as it was about making people think I did a good job representing it. I think I did a good job with that as I incorporated visuals and audio all from the game.
Overall it was pretty playable and the ball never really got stuck and their were never any major issues. But I had to modify the locations and angles of a lot of play elements to allow easier access to game necessary progression.
Setting up for the strong was pretty eventful as I was a driver for 3 other people one of which was very sick. This meant that upon arriving I had to turn around and take someone back to campus. But even after that I had plenty of time to set up and make some minor modifications to my game such as adding new sound effects and a rule modification. Other than that the visit to the strong was not too eventful with the main event we were there for being canceled. Due to this attendance was slow and we only had a small handful of people try out our games. But regardless the people that did test our machines seemed to generally like it and think that they were cool.
From what I noticed people tended to gravitate to the physical machines unlike the digital one I brought. This meant that if I was to do this again I would do my best to bring my advanced pinbox as I feel it would get more people to play it.
Everyone was really nice and the people working there were very helpful, and overall it was a very relaxed event. I had a lot of fun and I think it was a good way to wrap up the class. I will say that due to the event being canceled it meant that the expected 5 hours was much longer than necessary and luckily due to this we were released early at 3 p.m.
Playtesting both the physical machine and the digital machine at the Strong Museum.
Although the museum wasn’t too busy, a fair number of people came over to play my machines. Many of them were drawn to my cardboard machine and really liked the visuals on it, namely the eel and the lights. When they played it, however, many gave up early because the ball drained too fast and they found it very difficult. Some people (especially children) wanted to interact with the eel in some way.
Those who played my digital machine liked the music and visuals and were able to last much longer on there than on the cardboard machine. Many really liked my general concept and how I iterated on it. I can say that I’m very proud of how both of these machines came out and they were very fun to make without being too complex or difficult, given my experience in designing pinball machines. With some more robust functionality and visual details, I think the digital machine would make for a good portfolio piece.
Today, our class went to the Strong Museum to showcase some of the Pinball machines we made throughout the semester. I chose to bring my advanced physical and virtual machine to the museum. My advanced physical machine has an overall bowling theme, with drop targets as pins for players to knock back. I took this design and expanded on it for my advanced virtual machine. The reason I chose to bring these two was to show the difference between the initial idea and the expanded upon version and to get feedback on the difference.
The start of our day at the museum was fairly quiet, not many people came to the museum early in the day. However, after a few hours, almost all of our machines were being played. Everyone who stumbled on my table had something to say about my physical design. Many people were surprised that I made the machine, commenting on its creativity. The bowling aspect of my machine was new to most people because there are few machines like it out in public. They liked how the magnets stuck the pins up, and for children, this idea seemed pretty cool. Of course, there were still some setbacks, such as the big balls getting stuck in the ball return. But other than that, most people really liked my design and quickly moved to see how I improved it with the virtual machine.
After playing the physical machine, most people moved on to the virtual version. This was when I saw people light up with excitement. Everyone seemed to love how I improved on the physical game. The two player concept that gets lost in the physical version is fairly easy to understand on the computer. I saw families taking turns and playing with each other as they competed. It was very easy to understand the rules as well, so anybody could play. One of the biggest compliments was the sounds I used for the game. Many people thought they fit the game well and made it even more fun to play. The only setback I noticed with the virtual machine was the slight difficulty in understanding how to add a credit and start the game. I thought this feature would be cool, but it seemed to be more confusing in the long run. Besides that, the overall playtest went great. I met some nice people and families that shared our passion in Pinball. I look forward to showing off my machines to others when I go home for the holidays!
After going through too many different design variations due to technical difficulties, I finally settled on one and had it tested out.
The Good
There was less awkward ball flow compared to my previous design and the overall flow of the gameplay was improved on.
The design was also a lot simpler in terms of skill-shots as there was only one ramp and the players didn’t have to worry about slightly off-angle skill shots that were hard to access.
The Bad
Some comments I got were about the difficulty of the side bank skill-shot and how they just could not hit the skill-shot.
While it is a valid point, once they tried the shot enough times, they were able to hit it consistently so I don’t think it’s a big point I need to worry about changing.
What I’d Change
I would probably make slight changes to the side targets to make it more lenient to hit, but other than that I don’t think there’s too much I’d change.
Overall, I like how it’s turned out even though I’ve strayed from my initial design.
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.
What I would like to bring to the Strong would ideally be my Advanced Visual Pinball design. But as I don’t own a laptop or have figured out a solution for it, my backup choice would be my Advanced Pinbox design.
Why?
My initial and ideal choice was the Advanced Visual Pinball design for a lot of simple reasons:
I don’t have to worry about physical malfunctions or the likes
It’s more visually appealing than the Pinbox
There’s an explicit goal that exists
Having used Visual Pinball to construct my design, the biggest thing I don’t have to worry about is balls getting stuck somewhere. Also even if it’s just basic colors, it’s probably still more visually appealing than a plain cardboard box machine with almost no visual crafting done on it.
The last part is that my Advanced Visual Pinball design has an explicit win condition where the player has to knock down all three drop targets that are placed on the playing field. Having a goal to work towards would probably be a lot more interesting to play rather than an arbitrary design that seems to have no goals or the likes.
This is the reasoning as to why I’d like to try and use my Advanced Visual Pinball design at the Strong if possible; although I will have to work out borrowing a laptop from someone first. Otherwise I will bring my Advanced Pinbox design.
Shoot the drop targets down for a multiplier increase 2,3,4… on all point values. Shoot the U loop to increase the flat point value of everything before multiplier. I got rid of a kicker feedback loop up top in favor of the more classic bumper layout and an open shot on the drop targets. This should lead to higher scores and more fun games.
With this design of Memestreet I aimed to create a subgame on the top floor
I tried to keep the shots interesting by putting a bumper between you and the drop targets. Sometimes you will need to bounce it off of a bumper to make the shot on the target. Additionally, you can make the right ramp to clear them. Additionally, you can score by hitting the right wall and the u-loop. The teleporter can only be made off the wall.
