When I was thinking about what I could design and theme my bagatelle around, I thought about how I would track score, and what seemed the most intuitive option was using buckets. This reminded me of a game I played a lot as a kid, which was a very bagatelle-like game, with buckets and a spring to try and line up the balls into all the buckets. Jungle Safari inspiration shown below:
But also the buckets made me think of basketball, and I decided to go with that theme for the bagatelle. I wanted to emulate the different types of shots in basketball, like bank shots, swish, free throw, and the pocket. The different variety of basketball shot types was my guiding point for the different types of point scoring.
In my final design, I added to the basketball thematics by laying out the basketball key and labels. I made the swish bucket too short, so that if you just ride the rim it will overshoot and airball, simulating the precision needed for a swish in basketball. In my testing, Air ball is by far the most likely shot that players get, so I adjusted my rules to give players more balls. I initially had players have 3 balls, cause I only had 3 marbles, but too few players would make any baskets. Now, through my own testing, I found that the bagatelle is fairly consistent with practice on it. I was able to pretty consistently make some kind of basket for each shot, although the learning curve takes a good couple games. Most new players would get 5 out of 6 balls as Air balls, but with repeated practice they were able to get on average 3 balls in per play.
In the final design, I was happy with how it felt super similaiar to playing Jungle Safari, with a lot of skill expression being in the force of the marble shooter. The bank shot acted as a good mechanism to weed out the too weak shots, and the air ball punished the too strong shots, so the game required a lot of precision. The pins were mostly left the same, with only minor placement adjustments for spacing. The pins were really bouncy and it added a lot of pachinko-like randomness when the ball went down the center. There also were more niche strategies that players found during playtesting, with trying to bounce the ball off the shooter mechanism to bunt it into the dunk, which was a fun low percentage shot.
Overall, I am happy with how Basket-telle turned out. Some adjustments I could still make on it would be to round out the shooting lane. The little bump at the top was too inconstant on your initial shot, and I saw other students use tape to smooth that out and have a more consistent and smooth curve to their shot.