made by Geoff Gracia
Design drafting
I had the idea and use of this come to my very early into the semester. It was based on a table called “ABC’s Monday Night Football”. It was a super interesting and complex array of lights, targets, and ramps. It had an awesome metagame system that used the lights to track your “distance” on the field, which you increase by hitting the ramps. Hitting them would move your light up the field until the Endzone! In my mind it truly felt like it was ahead of its time. There’s also not many other tables like it. I wanted to recreate it and then some: I wanted to have you playing against an enemy team that would be scoring based off your mistakes and progress. I planned to include a lot of playfield toys and I was hugely excited to undertake!
First version
After a lot of tooling and toying, I settled on what elements I thought were on the necessary course, and rendered my first version of my Pinbox pinball machine:
Below is the user feedback I got with this rendition
My general consensus was that the “homage” scoring system was too confusing, especially with, and because of, the limitations of Pinbox. I abandoned the “yardage + score” tracking system. Also I found that in order to keep the ramps, I needed to create a surrounding perimeter that would prevent the balls from launching out of the field. I also decided to ditch a “spinner” target feature at the top that was suppose to be for field goals. I didn’t find a way I liked and that worked.
There was a version that I demo’d at Imagine that was the in-between phase, it was basically the one you will see below with the paint job and graphics. I wanted to confirm that the walls and movement of the on field pieces would positively impact the final. I did find out even at Imagine, that I needed to move around my “buckets” and shrink them a little bit to prevent people from only landing in the bucket and never reaching the flippers.
“Final” version
This is my culminated final version. I added the paint job and my personal created graphics. You are supposed to use the ramps to land in what is supposed to be a broadcast booth, and to hit the deep pass target on the wall. Both of these require a lot of force and accuracy in the shot to make the full velocity off those ramps, but they’re equally feasible. The buckets are the same and labeled better. I also added the golf tee from the kit as a ball save peg, I also painted it yellow to emulate a goal post. This is a feature I love in other pinball tables, and is something I always like to try to incorporate.
While it didn’t feel like an appropriate space-with the people needing to just quickly play and pass through-to ask them to type up on a user feedback sheet, I was able to observe the people playing. My plunger mod worked well, since I noticed at Imagine that older and younger age crowds tended to struggle with the pull and it would pop out of its socket semi-frequently; at The Strong, it worked pretty flawlessly. The ball only came out once in a freak marble overload situation, but the walls all worked as intended! All the users were drawn to its loud colors and graphics and had fun with the mechanics.
You can see event specific notes here
Visual Pinball
Visual Pinball gave me trouble on mobile systems since we started working on them. I got the app to install and could see the editor but I was never able to actually run the game outside of the classroom desktops.
In the muck of getting it to work on my multiple laptop attempts, I also decided to deviate my digital table away from Gridiron Gauntlet, and instead revive my “Hockey Night” Pinbbox bagatelle in a pinball machine format in Visual Pinball.
My post on that is linked here