When I began planning the digital version of Sketchy Situation, my goal was to do a one-to-one adaptation of the physical version. I didn’t want to reinvent the machine, I just wanted to elevate it. My plan was to preserve the layout, theme, and game mechanics from my cardboard Pinbox while introducing one key feature missing from the original: a proper point system.
In the physical version, the game focused on a singular win condition, hit the monster’s mouth and you win. But in the digital version, I wanted the game to feel more like traditional pinball. This meant rewarding players for hitting different areas, encouraging replayability through score-chasing, and giving feedback beyond just winning or losing.
First Digital Design
This was my first time working with Visual Pinball, and while I had high hopes, my progress was slower than I expected. My first digital prototype was essentially a wireframe version of my Pinbox. I focused on function over form, mapping the ball flow, adjusting ramps, and adding invisible walls to fix areas where the ball would get stuck in the physical version.
I did make some smart mechanical tweaks during this phase. For example, the pencil cup at the bottom became a point bumper instead of a purely decorative element. I also ensured that the main ramp and top area had proper ball physics to avoid the jamming issues I had encountered during the Strong Museum event.
Final Digital Design
In my final version, I added visual elements to bring the game to life. Unfortunately, this is where I fell short. Rather than designing new assets specifically for the digital format, I scanned pieces of my cardboard pinball machine and used them as graphics. While this helped maintain the original art style, it didn’t translate well into a digital environment. The result felt flat and a little unpolished.
I also added drop targets to represent the monster’s attacks, giving players point-scoring opportunities that echoed the ink splotches from the physical design. While the functionality was there, the presentation didn’t live up to my expectations.
To be honest, this final version might be the project I’m least proud of in the class. I spent so much of my energy on the physical build that my digital one ended up feeling more like a rushed port than a proper sequel. I watched tutorials, explored Visual Pinball features, and tried to make the most of what I understood, but I struggled with the tool and it shows in the final product.
Playtesting Reactions
Playtesting for the digital version echoed the physical one in terms of layout and mechanics. Since I kept the designs almost identical, players immediately understood the rules. The new point system added a welcomed layer of engagement, and people enjoyed seeing their score rack up for different actions.
However, the most consistent feedback was about the visuals. Players said the game felt “unfinished” or “messy,” mostly due to the scanned cardboard textures. While the physical aesthetic worked great in real life, it didn’t feel intentional or refined when brought into the digital world. If I had more time, I would definitely focus on creating unique, stylized assets tailored for screen use.
Citations
All scanned art assets were taken from my physical Sketchy Situation pinball machine.
My one-hour shift at Imagine RIT was surprisingly lively. Going into it, I expected just a few curious glances here and there, but our pinball table turned out to be extremely popular, especially with kids. It was fun, energetic, and a great trial run for what was to come later at the Strong Museum event.
Kids were pretty aggressive with the machines, but fortunately, nothing broke on mine during my shift. That said, by the next class session, I discovered some minor damage: the doodle monster at the top of my playfield had lost its teeth. I quickly crafted new ones and made the necessary repairs to get it back in shape.
Between the two shifts, I didn’t make many major changes to gameplay, but I did spend some time flattening out parts of the board where the ball tended to get stuck. These subtle tweaks helped improve the overall flow of the machine without altering the core design.
Strong Museum Pinball Day
The Strong Museum shift was a longer 3.5-hour experience. While it was a bit less populated than Imagine RIT because the event was indoors and the weather was rainy, it still had some great highs. There were plenty of families and kids, and seeing how excited they were about building and playing pinball machines was genuinely rewarding.
My shift was mostly spent stationed at my pinbox, ready to explain the design and talk about the class to visitors. Having already done Imagine RIT, I felt much more confident and relaxed. I’m typically a pretty shy person, but this event helped push me out of my comfort zone. I had real conversations with strangers about something I was proud of, something I built.
One of the first challenges of the day was addressing the rain damage my machine suffered during transport. Some components were slightly warped, but with a little help and quick fixes, I managed to repair everything before the event started. I even took the opportunity to make a meaningful upgrade to my design: I added walls around the ramp at the top of the playfield to prevent the ball from getting stuck, which had been a problem during earlier tests.
Perhaps the most inspiring part of the day was getting to see the pinboxes made by Ben and the other workshop leaders. Their machines featured some truly clever ideas such as fidget spinners as bumpers, ball bearings for dynamic motion, and other imaginative mechanics. It really encouraged me to think more creatively about what pinball can be. Seeing their work made me want to go back and push my own machine further.
Takeaways From the Class
Before this class, I wouldn’t have considered myself a pinball fan. I had played it a few times, but I held the same general opinion that a lot of people probably do: that it’s an old arcade novelty. This course completely changed my perspective.
Not only did I learn the rich history of pinball, but I also got a glimpse into a passionate and dedicated community I didn’t even know existed. There are people out there keeping this game alive, not just as a form of nostalgia, but as a living, evolving design space.
And now, I get it. Pinball is far more than just flippers and bumpers. It’s a blend of artistry, engineering, playtesting, and iteration. It’s storytelling through mechanics. Thanks to this class, I feel like I’ve joined a small part of that world. I’m leaving this experience not just as someone who knows how to make a pinball machine, but as someone who actually enjoys doing it.
Me and the Questball team decided that the best course of action would be to showcase our Questball Machines at Imagine/The Strong as opposed to our digital versions, since they highlighted the ‘character select’ aspect better than the digital ones.
I don’t have any photos of my setup at both places, but man, what fun events. The fact that so many kids came up and had so much fun fighting their siblings or even in some cases their parents. It was a little annoying having to rapid fire fix the machines since some of the kids were manhandling those machines. But Jacob had them up and working in under five minutes.
One of the best parts of the Strong Museum Experience specifically was the fact that we got to meet the inventor of Pinbox 3000 and he got to tell us PERSONALLY how cool he thought it was that we designed Questball the way that we did. I felt really proud and felt like our hard work was being properly recognized. I also loved seeing all the kids play our machine at The Strong and then instantly go to the workshop and try and make their own. It felt like a really good full circle of the creative process. Just like how we joined this class because we liked Pinball and got to make our own with Professor Jacobs, those kids were then further inspired by OUR work and wanted to make their own. That’s just straight up beautiful.
Thank you Professor Jacobs and I really hope Retirement treats you well!
Me and the team from Questball wanted to take each machine and make it it’s own cool Visual Pinball.
So with mine, the Archer Edition, I wanted to bring back the bullseye, add some drop targets, and have tons of long ramps. I was super inspired by the Spider-Man Pinball machine, which is one of my favorites.
I will admit, I was waaaaay too ambitious with this one. I thought Visual Pinball wasn’t that hard to use.
Readjusting/Struggles
I’m on a Macbook so I had to use VMWare Fusion to make Visual Pinball. And therein lay my biggest issue. Because Fusion does NOT like Visual Pinball. I had made a fair amount of progress, but my game was laggy, the preview screen wouldn’t work, and overall it was just not fun to use. So I pivoted to helping Jacob with his!
We edited his initial design slightly and added some more ramps and got to mess with the flipper gates. It was very fun! We didn’t end up doing too much since we were more focused on making sure our Physical Questball Machines were good for Imagine. But I enjoyed the little time I had with Visual Pinball, especially the drag and drop aspect of the whole thing.
Audrey: The one-hour shift was extremely fun, but ended up being way more exhausting than I expected lol. Either way, seeing kids try out the games and saying hi to friends stopping by made it a great experience!
Gabe: The one hour shift was fun, but also extremely hectic. I was surprised how many kids instinctually repeatedly smashed the flipper buttons as hard as they could, which led to a couple on the fly repairs. There were a couple times where people who kind of knew what they were doing would play our games, and it was very fun to watch them experience them! I did definitely learn that the spinners on Frog and Toad would wear quickly, and start to stick! The next day in class, we reinforced the spinner pins underneath with more cardboard and hot glue!
Brandon: Imagine RIT was a fun experience, although I mostly just helped with setup. I had the first shift, so I helped set up the booth, but I had to leave somewhat early for my other Imagine shift for my card game I’ve been developing, so my Imagine experience was pretty short
The main repairs we all completed after the demo involved a lot of gluing components such as the spinners on frog & toad and wires on the bagatelle back down. Additionally, the most common point of failure during Imagine itself was the rubber bands in the flippers snapping, so we had to do a significant amount of quick repairs during the shift itself. We also re-taped the cups on the underside of the pinbox back down.
While we didn’t make any changes to the physical machines, the digital one went through a few modifications. We realized that the top-right corner was a bit bare and uninteresting compared to the other sections of the playfield, so we mapped the multiball target there. We also added a ramp going up the side wall to hit the wizard on top of the tower, which opens after completing the challenges. We also added some additional texturing to the ramps and walls to make it look nicer. We also realized one of the last second changes hindered the ball movement in “BumperWorld” so we had to change that on the fly!
Strong Museum Pinball Day
Audrey: The strong museum shift felt a lot easier, despite it being longer. I think this was largely due to the fact that it wasn’t as busy at first, and only started to pick-up around noon. Thankfully fewer people playing the machines meant that there wasn’t any repairs that needed to be done at the time, though marbles were often being lost or stolen by the children.
Gabe: The people that came to our exhibit at the Strong museum were very fun to engage with. There were at least two groups of kids who couldn’t get enough of Frog and Toad and the parents of both groups told us we should market the game! There were a couple of times kids would hit the flippers hard (again) and I needed to swap out two rubber bands during the shift. We had a lot more time to work with individual people at the Strong, and was overall a more relaxed experience than Imagine RIT.
Brandon: The Strong expo was pretty long. I made the mistake of not eating breakfast that morning, and I was feeling it pretty hard by the end. But the kids that walked up were all super fun to talk with. Each person loved the frog and toad theme and the beautiful art. I think also our game being the only one colored brought in a lot of customers. It was a super fun experience overall
Audrey: I feel like I learned a lot more about explaining how to play the games in the simplest way possible to kids. Since they were on average younger than the people at Imagine, I had to simplify and shorten some of the rules. This made the bagatelle machine a lot more approachable for kids, as they were often confused about how to use the flippers on the frog & toad machine and got board quickly.
Gabe: It was very surprising for me to see, both here and at Imagine, how unintuitive Pinball is to most people. When we toured the Strong earlier, I laughed at some earlier pinball machines that felt like they had to point out where the flippers and buttons were, but after having some kids play our games who’ve probably never seen Pinball before it makes total sense. There were multiple kids that I had to show where the buttons were (or that there were even buttons at all!!) It was very fun to watch kids get into the groove of the game, and get competitive with one another!
Brandon: I got a lot of joy just watching new people, and kids, interacting with our pinball. I was feeling pretty worn out from classes for the semester, and working on the pinball machines. But watching people just enjoy our pinball machines brought a lot of energy back to me.
Audrey: I was really impressed by the machines Ben and the other leaders brought. They all did really well at showing the full extent of the pinbox’s capabilities, and all the interesting features you can include even without electronics. For example, I really liked the neon spaceship machine, which used lots of sloped pathways to let the ball build up speed and make the game feel extra snappy. The way they used elastic gates was also really interesting, in how hitting them once triggers them to open. My favorite out of all the machines they brought in though was Swamp Quest. While the gameplay itself was fairly simple and straightforward, GhostShrimp’s art really elevated it to the next level. It was also cool hearing their iterative design philosophy being best received in educational settings.
Gabe: I was amazed by some of the games Ben brought that they had made with the Pinbox 3000 kit. The mechanisms for drop targets and additional mini flippers higher up on the playfield were especially fascinating! It’s very easy to think “there’s only so much we can do with cardboard machines,” but seeing what the Pinbox team was able to accomplish with some creativity was really humbling!!
Brandon: I was flabbergasted by the machines Ben brought. There was so much detail and innovation that I would never have thought of. I mostly remember the pinball machine with palmtrees and the wooden door. I also really liked the tic-tac-toe machine, where you are trying to get 3 in a row in the tic-tac-toe board, which is ingenious. It’s hard to do scoring/objectives in cardboard and that one was super simple and fun.
Takeaways From The Class
Audrey: Overall I had a bunch of fun with this class! Going into it I knew next to nothing about pinball history, but have really gained a greater appreciation for the advancements in both technology and game design that have influenced the modern pinball scene. It was also incredibly cool discovering how much of a pinball hub Rochester, NY is. Brandon ended up hosting ‘Pinball Friday’ where we would go out and play pinball at Arcade 80’s. One of the highlights of the class was definitely the guest speakers, I really enjoyed hearing about the pinball restoration process from Ashley Ludwig, and George Gomez really reframed how I thought of playfield design. My only wish for this course is that I had more time to create playfield art or try to make a computer vision-based scoring system, but there’s always a chance for that in the future!
Gabe: I wasn’t very sure what to expect going into this class, but it far exceeded what I thought it would be! I had very little experience with pinball prior, only playing a couple of times and struggling to keep balls alive without much more thought, but after learning more about it and being exposed to it more I’ve grown a deep appreciation for it! A couple machines I played through my discovery really stood out to me like Medieval Madness, Lord of the Rings, and most of all, Funhouse. All of these games are super different and showed off variety that I didn’t know was possible in pinball! There’s just something about the physicality of pinball, and the feeling of manipulating a real ball with real physics, that is hard to replicate in any other way. I loved all the amazing opportunities we had in this class at the Strong (both presenting and getting a behind the scenes look!), Imagine, and the presentations from multiple relevant people in the modern pinball scene. Talking with George Gomez especially was fascinating, and was really awesome! As fun as it was, my one wish for the course, would be to cut the time working on the bagatelle machines a little bit to make more room for visual pinball time! This was a fantastic experience and I wish Professor Jacobs a happy retirement!
Brandon: My biggest takeway from the class was the discussions and thought on the readability of games. I hadn’t played much pinball before, and I had previous thought that pinball was incomprehensible, even though I hadn’t really seen much pinball machines. But pinball machines has a lot of effort in telling the player how to play the game. There’s not much room for actual rules, and players won’t read text anyway, so a pinball playfield has to be understood while playing. I really like that type of design in general, and I got the opportunity to think about it a lot in regards to designing our pinball machines.
Questball’s Imagine RIT debut was a hit with many of the kids there, they all loved bringing over their friends and family to face off against them and send marbles flying way too far outside of the board. Flippers were smashed to bits, but in a good way, as the kids loved flinging the marbles onto the other players’ boards. I think it’s safe to say that Imagine proved that our idea was in fact fun, for the kids at least, because the level of competition that some kids had with each other was wonderful and exactly what we were aiming for with our Pinbox designs.
The Strong Museum
The Strong offered a similar perspective, the kids loved the game, and loved to bring over their friends and family to play against them. We got a lot of comments from people that never really thought pinball could work the way that we had made it work, and that made me feel pretty good about the work we put into this project. Lots of people thought the idea that different boards were a different classical fantasy class was very fun and interesting, and gave pinball a cool little spin.
Overall, with the feedback and “playtesting” at both Imagine and the Strong Museum, I think Questball made a great showing. I’m super proud of the product we were able to produce as a team, and I think this Quest was a success… ball.
Wizard Pinball, just like “Frog and Toad’s Big Day Out,” was a collaborative project between myself, Brandon Korn, and Audrey Fuller. For our digital pinball machine, we decided to not iterate on our pinbox machine because the visual pinball software didn’t have good functionality for the co-op mechanics we designed for the frog and toad pinball. Instead we pivoted to Wizard Pinball, a previous idea we had. We wanted to emulate 70s/80s wizard stylings and put the player fighting against this evil wizard for points. The main gimmick was to get points by hitting the wizard statue that is up on a pedestal, and the ramps would be lowered until the player beat certain challenges (flavored as mastering different schools of magic.) Then the ramp associated with the “school of magic” would rise and the player could attempt to hit the wizard statue.
We wanted to have the ramps be unlocked by completing challenges. You can start a challenge, then select either hitting pop-up targets, multiball, or bumpers, and when you complete a set amount of those things, a ramp will rise and you can hit the wizard, gaining the most points.
When we got to designing it in visual pinball, not all of our challenges were quick to implement. We kept the idea of bumpers and drop targets to open ramps to hit the wizard bumper, but we couldn’t raise the ramps from the ground like we wanted and having them “always raised” took up much of the playfield, which we didn’t like. We made the gimmick to start challenges a kicker in the wizard tower. First, you have to knock down the outer wall of the tower to reveal the kicker, and then you can enter to start a challenge. After a delay, and the drop targets are raised, your ball is ejected through a one way gate at the back of the tower. The targets are on a timer, and if the ball drains or the time runs out, the rest of them drop for no points. As the pedestal is the main centerpiece, we wanted that to be the main target, and we think the current mechanism feels very fun.
Our final design added in more spinners and targets that are always active in an attempt to keep the playfield interesting for players who may just be trying to keep the ball alive, and to just generally give players more things to do. The ramp shot to enter the area with the bumpers (which we very lovingly referred to as “BumperWorld” during development) is very difficult, but we found that if you slightly miss, you fly around the right side of the ramp and follow a fun path. Because it felt so good when we accidentally hit this shot, we decided to put a spinner towards the back to encourage players to make the shot for points! Although we didn’t implement the “multiball challenge” how we initially wanted to, we still have multiball in our machine. Multiball can be activated while the challenge is active by hitting the right back target during the challenge. Our compromise for still being able to “fight the wizard” without being able to raise ramps was to have a ramp on the right side of the playfield, mostly out of the way of other shots, with a gate that opens allowing you to attack the wizard during the challenge. Similar to the ramp on the left, it is a very difficult shot, but it feels extremely good to hit and gives you the most points of anything on the playfield.
Overall, we were sad we weren’t able to do some of the unique things we initially wanted to do, but we still think the game is fun, and we certainly learned a lot in the process- both about Visual Pinball and how to design satisfying shots! It was harder than we imagined developing and designing at the same time, instead of adapting our pinbox machine, but we think this machine plays very well, and has some fun challenges!
Imagine RIT: Creativity and Innovation Festival is a highly popular annual event held on the main campus of Rochester Institute of Technology where I, along with my peers, got the chance to show off our pinball games as part of our own exhibit.
I worked the exhibit during the 12:00pm to 1:00pm block, plus a little bit longer alongside a couple of other people. During my time there, I let visitors of the festival play Pin-8-Ball – Visual Pinball X Edition on my laptop.
I learned a lot from this experience at Imagine RIT. Due to circumstances in class that did not allow Pin-8-Ball – Visual Pinball X Edition to receive an adequate amount of playtesting, this was its actual first time being played by other people. Unfortunately, at first, I think a lot of people were naturally scared to touch my laptop, so I didn’t get a lot of players in the beginning of my time at the exhibit. Crowds soon came in, however, and I ended up getting a lot of players.
While watching others play, I observed that the rules were definitely too lengthy and complex to understand right away. I had to do a lot of clarification and explaining to help people out while they played the game. Interestingly, however, I also noticed that children were significantly better at the game than adolescents and adults, including myself. After an initial explanation to them, they seemed to pick the game up rather quickly. There was even one kid who enjoyed it so much that he had to be pried away from it by his parents.
Luckily, because I displayed my virtual game instead of the physical one, there were no repairs to be made. I did make sure to thoroughly sanitize my laptop, however.
Overall, I generally received positive responses in regards to Pin-8-Ball – Visual Pinball X Edition. Those who played it this time around who had also played Pin-8-Ball – PinBox 3000 Edition appreciated the user interface because it kept track of all of the game’s information for them. It was also generally a lot easier to explain and understand in the virtual format than it was in the physical format. They also really liked the graphics and design of the game, all of which I made myself. I ultimately decided that this version of the game was already good enough to bring to The Strong National Museum of Play, so I didn’t make any changes to it. I also left the physical game as is for the same reason.
Players play and react to the PinBox 3000 and Visual Pinball X exhibits at our station
Strong Museum Pinball Day
The World Video Game Hall of Fame Celebration at The Strong National Museum of Play is an event that celebrates video games. In conjunction with the PinBox 3000 Workshop and this event, we, as a class, got the opportunity to show off the pinball games that we’ve been working on all semester. For myself, that meant that I got to display both Pin-8-Ball – PinBox 3000 Edition and Pin-8-Ball – Visual Pinball X Edition.
All of us in the class worked this exhibit from 10:00am to 2:00pm. While here, we got to show off our pinball games and let visitors play them. Additionally, beforehand, we got to meet Ben t. Matchstick, who is one of the cocreators of the PinBox 3000.
Like with Imagine RIT, I learned a lot from being a part of this exhibit at The Strong National Museum of Play. Because we were there for a long time, lots of people got the opportunity to try out both of my games.
Similarly to what I observed during Imagine RIT, players had difficulty understanding the rules of both games at first. I received some comments that indicated that they were too long to bother reading, which is likely what contributed to this. Additionally, some players thought that the game was simply just too hard. This time around, I did not notice a particular difference in skill for the games relative to age, which I was a bit surprised by. Instead, most players, regardless of age, did not perform super well. This indicated to me that they were too hard.
I also learned a lot from Ben and the other workshop leaders. They believed that I had a fun and unique game, however the rules that I had established were far too long to read. This ultimately resulted in a lot of the misunderstandings of the game’s functioning that many, including Ben, had while playing. Looking at the games that they brought along with them, I learned that magnets are a very versatile and interesting feature to include in a PinBox 3000 build. They were utilized with balls that were attracted by them on one machine, and on another they were used to hold obstacles in place while giving them the ability to slightly shift.
The class checks out the games that Ben t. Matchstick and the other representatives brought[1]
All in all, though, the general reactions to both games were once again positive. Visitors of the museum expressed admiration for the theme of them and they liked the designs that I gave to them. Players certainly picked up on the rules better in the visual version of the game in comparison to the physical one, but I expected that due to the user interface that it features.
Me sitting at the exhibit with Pin-8-Ball – PinBox 3000 Edition and Pin-8-Ball – Visual Pinball X Edition on displayMe talking to guests at my exhibit[2]
Takeaways From The Class
As someone who walked into this class knowing almost nothing about pinball besides how to play it, it’s hard to say that I haven’t learned a lot this semester. From its extensive history to its many shapes and forms, pinball is so much more influential than I originally thought it was, and it certainly is quite intriguing. I had a lot of fun in this class, and I’m super glad that I took it.
Creating these games has certainly been a fun process, and I can’t believe that History and Design of Pinball is already over!
Pin-8-Ball – PinBox 3000 EditionPin-8-Ball – Visual Pinball X Edition
This time, I teamed up with Jacob and Raina to do something interesting: make a Fantasy Battle themed Pinball Pinbox. We decided that making each Pinbox a different Character Class like a traditional fantasy TTRPG. Mine was the Archer!
So I wanted to have a giant bullseye and ramps to simulate a sort of volley of arrows to attack the person on the other side of the box.
PRODUCTION
It was really fun working on this with Jacob and Raina. I had to make some changes to my board since I kinda realized clogging up the center of the field for a battle machine like this wasn’t optimal.
When we had finished, we had a really cool project! And it was super fun being one of the only groups who had a Battle machine like this, something that actually can’t be done with a digital medium, this is a Pinbox 3000 Exclusive Experience.
I learned a few valuable things from my experience at Imagine. The main thing was that you shouldn’t wait until the last minute to try to install visual pinball on your laptop. I also learned a lot about my pinball machines. One issue with my Hole 18 Pinball was that I had a wall to block players from hitting the target by going up the very left side, but the ball could get stuck on this wall, which I didn’t realize. I had to compromise a little of the “skill” required for my game to fix this issue.
The wall the ball would get stuck on
I also realized a few things about my Visual pinball machine, MarioPinball. The main one was that when players would get the ball in Luigi’s Mansion, they wouldn’t realize that they got an extra ball that they had to launch. Sometimes this would happen to me when playing a real pinball machine, I’d think the ball got stuck somewhere and then after a few seconds, check the launcher and see a ball there. I believe that because it was a student project, people were more likely to assume that it was an error that caused the ball not to come down. It’s also possible that this happened because a lot of the playtesters were children and they just didn’t have enough experience with pinball to check for that kind of thing. Those were the main takeaways I got from Imagine.
I learned a great deal from people playing my games at the Strong Museum. The first main piece of feedback I got was on the Hole18 Pinbox machine. I have two main lines, Hyzer and Anhyzer that players could try to use to hit the basket, but multiple people showed that when the ball went back down the Anhyzer line, it would shoot right into the middle and instantly lose the game. Because of this, I tried to bend the Anhyzer line so it pointed closer to the edge so it wouldn’t drop the ball down the middle.
Anhyzer Line dropped the ball to the middle.
One piece of positive feedback I got about Hole18 Pinball is that it is very beginner/child-friendly. There are 2 simple shots to go for and there isn’t a lot going on. I was happy to hear this because the goal was to have the 2 main shots be the focus and the fact that the other aspects of the box didn’t distract from this was a huge positive. Originally, I had a lot going on with scoring, but when I simplified the scoring to just, +1 for hitting the basket, the box came together. The scoring needed to match the simplicity of the box for a more unified product.
I received a lot of feedback about Mario Pinball. One small bit of feedback from one of my classmates that meant a lot was that the red coins in the center of the machine were perfect for the theming. I have to give some credit to Kai because he recommended putting something in the middle of the machine; it was looking empty before I added the coins. It was great to hear this kind of positive feedback.
The biggest issue with Mario Pinball was that the game didn’t give enough information to the players. All the layouts and shots were clear, but I didn’t get to scoring, so it wasn’t clear that the players were making real progress. I also didn’t have any instructions about a win condition. The lack of a back glass on my machine really hurt it. I had to narrate what players should be going for as they used my machine, which was fine, but the game should speak for itself. The last small issue with Mario Pinballl was that when players would win by completing all the challenges and then getting the ball into the castle, the ball would shoot back to the players like nothing happened. I did have lights on a Bowser statue in the corner to try to convey that he had “fallen into lava” but because the ball was released after 1 second, players didn’t have time to focus on that. They expected “winning” to mean they didn’t have more to do, which is a fair assumption, so they were surprised when they got the ball back. I made a small change that the ball would just be kept if they won, which is what it should have been from the start. Other than that, most of the feedback was very positive!
Takeaways
I am so happy I got to take this class. I learned a lot about the history, design process, and industry of pinball. The biggest takeaway that I got was that taking this class felt like being a kid again. We did “crafts” working on the Pinboxes, and we went on a field trip to the Strong Museum. This class had a feeling of fun to it, which is not common for a college course. It was a great experience and the things I can take away from this course, both my knowledge and the pinball machines I built, are so cool and make me incredibly proud. For this course, I give a 10/10, would recommend.
