For my advanced pinball project I decided to try and make a table that would react to the pinball that was inspired by some of the bonus stages of the Pokemon ruby & sapphire pinball game. For this project I needed an arduino, unfortunately the arduino did not arrive until the day before the project was due so I did not get to add as much as I wanted to this pinball setup.
The one thing I tried to make sure the table would do was react to the ball. I did not want to directly use buttons, partially do to not having the materials, but mainly due to wanting to recreate the feel of the pokemon pinball game, where it feels like parts of the board are alive and not simply components. I managed to create a sensor with variable succes by using a library that checked capacitance between two ports of the arduino, and connecting the circuit to some tinfoil on the back. I also covered the ball in tinfoil and put some tinfoil connected to ground beneath the sensor on the back. letting the ball complete the circuit whenever it touched both pieces of tinfoil at the same time. As stated before this didn’t always work and the wires that connected the sensor often came loose. I also added a motorized arm to the playfield that would block the ball but did not have the time to program a pattern of movement so I just had it mainly controlled by a potentiometer.
While I think that the idea for the pinball table was interesting the fact the supplies came in late did not help with the design. The game did not have any visuals as well which probably did not help its case. Overall though I think I did ok for the amount of time I had (because of the late delivery).
Pinball 2000 was the last pinball platform produced by Williams, Its notable for two reasons. The first being that it used a computer monitor to create a peppers ghost style effect on the play field, allowing for interesting game play and visuals. The second interesting thing about pinball 2000 is that it used conversion kits. Since pinball 2000 included a full computer the system was expensive. To make the platform more attractive to arcade owners who would purchase the system Williams made the cabinet in such a way that you could replace the play field. That way arcades could purchase new play fields at prices lower than that of a new cabinet. Only two games were released for the pinball 2000 systems, Revenge From Mars and Star Wars Episode 1. Three more games were planned, Wizard blocks, Playboy and Monopoly, though these games were canceled mid production.
A conversion kit for star wars episode 1 Source Link
After learning about the pinball 2000 conversion kits the first question that popped into my head was, “Has anyone made their own custom conversion kits?”. It took more Google searches than I thought it would but I did find a total of three projects made by two separate people as well as some other information about the system. The computers in the original pinball 2000 kits are now old and a big problem is replacing the parts. Since the parts in the original system are hard to find a third party company has developed software called Nucore to emulate the old system that pinball 2000 used. Posts and interview from the creators of the custom projects make it sound like they have developed their own systems for working with the cabinets. The custom projects I found are a port of Demolition man to the Pinball 2000 system, a recreation of Wizard blocks and an original project called Haunted cruise. The creator of the Demolition man port and Wizard blocks remake has video of working versions of each on his youtube channel, this also lead me to a Reddit post were Louis Koziarz (one of the members of the team who worked on wizard blocks) comments on the video and has a small back and forth with the guy who made the recreation. The creator of Haunted Cruise posted development videos on his youtube channel though in later form posts he stated that he was going to create a new system rather than continue to develop for the pinball 2000 system.
On our first trip to the strong museum one of the games that was singled out in the tour was Hyperball. Hyperball was Williams attempt to make a game that was more of an arcade game than a pinball cabinet. Executives had high expectations for the game, predicting it to sell 50,000 units. The game flopped and only sold 4,444, they used the remaining cabinets to produce other games. Bally attempted to copy Hyperball with the game Rapid fire, which produced the same number of units and also used left over cabinets to produce other games. Most people do not consider Hyper ball and Rapid fire to be pinball cabinets. Hyperball notably creates a noise of 90 decibels which is very loud.
These games and there failure are interesting. The goal of hyper ball is to hit targets to prevent lightning bolts from hitting you, these targets also correspond to letters and you get points for spelling out certain words. Its hard to do both at once and the noise from the game drowns everything out. Since William and Bally had reused the cabinets in other games I was curious to see if the games had any unique mechanical parts that were reused in other games though I couldn’t find anything.
Since I couldn’t find enough on Hyperball and Rapid fire to fill out a section I thought it would be interesting to look at Baby Pac Man since that was Midways attempt to mix pinball and arcade games.
I had two ideas for what to work on for the two player pinball. I waffled on which one to present and could not completely conceptualize either one. When I set out all I knew is I did not just want a game where the objective was to drain balls in the opponents drain. Both concepts ended up being cooperative and asymmetrical.
The first concept was called Hives & Hornets, and was inspired by bugs and the game Killer Queen. The origin for this was when I told professor Ian about this assignment and he mentioned the idea of attempting to adapt Killer Queen to a pin ball game. I drew a few messy sketches for this concept and wrote down some mechanic ideas for the game. The goal would be to pass balls between the players that would lock in to other parts of the field and release another ball to pass back. I felt like the idea was too impractical as it would require parts to recognize specific balls.
The second idea I came up with was called Fight the law. The concept of fight the law was inspired by the song I fought the law, and a joke by John Mulaney about old time bank robbers. In fight the law the players are bank robbers, one is in front of the bank holding off the cops while the other attempts to open the vault and collect money. Fight the law is a cooperative pinball game where the fields are not connected, though actions on one side effect the other. The game runs on a timer, the player in front of the bank adds time to the timer and prevents obstacles from reaching the other player, while the player inside the bank builds the players combined score and provides bonuses (like multi balls) to the first player.
To start off I thought that the play test was going to be for feedback and that we were going to modify our designs further. I spent a lot of time getting the wheel to turn properly. Two of the biggest breakthroughs in getting the wheel to work was removing the bottom of the wheel and my friend advising me to use a washer between the wheel and the board.
My roommate playing the game
I placed some pins at the top to get some variance, then shot the ball a few times and placed pins bellow the wheel based off of where the ball went. I planned to cut holes in the board, but because I thought we would iterate on the design I placed pins to hold the ball where the holes would go. That way if I needed to fix the hole placement I wouldn’t need to make a new board.
During the play test people liked the wheel. A common criticism was that the bottom of the board was kinda empty. For the next I assignment I think I will include more interactive elements on the board.
Layout concept Donuts are holes big circle is wheel triangles are general placement of pins
My concept for the Bagatelle assignment was inspired by an episode of Over the Garden Wall. In the episode, the main characters sneak on a ferry boat where all the passengers are frogs. The boat in the episode made me want to theme the bagatelle around a ferry boat. Since I wanted some form of unique mechanic, I thought that I could make the wheel of the ferry boat part of the board and have the ball turn the wheel. The layout I made for the design is mostly a place holder, as I wanted to see how the wheel affected the ball .
NBA Fastbreak Made March, 1997 Midway Manufacturing Company
Despite not being a basketball fan I really enjoyed the NBA themed Fastbreak pinball machine at the Strong Museum. The game leans into the NBA theme a lot, allowing the player to select which team they want to play as. As far as I can tell this has no effect on gameplay but is still enjoyable.
The instructions
The goal of the game is to get MVP rings. These are earned by completing six tasks, which will then activate trophy multiball mode and outscoring the other team. The main way of scoring points is interesting at the center of the play field there is a ramp to a basket, shooting the ball into the basket awards you points.
the basket
The other way of scoring points is during Pizza power shots or the occasional throw from the foul line. When either of these events happen you can press the shoot button to activate the flipper in the back box to attempt to throw a ball into the net
The amount of points a shot is worth depends on which of the lights at the bottom are lit up.
While playing I got to activate the pizza power shot and the million dollar shot modes, though I was trying to get the shoot around multiball mode, which i was unable to get. Also though it never happened to me at various points the other team will get an attempt to shoot a ball at the net and you can move a defender around the net to block the shot using the flippers. I really enjoyed this game, and would like to play it again sometime.
