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!