Geoff Gracia – Playing with Pinball

Demo Days – Gridiron Gauntlet

You can see my original machine here.

My Visual Pinball you can find here, <- Although it was not shown at either for reasons of software issues and technical difficulties with mobile ports of VPX ( S.J. knows)

Imagine RIT
General content

This was during my shift. I arrived shortly thereafter

My shift was the first one of the day on Imagine show day. I never was able to get a picture of me there with my table on my shift. The middle picture was during my shift and taken a moment before I arrived. The idea of tabling wasn’t new to me as I had done it all 4 years up until that point. I didn’t get to stay for too long past my planned block as I had to attend my capstone most of the day (9-5), and didn’t have a laptop (despite the fact it never got to run my VP project) as I was running that same capstone project hosted from my laptop the whole day in Gannett
I made some repairs ON my arrival. The machine looked more like the one above and I had added all the large walls and edges around the outside that are on my final. I was still in a “playtest” phase because I wanted to get more usage data to see how hard or where players were hitting and where it went off the table. While I didn’t get a formal player feedback documentation and not a ton of people to play the machine in that short hour, I was able to see how people interacted with it and what needed change or rework immediately. I saw the plunger needed strength and stability as an example. Older and very young play testers tended to struggle with the finesse the one rubber band and my playfield internals were set up. I made that note and change among others for Strong.
Made the walls permanent (you can see them in the final version at the Strong) and added more rubber bands to my launcher to increase pull back tension and power.

Strong Museum Pinball Day

This did feel like a long time. I did have some trouble arriving (showed up late into the first hour) because of needing to pick up a laptop from the library when it opened to install and run my VP. This attempt ALSO did not work and left me only being able to run .vpt which was not what I had setup. So I just wanted to perfect my Visual Pinball based on what I saw that day. Linux on my daily laptop did become the bane of my digital project :(.
I learned a lot more people than I thought were very adverse to playing because they were in “hands off” mode since most of the parts of the museum are record keepsakes that can’t be touched. It made people more reluctant to use our machines despite no issue
I learned that the designers and I had similar areas when adding created “branding” to the tables. On close inspection, I did see their elements were a lot higher print quality, but got feedback from Ben that said he really enjoyed the smoothness of my playfield heavyweight print, which made for good ball physics. He and his team also complimented a small but favorite thing about my table which was my “ball save peg” in the middle of the flippers on my cabinet that was heavily inspired by machines I love to play with that feature.

Takeaways From The Class

I GOT TO TAKE A PINBALL CLASS!! Just that fact alone was pretty darn cool. I hadn’t had a physical or tabletop-akin design and development class: I had wanted to take one and this course gave me that opportunity. ALL WHILE BLENDING PRIOR INTEREST AND PASSION! I loved the craftmaking and print-marketing design work I used and it made me feel truly confident in my creation skills. It made me feel comfortable (aside from Linux package things) and knowledgable enough to play or work on VP, tables which were something I had heavy interest in before this class but didn’t know where to start. It was also a joy for me to learn the history, see The Strong pinball behind the scenes, and “talk shop” about favorite tables others and I have. It was a blast of a class and something that lived up to my internal hype. And it never ceased to suprise someone: “YOU CAN TAKE PINBALL AT RIT??!”

Visual Pinball – Gridiron Gauntlet/Hockey Night 2.0

Drafting

This drafting was a stripped down version of my original intent because after looking into with the idea in mind of digitizing Gridiron Gauntlet. Eventually I moved away from it, but in this, I wanted to keep “buckets” where they are, then use ramps to have multiple levels of the field. I had bumpers and targets planned in the back. I sort of gave up on the idea of complex light coordination based on what I saw it was built like in the software. I tried to just keep it simple within reason for myself, also advised by S.J.

Visual Draft Version

Physicals

The above draft and demo video, as mentioned, was a digitizing of the table on the right. While doing so and building it out, I realized things just weren’t panning out creatively and the gameplay wasn’t as engaging. I realized that Hockey Night (left) was much more engaging and well recieved by players. I also felt more stimulated by its straightforward gameplay and more concise assets. And while it was originally a bagatelle, I just tweaked some placements and it ended up fitting pretty well into that format.

See the original table I ended up building out in VP < – My bagatelle Hockey Night shown on the left

Final Visual Pinball

This is my screenrecording for my final Visual Pinball game. It ended up coming out pretty solid and I think it is fun and a lot more stimulating than the direction I was headed before.

I couldn’t get the targets to go down as low as I want but everything else sort of worked with me for the most part.

I do wish I was able to have run the projects more often to get more user testing ( (but alas, laptops seemed to be my entire and seemingly always asured downfall) but I did get positive feedback from those I did test with outside of class.

My github for both files

Gridiron Gauntlet Pinball

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:

this was version 1 of 3; version 2 is not captured in any media

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

Pinbox Bagatelle: Hockey Night

Made by Geoff Gracia

When beginning to ideate on what I would seek to build, I was trying to start with by asking myself: what an under-represented theme for tables would be, or what hasn’t been done much or recently. I knew I wanted to try something I was familiar with, and I chose to focus on sports. I feel it doesn’t get a ton of attention with tables, especially with pop culture licensed tables making the majority of the money and sales.

My designs were mainly revolving around how to innovate with the “buckets” that I could create to catch the ball shots. I originally wanted to do large holes in the main board, but I found it to be much more reiterable and reusuable to just create objects on top of the play board to collect the score zones.

(Original Sketches and inspo)

I moved on to my actual physical construction. I reused cardboard from the kit in an order to reduce the waste of it and to make do with what I had available. I created all of the playfield in Canva and created the concepts for what it would look like in the final version.

I created a first version of the field in Canva that told me where to put the goals and obstacles (which is the exact one I used on the final version) but made a copy to make a rough “pin” draft.

(First Ver)

I got this feedback on the first version’s demo day:

Demo Video

I took a lot of that feedback and did what I could during that day to improve the experience

I created and attached a consistent logo and branding, an interesting backglass that I had imagined prior, machined wooden pucks to fit in their spaces on the field as the obstacles, made and painted the small cardboard “net” buckets, and cut out and created “toys” that would go on the puck obstacles. I added a “rules” play card to the side on demo day (it appears in the video at the bottom launcher section).

There was a small amount of time where I tried to 3-D print the nets and pucks but they were so small that it didn’t work correctly.

(Second Ver)

I got this feedback from demo day 2:

Demo Video (Final)

It was safe to say that I corrected almost all of the issues in the gameplay, and really committed to the visual style I had in mind in a way that was well recieved and executed well enough.

I wanted to also include the assets I made for visual reference (The hockey players were professional photographs that I “subject removed”). See all below