Author: Jacob Cristo

Demo Days – Questball

Imagine

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.

Questball: Warrior Edition (Visual Pinball)

Initial Design

The initial design of the Visual Pinball version of Questball: Warrior Edition was originally meant to be pretty true to the original, however, Visual Pinball does not support any sort of multiplayer battle mode natively and I absolutely did not want to take on that hassle for myself. Instead, the VP version of this table is single player, but still is meant to play as though there is someone else “fighting you” and trying to sink the ball down your chute.

What Changed?

With this idea in mind, the new and improved design features a bunch of rails which bring the ball all around the table and spit it out back towards you as though another player was doing so.

Another feature of the original table was the use of ramps, but I found that the use of ramps and rails combined made for very uncontrollable game play, whereas just rails felt just consistent enough to still emulate the feeling of “battling” while still being easy to predict the ball’s movement patterns so that game play doesn’t feel difficult or unfair.

Questball: Warrior Edition (Pinbox)

Initial Ideas

Questball is made up of a series of 3 different Pinbox machines representing different classic RPG classes, the Wizard, the Archer, and the Warrior. These different machines would be set across from each other in “battle mode” so that your balls could be sent to the other person’s board, like a 1-on-1 fight between two RPG heroes/villains. This edition of Questball is centered around the Warrior. The initial idea for the Warrior Edition of Questball was to have lots of “defensive” pieces all around your board, meaning that you’d have lots of ramps that doubled as walls for the opponent, lots of ways to redirect and slow down the ball to make it easier to calculate your hits and how you’ll get the ball over to your opponents board.

What Changed?

As I went along, creating and designing the first iteration of the board for the Warrior, I found that my original idea of “defensive” pieces on the board was going to be very hard to make work properly, because a lot of these pieces that could keep your opponents from scoring on you too quickly also often became a hindrance to you when trying to get your ball over to the opponent’s side.

Eventually, I managed to set up a ramp in the center of the board that would act as a way for you to get your ball easily to the other player’s side, and set up a rubber band bouncer so that your opponents would have a very hard time sinking their ball too quickly when sending their ball down the middle of the board. In addition to this, another ramp was added on the left-hand side of the board, and a block was added to the right hand side. The ramp allows you to have a second course of “attacking” rather than just the middle, though it is much harder to get the ball up the ramp. The block makes it harder for anyone who sends their ball on that side to get you right away with it too, while not really hindering you, since you don’t need/want your ball to go through that side of the board anyways.

User Reactions

Overall, most people found the “battle mode” gimmick a lot of fun, and “choosing your class” was a cool way to mix up the battles between players. I think a lot of people found that the Warrior Edition of Questball had a hard time “attacking” the other player a lot of the time, as it took a good amount of precision and power to get the ball through either of the holes the Warrior has easy access to. Generally though, I think most players had a great time stepping into the role of the Warrior and defeating their enemies!

Awesome Bagatelle 3000

Final Physical Design

Original Rough Sketch

Initial Ideas

My original idea for this revolved entirely around something which I had seen on some of the example bagatelle designs we were shown, where the ball went around the entire board when it was originally shot out, and looped around and back up into the actual play space. Eventually, this evolved into the idea to turn the bagatelle into a racing-themed one, but I wasn’t able to find enough time to illustrate that.

Changes Made

At first, I really only had the looping mechanic down for the first couple of play tests, which was a little unfortunate, as I didn’t really have a way to “score”. So from then on I focused on thinking about how to approach scoring, but I realized I had an issue, since I could do something with adding pins to the board to act as scoring zones, but because the ball looped around and shot out from the bottom, instead of shooting up to drop from the top, it would be very hard to put those scoring zones in places where they were both out of the way and also able to be scored in. So instead, I decided to cut holes in the board. It sort of worked, but it didn’t really end up working or looking super great. However, it did create a pretty satisfying feeling when you did manage to sink a ball into the holes.

User Reactions

When we did the first play tests, I definitely didn’t have enough to show for with only having the looping mechanic, so I won’t touch on that play test as much. But for the ones that followed, I had managed to get the holes in the board, and “scoring” was somewhat implemented. Overall, most people did enjoy the looping mechanic and being able to absolutely pelt the ball around the board. There was also some feedback about how satisfying sinking the ball into the scoring holes was, but there was also a lot of feedback about how the game lacked any sort of theming or art to it, which is totally fair, since I didn’t manage to get any art onto the board unfortunately. Overall though, minus not really getting any art incorporated, I think I did a pretty decent job at making something that I have very little experience with making.