Author: mxk6007

After going through too many different design variations due to technical difficulties, I finally settled on one and had it tested out.

The Good

There was less awkward ball flow compared to my previous design and the overall flow of the gameplay was improved on.

The design was also a lot simpler in terms of skill-shots as there was only one ramp and the players didn’t have to worry about slightly off-angle skill shots that were hard to access.

The Bad

Some comments I got were about the difficulty of the side bank skill-shot and how they just could not hit the skill-shot.

While it is a valid point, once they tried the shot enough times, they were able to hit it consistently so I don’t think it’s a big point I need to worry about changing.

What I’d Change

I would probably make slight changes to the side targets to make it more lenient to hit, but other than that I don’t think there’s too much I’d change.

Overall, I like how it’s turned out even though I’ve strayed from my initial design.

Initial Thoughts

Having built a number of designs throughout the semester, I listed out things that I liked to have in my designs being: ramps, smooth ball flow, and skill shots. I was thinking of a theme that could incorporate the three design choices and what I came up with was Skee-Ball.

Designing it

Initially, I thought of having a central ramp/bank that the player can shoot off towards three different targets that are at different elevations and have railings that would bring the ball back towards the flippers.

But during the designing of it, I didn’t account for the binary nature of the flippers in Visual Pinball as they are either on or off and there seems to be no in-between; making it almost impossible to not hit a ball and full power. That meant that my initial design would not work without being able to change the flipper’s strength settings, which I wasn’t able to figure out.

Improvising

As I went through several different variations, this was the one I had settled for.

There were three different targets that have a ramp there to catch the ball coming off from the central ramp and a bumper to push the ball back into the playing field.

One is in the center while the other two are angled towards the central ramp to the left and right of it.

The center target is there to represent the normal way of throwing a skee ball down the ramp while the two on the sides are there to represent bank shots that are done by banking the skee ball off the sides of the ramps.

Other than the three main components, there are two kickers and railings on each side for more interesting interactions other than just the three targets.

In the end

It’s far from perfect or the most interesting thing out there, but I think it’s a good design when considering all the variations I had gone through after deviating from my initial design due to technical difficulties.

What I’d like to bring

What I would like to bring to the Strong would ideally be my Advanced Visual Pinball design. But as I don’t own a laptop or have figured out a solution for it, my backup choice would be my Advanced Pinbox design.

Why?

My initial and ideal choice was the Advanced Visual Pinball design for a lot of simple reasons:

• I don’t have to worry about physical malfunctions or the likes
• It’s more visually appealing than the Pinbox
• There’s an explicit goal that exists

Having used Visual Pinball to construct my design, the biggest thing I don’t have to worry about is balls getting stuck somewhere. Also even if it’s just basic colors, it’s probably still more visually appealing than a plain cardboard box machine with almost no visual crafting done on it.

The last part is that my Advanced Visual Pinball design has an explicit win condition where the player has to knock down all three drop targets that are placed on the playing field. Having a goal to work towards would probably be a lot more interesting to play rather than an arbitrary design that seems to have no goals or the likes.

This is the reasoning as to why I’d like to try and use my Advanced Visual Pinball design at the Strong if possible; although I will have to work out borrowing a laptop from someone first. Otherwise I will bring my Advanced Pinbox design.

Due to my lack of familiarity with Visual Pinball, I knew my build would have a lot of chinks that I never ironed out, but for most parts, I think it turned out all right.

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The Good

The best thing I think was how well the ramps worked and how the ball interaction with the bumpers on the top of the second level handled itself.

The ramps had curves to them so it was fun to watch them roll along the curves onto the second level and it was even cooler if the rare occurrence of when the ball got off of one ramp, bounced off of a bumper and went on the other ramped and came down.

The Bad

This is something I didn’t consider till I was already out of time but the timing to hit the ramps was too strict and getting the balls up the ramp was too hard at times.

Alongside that issue, the way I had decided to handle preventing balls from getting stuck anywhere by sticking bumpers under the ramps, it just created more issues and it didn’t really create a smooth game flow that I had wanted.

In the end, it felt like people weren’t actually getting to play my build the way I had intended it.

What I’d Change

The biggest thing I’d change is to make the skill shots to hit the ramps much easier. That allows for more opportunities to get up on the second level and more fun.

After that, I’d rework how I would prevent balls from getting stuck under ramps. I would probably do something alongside of completely blocking it off with a block or the likes.

Initial Thoughts

Going into designing with Visual Pinball, I wanted to keep it simple and take ideas from previous designs, but primarily from my advanced design.

I wanted to make something with ramps and a second level again as I wasn’t too happy with how my advanced design turned out. As I wouldn’t have to worry too much about having well-built ramps where balls don’t get stuck, I was looking forward to it.

Designing it

The initial design I came up with wasn’t too different from my advanced design; there is an external ramp that was added in and instead of spinners to interact with on the second level, I planned on using bumpers.

I wanted to create a smooth flow of the ball going around the ramps and easy skill shots so getting up the ramps happen a lot more often.

Making it

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As I moved on to actually start building my design, some things had changed:

• The second level didn’t cover up the entire width of the machine
• There are only two ramps that led up to the upper level
• Removal of the external ramp

I had made the second level much narrow due to not being able to get external ramps to work. I haven’t been able to figure it out but for some reason, the ball would get stuck halfway through the loop and would not budge. Thus I had to give up on the external ramp and settle for simple internal ramps.

Alongside the compromises I made for the external ramps and upper level, I had created fewer ramps than I had initially thought to due to space limitations.

The ramps I was creating were taking up a lot more space than I initially thought it would and only was able to fit two in.

In the end

I think I had built something that I was thinking of from the beginning. It’s definitely rough around the edges but those are things I can learn from and take with me.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure how my machine would play out as I had spent so much time building it, I didn’t have as much time to test it out myself and flesh out the minor details. But after going through the playtest, it seemed like there wasn’t too much to worry about.

The Good

Overall, both the back and front ramps worked pretty well and no one really seemed to have trouble accessing the upper level. They required both a certain amount of strength and precision to use and the ball is quick to return maintain the quick pace that I wanted the machine to have.

The Bad

Overall, there was a lot of places where the ball could get stuck, and which it did, which I wasn’t able to flesh out due to lack of testing. Most of it was solved by shaking or nudging the machine a bit and the game would go on as usual. But it did happen a little bit too frequently.

What I would change

Other than making sure the gameplay is smooth by fleshing out the pinball getting stuck caused by less refine building, I would’ve like to have refined the upper level more than I ended with. I think it worked decently enough but there was definitely more room for improvement. Hopefully, my take of this design with Visual Pinball will end up with a more enjoyable design to be played.

Initial Thoughts

If there was at least one thing that I wanted to try with my advanced design, that was using ramps to get to a second level of the playing field. There was something about having multiple levels that always fascinated me when I see machines implement them in their own style and I wanted to give that a try.

Initially, I thought about what I specifically liked about machines with an upper level and how they handled it and narrowed it down to a few features;

• A skill shot ramp that leads up to the upper level
• Interactable objects on the upper level
• A fun way for the ball to drop back down to the lower level

After deciding on what I wanted, I started crafting.

Actually Making it

The first part wasn’t hard to implement as I just connected the lower back hole that was for the battle mode with a ramp that leads up to the upper back holes.

I did spend a little too much time though making it functional. I initially built the ramps out of cardboard but they were too stiff to bend in the steep ramps I wanted them to be and the way cardboard bends usually ended with the result of the pinball not even being able to reach the upper level at all.

Next, I tried 3D printing it but immediately gave up due to time restraints and eventually settled for lightweight cardboard. They were easy to work with and would maintain smooth curves for the pinball to reach the upper level.

After that was the objects I would populate the upper levels with. I originally wanted some sort of spinners but couldn’t get them to work smoothly. So I opted for golf tees and a hole in the center to make it like a mini bagatelle game in parallel with the pinball.

Then the last part was the method for the pinball to return to the lower level. I decided to make a half pipe as it was easy to implement as opposed to the railings I thought I could have made but I couldn’t figure out how I would’ve implemented them. Functionally though, they are identical so I don’t think it makes too much of a difference.

Lastly, this was something I added towards the end but I created a very steep angled ramp that would act as a skill shot and another means to gain access to the upper level. I threw this in to add emphasis that the skill shots that lead to the upper levels aren’t just about precision, but also the amount of power is required to reach the upper level.

Similar to sports, the idea I wanted to convey was that not only do you have to “swing” hard at the ball, but you had to stay precise with your “swing” at the same time to hit the target.

Wrapping Up

Overall, I’d like to think I had built a machine that achieved everything that I initially wanted for most parts. But I think I’ve had enough of the Pinbox for now and am looking forward to working with Visual Pinball.

Although it didn’t occur to us at the start, as we went through and iterated through design ideas for the dual machine, we realized how much of a stupid sport Quidditch actually was; seeing how the game didn’t actually end till the Snitch was caught. But as we were trying to recreate Quidditch on a pinball field, we tried our best to stick to the original.

Initial Designs & Improvements

Honestly speaking, the initial designs weren’t really a thing of beauty much alone something one could call interesting. It was basically pinball with just three hoops on the playing field and two balls instead of one. We knew we could do better than that and better we did.

One of the first things we thought about was reconditioning the win condition. Originally it would be so that if the Snitch went through your gutter, you lost. But after some discussing and debating, we settled for making skill shot holes that the Snitch had to be shot into in order for the game to end. This made the game much more skill-based as well as deviating away from the typical pinball win/lose condition.

The next thing we changed was how we would set up the hoops. Originally there would be two sets of hoops on both sides of the field but we deemed that to be a potential annoyance as it could interfere with the players trying to shoot the balls past their side of the playing field. Instead, we had only one set of hoops at the center of the field that both the players shared. This allowed for the majority of the playing field to be open and cause less of a disturbance for what it was.

But after we had cleared the playing field of the hoops, we brought in a mechanic that acted out the defenders of a quidditch game. We had a pseudo-grid and golf tees to represent the defenders of a player’s team and the positions they could potentially be in. Each player would get 3 defenders that they would set up on the opponent’s field, as they are there to be an obstacle for the opponent. They were also limited to only one defender per row to prevent one from setting up a blockade which wouldn’t be fair.

After all that, the last thing we did was set an alternate win condition to the game. We realized that it was possible for the game to go on for a long period of time, much like how it was possible with quidditch games in the Harry Potter world and felt the need for another way to end the game. What we came up with was a score limit that if reached by scoring enough points by getting the quaffle through the hoops, would end the game regardless of whether or not the Snitch had been caught and the player who reached the limit first would win. This ensured that while our game is trying to recreate quidditch, we made sure to keep realistic goals for players playing our game.

Playtest & Feedback

There really isn’t much to say when it came to the playtests. Most people seemed to enjoy the game but many can agree that it can get a bit hectic when there was a total of three balls on the playfield at any given time and sometimes they’d go flying off the decks as well.

Any improvements that came to mind after the playtest were heavily limited by the fact that we’re using a physical machine: a reliable method to keep track of the score, something to keep the balls from flying off the deck, a way to play out of bound balls quickly back into the game, etc.

Due to the limitation of having to work with a physical machine, not many improvements can actually be made without the proper skill sets to do so.

But if we could make a digital version of this game, we wouldn’t hesitate to do so.

As with most projects, I had expected to not stick with my initial prototype designs and make changes to it as I went along; however, what I didn’t expect was how much I would be changing it.

Designing & Building

My initial thoughts when designing the playing field was to keep the base mechanics of the game the same while adding in a few additional elements in the form of ramps that would complicate the gameplay at the same time.

As I started to build and pseudo playtest, I realized that there wasn’t something that was quite satisfying as I imagined it would have been with the ramps. After some additional brainstorming and more testing, I had come up with by combining the functionality of the curved ball catchers and ramps.

Although I had forgotten to mark them for how many points they are worth, every single curved ramp/catcher is worth points while the top ones also function as ramps for balls to interact with and users to use for skill shots.

Once I had figured out how to remedy my discontent with the design, finishing the build wasn’t too hard. But if given the opportunity to build another. I’d like to build it by 3D printing instead of working with cardboard as getting the ramps to have a nice curve to them to maintain a natural flow when interacting with the balls took a lot more than I had bargained for.

Feedbacks

One of the most mentioned feedback was what seemed like an incomplete theme or the lack of one. I suppose this was because I had been to busy playing other peoples’ builds and wasn’t there to explain but my theme was to keep things simple.

I wanted to keep my final build plain and simple to mimic the simplistic builds of earlier bagatelle machines that were just wood and pins; as well as making sure the players would be able to completely focus on the game with no possible distractions at all.

Otherwise, it seemed like everyone who had tried playing was satisfied with how the game plays out and how the ball interacts with the ramp/ball catcher fusioned elements.

There were a few comments that pointed out the lack of points, but as mentioned above, I had unfortunately forgotten but would have been as shown by the image below. The rules were that players would get 3 shots to get a high score and if a ball fell through, they get to shoot it again.

Results

Overall, the machine was still playable with everyone who had played it trying to get the ball in the bottom left pocket and either succeeding or failing and there isn’t much I would do differently other than the already mentioned changing the material I would work with to build if given the time and opportunity.

When I sat down to think about what I wanted to throw into my version of bagatelle, nothing really came to mind at first. After a few days of pondering and thinking about what I liked and didn’t like, I eventually settled for the addition of terrain to the playing field.

The main inspiration that sparked this idea was Chutes & Ladders and Ghost Leg. The idea was to add variables to the playing field that would complicate the game through the addition of interactions done on the ball other than just launching it with the plunger.

I wanted the players to not just pull the plunger without a care in the world but to actually observe the results of their actions and think twice before just mindlessly pulling the plunger.

Overall, I wanted to keep the basics of bagatelle so it stays familiar while further reinforcing it with the complication of the playing field and really make the player make each shot count if they want to get good scores. Thus the fundamental gameplay remains the same but with a more difficult playing field.