Author: Will Frank

IMAGINE AND THE STRONG

Me and the Questball team decided that the best course of action would be to showcase our Questball Machines at Imagine/The Strong as opposed to our digital versions, since they highlighted the ‘character select’ aspect better than the digital ones.

I don’t have any photos of my setup at both places, but man, what fun events. The fact that so many kids came up and had so much fun fighting their siblings or even in some cases their parents. It was a little annoying having to rapid fire fix the machines since some of the kids were manhandling those machines. But Jacob had them up and working in under five minutes.

One of the best parts of the Strong Museum Experience specifically was the fact that we got to meet the inventor of Pinbox 3000 and he got to tell us PERSONALLY how cool he thought it was that we designed Questball the way that we did. I felt really proud and felt like our hard work was being properly recognized. I also loved seeing all the kids play our machine at The Strong and then instantly go to the workshop and try and make their own. It felt like a really good full circle of the creative process. Just like how we joined this class because we liked Pinball and got to make our own with Professor Jacobs, those kids were then further inspired by OUR work and wanted to make their own. That’s just straight up beautiful.

Thank you Professor Jacobs and I really hope Retirement treats you well!

Questball VISUAL EDITION

Me and the team from Questball wanted to take each machine and make it it’s own cool Visual Pinball.

So with mine, the Archer Edition, I wanted to bring back the bullseye, add some drop targets, and have tons of long ramps. I was super inspired by the Spider-Man Pinball machine, which is one of my favorites.

I will admit, I was waaaaay too ambitious with this one. I thought Visual Pinball wasn’t that hard to use.

Readjusting/Struggles

I’m on a Macbook so I had to use VMWare Fusion to make Visual Pinball. And therein lay my biggest issue. Because Fusion does NOT like Visual Pinball. I had made a fair amount of progress, but my game was laggy, the preview screen wouldn’t work, and overall it was just not fun to use. So I pivoted to helping Jacob with his!

We edited his initial design slightly and added some more ramps and got to mess with the flipper gates. It was very fun! We didn’t end up doing too much since we were more focused on making sure our Physical Questball Machines were good for Imagine. But I enjoyed the little time I had with Visual Pinball, especially the drag and drop aspect of the whole thing.

Questball – Archer Edition

This time, I teamed up with Jacob and Raina to do something interesting: make a Fantasy Battle themed Pinball Pinbox. We decided that making each Pinbox a different Character Class like a traditional fantasy TTRPG. Mine was the Archer!

So I wanted to have a giant bullseye and ramps to simulate a sort of volley of arrows to attack the person on the other side of the box.

PRODUCTION

It was really fun working on this with Jacob and Raina. I had to make some changes to my board since I kinda realized clogging up the center of the field for a battle machine like this wasn’t optimal.

When we had finished, we had a really cool project! And it was super fun being one of the only groups who had a Battle machine like this, something that actually can’t be done with a digital medium, this is a Pinbox 3000 Exclusive Experience.

Space Bagatelle

Let’s talk about my Bagatelle Project!

Initial Concepts

I was inspired by old school depictions of space travel and pulpy adventure serials. I knew I wanted to something in that style. I started thinking about how a Bagatelle, something made in an era before flippers and before heavy graphics, would showcase the theme of space.

(INSPIRATIONS: Microsoft 3D Pinball Space Cadet, Pulp Sci-Fi Serials)

With that in mind, I drafted up my first design!

I thought that by making it so launching the ball and having it “Land” on planets for points could be very fun! Since you don’t have a lot of control over the ball, the hard part became designing and placing objects on the board to help guide the ball without feeling like there wasn’t any room for chance.

Building The Machine

Here’s where we were at just before I started play testing. We can see that there’s three ‘Planets’ which 500 or 1000 points each. I decided that since the kit came with 3 marbles, I would make it so that you had three “attempts” to land a spaceship on one of the planets.

Final Product

After play testing, I noticed a few issues so I pivoted. I added a FREE BALL if you launched the ball into the Black Hole since the way that the cardboard is angled has it so there’s a chance it lands in there on the right shot.

I also adjusted the pins and cardboard on the top part of the machine since stuff wasn’t slowing down enough to land on one of the planets.

Fin

This project was really fun! If I had more time I think I would’ve messed with the overall design a *little* more just since I didn’t really like how they were spaced out (hah). But I liked the design constraints that a Bagatelle comes with, I feel like you can make something more interesting with it because of that.