Posted on 05 September 2010. Tags: button, design, distance, from, Part, Pinball, start
While designing features for a pinball machine you have to think of the big picture at all times. Two things you have to consider are: How hard is the feature you are creating while you are playing it? And: How hard is the feature to get to?
This is what I mean by “distance from the start button”. How long it takes someone to get to the feature after they push the start button and start the game.
This is all about the pacing of the game. You want the game to be deep but you do not want there to be long stretches of “work” to artificially deepen the game. You want the game to be action packed but you can’t let all the action get too bunched up. You have to design the game so that the pace of the game is good. You have to place the different features at good distances from the start button.
The pacing of the game is very important. Where it is most noticeable is in how hard the various multiballs in the game are to achieve, or how far they are from the start button. The closest one is for the Novices, another one further away as a challenge for the beginning players and a stepping stone for the intermediate players, another to give the intermediate players a challenge, and lastly one really far from the start button for the experts.
A great example of this is in the recent Spider-Man pinball machine. Spider-Man has Doc Ock which is only two shots to start. Further out is Black Suit, then Battle Royal, and finally Super Hero is really far from the start button. Well done Lyman.
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Posted on 31 August 2010. Tags: design, Machine, Part, Pinball, Silhouette
Who plays our games? What I mean is what range of skill sets do the people that play our games have? Are they mostly novices or do they have some amount of skill? We have no means to do real research. So we mostly just guess.
Knowing who our players are is one of the first steps in knowing what game to design. How much of the game should be engineered for the novice, beginner, intermediate, expert, or Lyman?
My guess is people play our games first and foremost because they have the shape of a pinball machine. From a distance they have the silhouette of the game they know how to play on some level. I believe Pinball is like billiards, or darts, or bowling you have some idea what it’s about and you want to play it or you don’t. They are a form of entertainment but we are not a movie or bar band that people can passively participate in.
When I design a game I try and place emphasis on the beginning to intermediate player. I think it’s really important for the novice as well as the expert to have fun playing the game too. But I believe we should not bow down to the novice. We should instead make a game that intrigues the novice and pulls him in. Then after a few games the novice is no longer. In his place is a player on his way to being average. Yay!
The fear is that since a novice’s skill is so low they will play once not achieve anything, decide that their original assessment was correct, pinball was not their “thing”, and not play anymore. So it is often argued that we should design to allow the novice to accomplish something every game.
I argue that an initial experience of a particular game is not one 2 minute game but a series of games. The goal then is after that series of games the player has learned enough about the game to want to play it again someday. I think it’s a mistake to design a game so that everyone every game sees every major feature.
There is one wrinkle in this line of thought. More and more games are being sold to be in basements. Most of which are people putting a Pin-table next to their bar and 60” flat screen for when they entertain guests. Guests will play pinball because it’s there even if they normally would not. They are novices that for the most part will not become a player but still need to be entertained.
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Posted on 27 August 2010. Tags: design, Grace, Part, periods, Pinball
Grace periods are a large part of the pinball rule-set development time. I know it doesn’t seem that way but it’s true. I would put them 3rd in the list of time consuming pinball development areas. The top 5 would be: choreography, choreography conflicts, grace periods, device drivers, and finally the rules themselves.
In short a grace period is this. Some pinball feature / rule is available, and if the player does what the rule is asking for he will be rewarded, but you only have a limited amount of time to do it. If you succeed great you get the award. If the time runs out the game will seem to take away your opportunity. The light will go out and maybe even the music will change. Both indicate that your feature is no longer available.
BUT WAIT! What if the ball was flipped while the feature was available and the ball is now en route when the feature ends? Well when the ball arrives the software should remember that you had the feature available and give it to you anyway. This is a grace period; a period of time when you still can be awarded the feature even though the feature has gone away for whatever reason.
The first problem is when deciding when to show the total page. Often when a player finishes a timed event we like to show them how well they did for that event. We call this a total page. At first you would think that the total page would immediately show up when the event ends. Also the total page is important to add clousure to the feature that was running. The choreography could go like this: EVENT IS RUNNING 3 2 1 0 TOTAL PAGE and at the same time the music, background display, and lamps all change to reflect the feature has ended.
Now what about the grace period? The event ends and instantly you see the total page and then you score one more award during the grace. Now the total you saw is wrong. So should the Total page not come up until the grace period is over? But then you have akward presentation like this: EVENT IS RUNNING 3 2 1 0 music changes, display changes, lamps change A FEW MORE SECONDS then the total page. Lately this is how we have been doing it but I don’t like it that much.
Now there is the case where a grace period can restart the event. Imagine if you will you are playing a multiball like Battle Royal in Spider-Man. In Battle Royal you Super jackpot is lit by shooting each of the villain areas of the game. Then when you shoot the super jackpot shot you get an additional ball in play! Let’s say you have the super jackpot lit and you drain down to one ball ending the multiball. The super jackpot light goes out, but you shoot the shot during your grace peroid! The game will award you an additional ball into play and start your multiball up again! Cool huh?
In my current game, 24, there is a time in the game where you are trying to get someone to the hospital before they die. You have to make some number of shots or else they die. Let’s say you have one shot left and the time runs out and FLAT LINE! She dies. BUT then you make the shot during the grace period and it’s a miracle!
Anyway you can see that sometimes a lot of thought goes in to something as simple as grace periods.
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Posted on 25 August 2010. Tags: birth, design, game, Part, Pinball, rules
There are always some chunks of rules that have to come from flipping the game.
After flipping a game for the first few times you begin to realize that certain sequences of shots are fun, just kinetically. Therefore it’s really clear to me that you have to build at least some rules around the player performing that sequence.
In Star Trek: The Next Generation it was clear from flipping the game that there needed to be a special rule for shooting the left orbit followed by the left ramp. Thus the Picard Maneuver was born.
Terminator 2 is an example of a game that was largely birthed from flipping. When Steve Ritchie, Doug Watson, and I first started flipping the whitewood, it was plain that shooting the left and right ramps back and forth should be a big part of the game. Shooting that whitewood for the first time was lots of fun because it has really good flow.
Clearly when you shoot either ramp the goal should be to then shoot its counterpart. Each alternating ramp shot would build a ladder of lights until you reached the top. Also it was more fun if you did it quickly. So I added incentive for shooting the counterpart within a few seconds with the million plus rule.
But what should happen then? PAYBACK TIME! At first payback time was only awarded on the ramps. The thinking was you got here from being in a groove and shooting the ramps over and over. The rub came when people would miss their first 5 MILLION ramp shot and then flail and not get control of the ball for a length of time. Then the time would run out. So again the rules were changed / created from flipping the game; we made it so you could collect Payback Time from more than just the ramps.
Today games are more complicated. A great deal of the design work is done in team meetings and on paper. We often don’t have enough time to let the game tell you what the main rules will be. Once we get a whitewood a large percentage of the core rules have to be somewhat thought out.
Although, it’s not a good idea to completely design a game without flipping it. If you start flipping certain shots or sequence of shots and it is not easy or fun? Then you are stuck you cannot put in the rules you have mapped out there.
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While designing features for a pinball machine you have to think of the big picture at all times. Two things you have to consider are: How hard is the feature you are creating while you are playing it? And: How hard is the feature to get to?
