It’s been a busy November. So busy, that I don’t think I played a single game of pinball in the previous month.

But finally, this weekend I found some time to get back to my White water. A couple a friends jumped in and together we finished the first part of cleaning. We cleaned bottom playfield and all the basic parts that I left on the machine. Here’s how the action looked like:

And a couple of hours later, the result was playfield, all clean and shiny. Here are some pictures:

This concludes the first chapter of the celaning story. I will continue with the ramps, and all the bits that I will be putting back to the machine. I hope that I will be able to find some time to continue before the end of the year, but it looks pretty grim for now.

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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?

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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