Thursday, March 31, 2011

Holiday

Just came back from a nice week off in the sun. They call me gingerbread man. Sweet!

Anyway.
Progress is going slow at the moment but I've done a little reconnaissance in various hardware/woodware shops and got a couple of good candidates for my cabinet and playfield.

Still not done with the actual theme of the game yet.
So my new plan is to design a "beta" board based on the current design without any graphics just to work out the kinks and see if the game flows properly. And is FUN.
It would suck to build a table that simply isn't fun to play.

Monday, March 14, 2011

Not standing still!

Despite the lack of blogging lately, work is going steady backstage.
The new design (playfield layout, that is) is nearly finalized.
Next comes the actual theme and playfield art which could further change the playfield to accomodate new modes etc. But I'm pleased with the current layout, although not accurately depicted below.


Stay tuned!

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Good old days!

Had a go on a couple of pinball machines last night, and it spurred me even more in the making of my own machine. There's something truly captivating in all those flashing lights, the sound and feeling of the games. It's hard to imagine why only so few people (here at least) still play...

It's also too bad that most of my ideas seems to be done before. But I guess it's about creating a fun game more than anything else. A lot of the major companies created pinball "templates" which were used to base new games on by switching the toys, rules and graphics. But most of the gameplay remained the same.

I'm going to have a go at redesigning the playfield from scratch. The current design has four flippers, but I'm not sure about this design choice anymore. I find myself not using the upper flippers during gameplay as one probably should. But...I'm pretty sure I'll be redesigning it again as soon as I've bolted down a few parts onto the playfield anyway....

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Babysteps!

This, my fellow readers, is Pinball Mainframe version 0.0.1.


It's not much, but it's a start!

At the moment eight lights are connected to the Arduino via a shift register. All of them individually switchable and in the picture they are running a little "ye old Knight Rider" lighting show. My wiring and soldering look like crap, but it's called a development board for a reason...
Ps. Using superbright LED's while prototyping is rather annoying.