# Meet The Team... Eric Priepke - Winchester Mystery House - Software Engineering & Programming **Source:** Dirtypool Pinball **Type:** video **Published:** 2025-10-30 **Duration:** 65m 47s **Beat:** Pinball **URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7POyZSWUuI --- ## Analysis Eric Priepke, software programmer at Barrels of Fun, discusses his journey from IT systems administration to pinball programming, his work on Dune and Winchester Mystery House, and technical challenges including LED efficiency (RGBW color mixing), graphics memory optimization with dual displays, turntable safety logic, and mode selection complexity. The interview covers his creative collaboration on lighting effects and reveals Winchester contains 3,000 lines in its LED config file alone. ### Key Claims - [HIGH] Winchester's LED config file contains 3,000 lines of code — _Eric stated this as a 'shocking number' during live code lookup discussion_ - [HIGH] Eric reprogrammed Cactus Canyon from scratch using P-ROC board and presented it at Expo Chicago, which led to his hiring at Spooky — _Eric explained this as the multi-step process that led to his entry into professional pinball_ - [HIGH] Winchester uses RGBW LEDs throughout (except possibly speakers) for power efficiency — _Eric detailed the RGBW lighting system and how white LEDs are more energy-efficient than red, preventing brownouts_ - [HIGH] Winchester's mode selection system required intricate logic to determine accessible rooms based on key acquisition and proximity — _Eric described the complexity as a 'very intricate bunch of stuff' compared to Dune's simple next/previous mode selection_ - [HIGH] Barrels of Fun uses Godot game engine for pinball software development — _Host asked about Godot analogy; Eric confirmed Godot as the platform used at Barrels_ - [HIGH] Licensed properties prevent opening source code to end users due to licensing agreements — _Eric and host discussed why modding cannot be enabled for licensed IP games_ - [HIGH] Eric's best competitive pinball result was 4th place in Division at Pinburgh pre-pandemic — _Eric stated this was his 'shining moment of glory' in public pinball competition_ - [HIGH] Turntable safety logic required extensive testing to prevent ball pinching and stepper synchronization loss — _Eric described a week-long testing process and at least a full day devoted to ball dislodgement mechanics_ ### Notable Quotes > "I'm the one who has to papier-mâché all of the pieces people make onto the donkey." > — **Eric Priepke**, early in interview > _Describes his role as integrating all team contributions; establishes his central coordination function_ > "Building this stuff is really fun. So even after a long day—you know, standard 8 hours or longer—I'm not at the end going, 'Man, this pinball stuff is driving me crazy.' I'm just having a good time." > — **Eric Priepke**, mid-interview > _Demonstrates sustained passion for pinball work despite demanding development cycles_ > "The LED config file for Winchester is 3,000 lines all by itself." > — **Eric Priepke**, technical discussion section > _Quantifies complexity of lighting systems; reveals scope of single component within game code_ > "Anything that has a licensed property to it, we can't afford to allow end users to do whatever they want with it because of the licensed property that we are the stewards of and have made agreements to only do specific things with." > — **Eric Priepke**, modding/source code discussion > _Explains industry licensing constraints on open-source pinball development_ > "I just love the machines period. Like the mechanical, I guess also artistry but the like how interesting all the mechanics are and the art on them just I love them as pieces of art in addition to enjoy playing." > — **Eric Priepke**, closing discussion > _Articulates broader appreciation for pinball machines beyond just gameplay mechanics_ ### Entities | Name | Type | Context | |------|------|---------| | Eric Priepke | person | Software programmer at Barrels of Fun; primary developer on Dune and Winchester Mystery House; formerly worked at Spooky Pinball on Rick and Morty | | Barrels of Fun | company | Pinball manufacturer where Eric works; produces Dune and Winchester Mystery House; uses Godot engine | | Winchester Mystery House | game | Recent Barrels of Fun release featuring turntable mechanism, dual displays, RGBW LED system, and complex mode selection based on room accessibility | | Dune | game | Previous Barrels of Fun game; uses simpler mode selection (next/previous); receives ongoing code updates alongside Winchester development | | Labyrinth | game | Barrels of Fun game using non-RGBW LEDs; receives minimal bug fixes as focus shifts to newer titles | | Scott Denise | person | Designer of TNA and Rick and Morty; recommended Eric to Spooky for programming work; found TNA programming difficult | | Spooky Pinball | company | Manufacturer where Eric previously worked on Rick and Morty | | Rick and Morty | game | Spooky Pinball game where Eric did programming work; predecessor to Dune and Winchester development | | Cactus Canyon | game | 1999 Williams game that Eric reprogrammed using P-ROC board; presentation at Expo led to Spooky hiring | | P-ROC board | product | Programmable pinball control board used in custom projects; Eric used original P-ROC framework from Adam Prebble and Jerry Stellenberg | | Adam Prebble | person | Creator of original P-ROC framework with Jerry Stellenberg | | Jerry Stellenberg | person | Creator of original P-ROC framework with Adam Prebble; founder of Multimorphic | | Trent | person | Collaborated with Eric on Winchester lighting effects; created animated LED sequences in After Effects | | Brad | person | Artist responsible for Winchester artwork; created Evergloss decals praised for visual quality | | Mission Pinball Framework (MPF) | product | Open-source pinball framework used primarily by homebrew community; prioritizes versatility over efficiency | | FAST hardware | product | Pinball control hardware paired with Mission Pinball Framework | | Godot | product | Game engine used by Barrels of Fun for pinball software development; provides visual editors and programming capabilities | | Pinburgh | event | Major competitive pinball tournament; Eric placed 4th in Division pre-pandemic | | Expo Chicago | event | Pinball exposition where Eric presented Cactus Canyon reprogramming and later debuted Winchester | | Rick Turner | person | Programmer who worked on Corvette Color DMD; operates in similar technical pinball space to Eric | | Mark Minitz | person | MPF developer credited with Nightmare Before Christmas as first polished MPF project using extensive custom code | ### Topics - **Primary:** Software architecture and coding frameworks for pinball, LED lighting systems and power efficiency (RGBW implementation), Winchester Mystery House game development and technical challenges, Turntable mechanism safety logic and ball physics, Career path from IT systems administration to professional pinball programming - **Secondary:** Licensing constraints and intellectual property restrictions in commercial pinball, Graphics memory optimization with dual display systems, Mode selection systems and room-based navigation design ### Sentiment **Positive** (0.82) — Eric expresses genuine enthusiasm for pinball work, appreciation for team collaborators, and pride in technical accomplishments. Host is complimentary and collaborative. No significant negativity; only minor self-criticism from Eric regarding his own competitive play skills and analytical perspective on his own work. ### Signals - **[community_signal]** Interview series 'Meet the Team' humanizes development staff and documents technical decision-making for Winchester (confidence: high) — Host introduced video as effort to 'give a face to the people behind' Winchester; discusses collaborative process with team members - **[design_philosophy]** Winchester's mode selection system integrates room-based accessibility logic seamlessly into playfield mechanics, providing player choice without gimmickry (confidence: high) — Eric described intricate logic for determining unlocked rooms and key requirements; host praised integration as 'really well integrated into the playfield's rules' - **[licensing_signal]** Licensed IP prevents source code modding access to end users despite technical requests from experienced developers (confidence: high) — Eric declined DJ Huxley's (ex-Google C++ developer) request for modding access, citing stewardship obligations to IP licenser - **[personnel_signal]** Eric transitioned from IT systems administration (ISP support, web services administration) to professional pinball programming via P-ROC homebrew project (confidence: high) — Eric detailed career progression from dial-up ISP support → system administration → Cactus Canyon P-ROC reprogramming → Spooky hire - **[product_strategy]** Winchester Mystery House incorporates RGBW LED system to address power efficiency constraints encountered on previous Labyrinth game where full-screen colors could cause hardware brownouts (confidence: high) — Eric detailed how red and green combinations on Labyrinth could brown out hardware, solved by using white LEDs in RGBW system for Winchester - **[product_concern]** Winchester turntable mechanism required week-long testing cycle for ball search and safety logic to prevent stepper synchronization loss (confidence: high) — Eric stated turntable safety 'was probably like a week-long process of testing different methods' with continued refinement post-Expo - **[technology_signal]** Graphics memory and GPU limitations on dual-display Winchester required custom resource loading solution to prevent LED pause/stutter during texture cache operations (confidence: high) — Eric detailed transparency PNG animation consuming texture memory and developed background loader using Godot's resource system - **[technology_signal]** Barrels of Fun standardized on Godot game engine for pinball development, representing shift from original P-ROC framework Eric created for Cactus Canyon and Rick and Morty (confidence: high) — Eric mentioned creating custom framework 'completely rewritten' but structurally similar to P-ROC, now used at Barrels --- ## Transcript Hello everybody. Welcome to uh another This is This is Meet the Team. This is Meet the Team. It's not our normal little like podcast thing. It's uh it's something instead that we're kind of diving into to talk about Winchester and to give a face to a lot of the people that are behind it. And uh today I'm noticing that I don't have my drop shadow set up correctly. We are on a new computer. Uh, but everything else seems to be working right now. And today I am joined by none other than Eric. I'm hoping I'm saying the last name right, man. Is it Prep? Prep key. Prip Key. See, man. Almost. Almost. Uh, he is the software programmer at Barrels of Fun. He worked on Dune. He worked on uh Labyrinth and uh maybe a little game called Winchester. I don't know if you're familiar with that. Welcome. Hello. This is where you say hello, Eric. Uh anyway, so as we do, it's this is a live interaction. We're going to talk about uh your journey, I guess, in terms of coming into pinball and doing programming for pinball machines, and then we'll talk a little bit about all the fun stuff that we did on Dune. You're one of the people that I would say that I interfaced with the most on the project. I feel like uh no matter who it is, you're kind of the person everybody kind of poops on cuz everybody gets their stuff together and then they throw it at you and they're like, "Come on, make it work." Like poking you with a stick. Like do the thing now. Right. Yeah. I'm I'm the one who has to paperiermâché all of the pieces people make onto the donkey. Well, how does I mean I think we got a pretty good donkey this time. Well, I think the other donkey was all right, too, but I just I have to stick all the things everybody else makes together. So, yeah, I do kind of have to deal with everybody. Yeah, you're like the glue. Big time glue. Uh, we got Insanity Pinball on here. Insanity Pinball put over a billion on Dune the other day, which is just like kind of mind-blowing to me. Um, [clears throat] I'm adjusting my volume so that it doesn't feedback. Anyways, uh, so let's talk a little bit like obviously you weren't doing pinball as soon as you came out of the womb. So, uh, what were you what before pinball? U, uh, I know that you did a stint at Spooky before becoming part of Barrels of Fun. Um, so what were what were you doing before that that kind of led down the path of maybe I can do pinball machines? Well, just as a a little bit of a flavor background to the you didn't do pinball coming out of the womb thing. When I was in high school, uh I really wanted to get into working on pinball back then. Didn't know that was a thing that was actually possible, but I went to school for mechanical design thinking I would get into pinball design. Um that didn't ever really pan out, but I had the, you know, the idea of trying to do pinball for a long time. Um but kind of panned out. You are doing pinball, right? Yeah. Different direction than I was headed originally, but um I just always ended up in computer jobs because I've been a computer nerd since the early days of 2400 bod modems and plugging into a phone line and all that. Like I I've been online term for ever. So I just sort of fell into like tech supported an IP uh internet provider. Uh and then uh after being there for a long enough time, I moved up into like the commercial support division then and then ended up doing system administration for a web services company. So building and maintaining all of their servers for be it mail, web, DNS, uh database, all that stuff. And I really liked it to start with cuz I liked doing all of the old internet things. By the time I finally got out of there, I hated it because it was all e-commerce and platforms that upg uh update their code every two weeks and break everything and it just it was terrible and I was so happy to get out of there. So, one thing I've noticed from working with you on the pinball machines is that you're in you're insanely good at kind of frameworking out quick solutions to programming problems. And does any of your work in that tech space from before you worked in pinball have to do with your kind of ability to kind of sketch and framework out coding ideas quickly or maybe um that's more of a being able to do that kind of job is more of a a an ability to learn from instruction quickly like be able to speedread manuals and figure out what's going on and and uh put together [clears throat] how you're supposed to do But I've always been a big puzzle gamer like my whole life, whether it's on paper, whether it's video games, anything like that. Anything that's puzzly, I've always been really into. So, um, another thing that I did in pinball for a long time was working with Color DMD, doing the displays for them. And that was fun because it's basically a giant puzzle game. you're trying to figure out how can I identify all these different kinds of graphics and when they happen and how they overlap and stuff. So that's funny. My other friend did that as well. I'm curious if you know him. Rick Turner. He did Corvette. He did he did a number of the other No, I never really uh met him or anything. That's his Gabe Timmer and some of the others. But um no, I never uh actually talked to anybody else. It's just that's a small world out of the two programmers that I know fairly close that they're both working on color DMT. I mean that's in the pinball space so it's kind of expected to a certain degree. Yeah. Anyways, yeah. So the bulk of my working life was either doing support for or system administration at internet companies before doing this. So an opportunity arises what happens? It was kind of a a multi-step process. I uh I had done the it starts with the Prock because the Pock came out and I've had a Cactus Canyon since it came out in 99 whatever. And when the Pock board came out, I was like, "Oh, neat. Somebody's going to make new code to finish Cactus Canyon." And like a year and a half went by and nobody had done it. And I went, "Okay, I guess I'm going to have to make new code to finish Cactus Canyon." So I reprogrammed that programmed that whole game and took it to Expo in Chicago. And from doing that, I met Scott, uh, Denise, designer of TNA, and then later Rick and Morty. And because he knew I had done the Cactus Canyon thing, and he knew he didn't want to program another game cuz he had a terrible time on TNA. Just not not his idea of a good time, he just asked me, "Hey, would you be interested in helping out on this?" And got me in the door over at Spooky to work on Rick and Morty. There you go. It's It's a who you know scenario. So, was there like an apprehension? How similar are the coding worlds of of you know the wild extremely fun world of of technical IT backend server databases versus you know pinball class object kind of stuff. Uh it was it is pretty different like the stuff I did before was mostly shell scripting and a lot of Pearl and dealing with large amounts of text and stuff like it it's definitely different but I don't know it was it for me it wasn't that hard to adapt. It's not all that far removed from PHP, which I did a decent amount of for not fancy front end, but front-end stuff for my own tools and things. So, that wasn't too much of a jump, I guess. Sure. One thing I was worried about and and I think that this kind of any person that is doing creative work, and I would consider some of the programming type stuff that you're doing creative as well, is that when you do you want to do something professionally, you start doing it and then it becomes like not a chore, but it's like difficult, right? It seems that you very much still love pinball, especially with Winchester recently. I think that the general consensus is that everybody that's worked on the team, and is the whole point of these videos, is that we still very much love pinball. Uh, is there anything you would say to like someone who's approaching a a job that they love professionally now to help keep them motivated and in that space like creatively and positively? I don't know. Like, I don't know that's something you can really help somebody out with. It's just a matter of your own personality and how you react to what you're doing. Um like if the work that you're doing ends up being hard and you know you end up at the end of every day you know like burned out and worn out then yeah you're not going to want to go back and look at the thing that you're working on. But to me building this stuff is really fun. So a even after a long day, you know, you know, standard 8 hours or longer, I'm not at the end going, "Man, this pinball stuff is driving me crazy." I'm just having a good time. So it just works out for me. It really is such a puzzle. It really just depends on the person. That's fair. That's fair. So let's talk about Dune, right? So Dune and Winchester very different problems in terms of like what the code required in order to have the experience kind of like laid out, right? Um, I feel like Winchester is definitely a more complicated game in terms of like how the different rooms kind of situate and how the travel mode uh dictates that. What did What was like a surprising difference when you dove into Winchester versus uh like Dun's challenges? Oh, the mode selection is definitely a thing that I was worried about going in. Um, but on on the other hand, like having new things to figure out helps develop better skills for handling that sort of stuff. So having a challenge is good, I guess, but in Dune like to select modes, it's just go to the next one or go back to the previous one. There's not any logic [clears throat] there. And this whole thing wanted to be able to do with okay, you're in this room. Which rooms are the ones close by that you can get to? and only the first three are going to be unlocked. And then any of the other ones after that are going to be locked and you need a key for it. And then once you get to the door, then we need to see what rooms can you get to from this room and how many are there and are they locked or not? And so yeah, there was a very intricate uh bunch of stuff to build to get that um mode selection stuff to work. But I think it's great. I the fact that it's going to allow people to pick and choose their where the path they take. I think especially for the home market that's going to be fantastic. And building this like mode value as you're traveling around if you've acquired keys like it really does give a lot of like freedom of choice to the like person playing right off the bat and not in a gimmicky way. Like it's really well like integrated into the the playfield's rules in my opinion. Um we got a handful of questions. We got roller coasters is here. You met at uh expo. Um he's saying if you had to make a best guess on how many variables are in Dunes code. Jeez, I don't know. Um it's just from a structure standpoint everything is very segmented the way the because the framework that we use is based on but not directly the framework that I used in Cactus Canyon and Rick and Morty cuz I I used the uh the original PI procame framework that uh Adam Prebble and uh Gerry Stellenberg had made for their boards for those two games. and I took what I had learned from those to build the framework that I now use at barrels. It's completely rewritten. So it's not the exact same thing, but it's it's the structure is similar. So a lot of things are separated into modes. So like when you do a prophecy mode, all of that code is in a specific uh file in the framework. So it has its own variables. So, like to total them all up would be really hard because there's all these different bins. Like skill shot is one and like every single segment of the code is so broken out. Well, you gota you gota you got to give a shot, man. Just a shotgun number. You got to give the people what they want. Yeah. I don't I thousands. I don't know. Wow. There you go. You said thousands roller coasters. Um that's really interesting that they're each kind of like contained things. U misled from YouTube. By the way, we are also streaming on YouTube. I have access to see that stuff. You probably can't, Eric, but uh Misled's asking if the if you have any experience or opinions on the MPF platform. I don't know what that is. [snorts] Oh, that's the mission pinball framework. That's the framework that the guys who uh do the fast hardware that we use. Sure. Um, that's their like open- source framework that their their big pitch there was they were trying to make something easy for people who are not programmers to use, which I always I kind of feel like that's overselling it because you still have to learn how to write the config files for it. It's not as intricate as actual programming, but there's still a lot to learn. So it's not like training wheels, you know, you still have to do some heavy lifting if you're going to build stuff in. Would you consider like the Unity game engine a good analog for that since didn't isn't Unity kind of designed for like you not having a lot of programming experience for people that want to build games. Uh it it does have but so does GDAU the thing we use. It does have a lot of visual editors where you can drag and drop things around without having to write code. But you still have to do a decent amount of actual programming in Unity compared to with MPF. You just write textbased config files that sort of end up looking like an outline for a school paper in high school with a lot of, you know, this section and then its details and the next section and its details. And it's fine. uh it's not super efficient because it's made to handle so many different kinds of configurations of hardware and gameplay and you know they they have they want it to be a one-stop shop for anybody doing anything homebrew. So it covers so many bases that it's not really made for efficiency, it's made for versatility. So, it needs more horsepower to do the same kind of thing that you would do. It's a trade-off, right? You're getting, you know, benefits [clears throat] in one category, but for the for the homerew community and for the open source community, but like it's fantastic. People can jump in and contribute to it or if they just want to get a a whitewood they threw together up and running with basic rules pretty quickly. You can do that sort of stuff real fast with MPF, right? But But to be able to do complicated display stuff and uh that does do light shows pretty well, but it it takes a lot of custom coding even on top of MPF to be able to do detailed things like um uh Mark Initi's Nightmare Before Christmas was one of the first big MPF projects that really looks like a nicely polished finished project and he did a lot of custom code on top of the configuration files to get things like on the display better than what they come just with what the config file can do. I think that it's a a talent of the people using a you know any tool is just a tool, right? And if you end up finding a way to use it in a unique way or putting your own talent and flare to it, you can you can make it function higher than its baseline ability. And it sounds like that's kind of what I'm hearing for the MPF platform. Um DJ Huxley has an interesting question. I'm guessing the answer is probably no to this, but uh he says that he's a C++ dev. He's an ex Google guy and uh he's got some good godo experience, which is the platform that we use uh at barrels for these games. He has a labyrinth and he wants to start modding and he's wondering if there's any chance that the people can open the software up so that people can start exploring the codebase that licensing presenting a hurdle. This is just flat out not a question for us to be perfectly honest. I mean the just yeah it's not necessarily a question for us but just the answer is no. Anything that has a license property to it, we can't afford to allow end users to do whatever they want with it because of the license property that's in there that we are the stewards of and have made agreements to only do specific things with. Cuz someone's going to replace the giant dune worm with a penis and then you know the people that provided the license to to barrels would be like that's a penis not a worm and that would not be good. Right. Yeah. And And you can you can say all day, you know, oh, but that's on the end user, whatever, but it's the licenser doesn't see it that way. That's not how these agreements work. Like, we cannot enable that sort of thing. So, there you go. Um, insanity is a real question. He wants to know how many lines of code are in the game. Again, I can't even imagine that that is something that we have. Oh, you going to look it up real quick? Have that number? Hang on. Does that Oh, here we go. Look at that. live live code interaction. Hold on. I don't know if GitHub tracks that or not. And again, this would only be even if it did. The question is, did I fix my reward so that they're in the eyeball in the background? Roller coasters. Give them a bath. Let's see if it works. No, it uh it doesn't seem to have like a summary of I tell you what, give me give me give me that number later and I will post it on Instagram. Oh, god damn it. The mask isn't set up. Oh well. Well, now I know something I need to fix. Um, so yeah, I'm I'm very curious cuz I'm curious how many like uh you know when you're when you're working and we're essentially making a video game, but in instead of it being controlled by a mouse and keyboard and having 3D graphics, it's controlling solenoids and other you know stuff all over the all over the playfield. So, in terms of like the complexity of something like this versus a indie game, I'm curious about Okay, so just one shocking number that I can get kind of quickly. The shocking number LED config file for Winchester is 3,000 lines all by itself. The LED config. That's crazy. Uh, and speaking of LED configs, I mean, a lot of people may not know this. you know, you're like, "Oh, you're a programmer, so you just write the logic behind it." But you were you were pivotal in the lighting effects for the game. And this has been praised like all over the place, even on our favorite place like pinsside.com and Reddit. Um, people have talked about how the light shows on Dune for sure. And also from what they experienced at Expo were really mind-blowing. And, uh, I know that you work with Trent on that. Can you can you talk a little bit about how integrating those ideas, what helps you come up with a creative idea on like how the light should integrate? cuz I know like having the um pattern in the whitewood kind of dictates what your can and can't do in terms of uh you know lighting graphics. I know you do wipes and stuff like that, but uh the attract mode is really special. I think it the way it snakes around through the rooms is really neat. Yeah, that particular one is entirely uh French idea cuz I well I I shouldn't say that. I had said maybe doing an attract mode that does, you know, lights moving around on the playfield that are in the colors of the spirit like lines you can see on the playfield. I didn't give him any other specifics than that and he came up with them running around the map which was not what I intended. I meant like bigger blobs of light moving around. I was what I was picturing. He came up with a whole different thing. So, uh, usually it's me describing specific, sometimes very specific, sometimes not at all specific, and then he builds something in After Effects and sends me an [clears throat] animated block of color, and then I run that through some code to turn it into the LE commands. But, um, sometimes it's my idea from the beginning and we go back and forth several times on no, no, change this, change that. And sometimes like that one with them running around the map in the uh track mode. It's something he came up with all by himself. So you you talked about uh two things which I thought were pretty fascinating when when we chatted at Expo. Uh one has to do with how the RGBA lighting handles power efficiency which I think is kind of interesting. Um using [clears throat] the the white in order to to calibrate into a specific color. Um so I want you to to touch base on that. And then uh the other thing I thought that was pretty interesting um is that the well here start on that one while I format the the other question in my head. Okay. So every uh LED in uh Winchester I think except for maybe the speakers is RGBW. So it means it has a red, a green and a blue element like standard colored LEDs do. But it also has a white element. And the way like if I am having it do some random off color where the blue is down like 30%. It sets the white to 70%. And then only turns on the red and the green at the 30% extra above white to get the color that it needs. And the white LED is way more energy efficient than the colored ones, especially the red because I I think it was red and green together to make yellow can uh on uh labyrinth where we don't have RGBW. If I turn the whole play foil on in yellow or god forbid white, it can brown out the hardware because it's pulling so much electricity, so much amps or is that what it is? Yeah, wants end amps. It's got to pull amps eventually, right? Yeah. So, with the RGBWS, I can get those brighter colors and it doesn't even come close to maxing out the amount of overhead we have through the hardware. So, we're pushing more LEDs on the same hardware and I can do whatever I want with the color, which is nice because there's LEDs in the apron. There's I mean, there's LEDs everywhere. If you you put an LED in there, you know, there's 128 LEDs just in the sides of the cabinet. Right. Yeah. Talking about that lighting. But on the theme of efficiency, the other question I have is we were talking about limitations, right? And I remember that we were hitting not a memory GPU limit, but with the integration of two displays, right? We have to push even more graphics out at the same time on the hardware. So, it's important to be efficient about it. And I know that we were talking internally there was a transparencies issue and how to use PGs to to kind of put this stuff up there, but you had come up with an interesting solution to try to like circumvent and to make sure that we didn't like overkill the graphics memory. So yeah, anything that's not in the engine we use, anything that's a video streams, so it doesn't take up any texture memory, but anything else, images or um animated sprites or anything like that, they take up texture memory. And at especially the resolution of the ghost box, cuz it's like 1920 x 720. Yeah, it's pretty big. If If I do a full screen uh PNG animation on there, it eats up tons and tons of texture memory. So there's a like a caching system um that also takes a while to load if it's really large which can you you can actually uh see if if it loads in stream with everything else you can actually see the LEDs like pause for a second because the whole system has to wait for that uh bunch of graphics to load. So using um a resource loader thing that's built into GDAU, I can load those in the background on the way to using them so that they're there when we need them and then unload them as soon as we're done to uh avoid that. But the the key there is to be able to overlay anything on a video, it has to be uh transparent images because I can't do transparent video. We don't have the ability to do that. Sure. I mean an alpha channel built into even a ProRes file would a 10- bit file would be enormous in file size. It would just be like incredibly cumbersome for the system to even begin to put that out. Not to mention needing to have the codec internally inside of the system and whatnot. Yeah. Um so we got to touch base on I think what is arguably the coolest feature on Winchester is the is the turntable. And uh you know when you see this multiath multiball thing that spins around like is the first thing that go through your head like oh [ __ ] or is this like a much more solvable problem than it really seems? Yeah. The The fun thing there is uh the detail control of that was not my problem because the guys who do the engineering end of it wrote the firmware that handles the I just tell it go to angle one go to angle two go to angle three and the the little board that drives the motor is the one that has to figure out what that means. So the heavy lifting there was was not my issue. Um, there is a lot of logic I had to build for when is it safe to turn the table because we don't want it ever pinching into a ball and getting the stepper to slip and be out of sync because that the gameplay is basically broken at that point. So, a lot of checking for when something requests the table to turn there. There's [clears throat] I have to decide if it's actually safe for it to turn or if I have to wait. And we had a the only time that the ball even got stuck when we were troubleshooting this, which we did extensively to make sure that Expo would be a double thumbs up experience for anybody playing it. Uh, you know, there was a lot of talk on like how to properly like jiggle and move. Like I feel like there was at least a whole day or two spent talking about how to properly uh dislodge the ball from this one position where it could potentially get stuck at the maximum success rate. Yeah. the the ball search specifically that involves the tables was probably like a week-l long process of testing different methods and deciding what was actually the most reliable sure to get out of and it's still not like it won't necessarily get it the very first time it tries but it does a decent job without jamming anything or getting stuck or whatever. Yeah. And it's such an it's just a fun mechanic. Um, what was what was your first experience of seeing the game after it had its art package and everything? Was that expo? Well, I guess I mean I saw it on like pictures and stuff from the office, but in person the first time I got to see it was when we set him up at Expo. And did you get to did you get to play it at all? Was there like a moment where you got to like, you know, you're actually feeling and playing the thing that is is a finalized piece of polish in terms of having art assets on it and all this stuff compared to your white wood. Yeah. on Wednesday when we were setting up at Expo, um obviously there wasn't the public wasn't there yet. So, we got to spend some quality time with it. And um of course it's hard for me because when it's still this early, I'm constantly seeing things that, oh, I should have changed that or oh, they shouldn't be doing that yet or whatever. When other people play it, they don't know. But for me, in the first several months of uh working on the public release of the game, I see stuff all the time that is problematic and it makes it really hard for me to just enjoy playing the game. Sure. I feel like it's kind of hard not to just be analytical of whatever the component is, right? Like I think that even, you know, Brad was looking at his artwork and Josh was looking at the animations and I'm listening to the sound of music. I mean, it's just like you can't help but want to just tweak everything as much as possible to make it as polished as possible. Um, but just as a like for a first impression point of view, like seeing it set up at Expo under those bright lights with, you know, Brad's art is fantastic. Those Everglass decals are so, you know, the way they shine is so good and the the uh powder coating they picked with the like prismatic rainbow effect in it. It the whole game just looks awesome. And I love that it's not, you know, like standard dark pinball colors. Sure. The whole thing is very And the fact that the teal for the, you know, the powder coat like you're talking about, like, you know, the whole package really leaned into the like kind of poppy color scheme and just a lot of the riskier choices that we [clears throat] did with the color, yellow, and red. So, yeah, it's all pretty red for sure. It pops in a good way. Uh roller coasters is asking how long did it uh did we get the white woods versus the initial game release? Uh and how do you balance fixing lab uh labs minor bugs and tweaks adding Dune? That's true. That's a good question. So you you were balancing working on you know a three pins essentially as rolling up to the Winchester release like how do you like organize that dayto day in terms of making sure that stuff doesn't get like swept under the rug or whatnot? Well, uh, to be fair, we don't do a whole lot on Labyrinth anymore. There's still a little bit that we would like to get to, but it's obviously not the the chief priority anymore. Anytime somebody reports serious bugs, I obviously look into them. But, um, Dune is still very much something that gets worked on all the time. Uh except for like the month leading up to Expo, I was pretty much only working on Winchester just to make sure we had as much content as possible before time for everybody for sure. Yeah. And that's just going to happen. But since Expo, like the first three days after I got back from Expo was all straight Dune, working on stuff that had turned up since um the last time I touched it and working on the next thing we're adding to it. And most days now I work on Dune in the morning for a couple of hours either fixing stuff people have reported or working on a new addition and then switch over and work on Winchester for the rest of the day. Yeah. Um which there is plenty to expand on. We got lots of new fun stuff coming to Winchester and some I think some surprise stuff maybe coming to Dune soon. Uh misled asks on a scale of Jeff to Carl, how are Eric's pinball playing skills? You son of a [ __ ] I'm assuming that I'm the low end of the scale when anybody is talking about Carl with pinball ability. I That's a good question, Eric. How good are you at pinball? I I am not a pro player by any means. My My shining moment of glory was coming in fourth place in Division at Pinberg when it was in the before the pandemic when it was like a thousand players. To be fair, that's still D division at Pinberg. That's like Yeah, that that that's my my best like public performance. I just I love the machines period. Like sure as a package the the mechanical like I guess also artistry but the like how in interesting all the mechanics are and the art on them just I love them as pieces of art in addition to love like li like enjoying playing and you don't have to be good at pinball to enjoy it like they really are these complete packages of all these different components. I I'm an okay player, but I don't put the kind of time in it takes to be a really really good player. What's your What's your high score on Dune? Oh, I don't know. Make up a number. You could make up any number right now. I wouldn't know. Somewhere around, I think. Four. Say four. It's four. Just Wow. How did you even get a single digit score? I uh I only have the Whitewood. Like I so I haven't really put a lot of time in on a fully finished retail game. Like I played a couple games at Expo, but I haven't put a lot of time in my And the Whitewoods don't always end up uh being exactly the same as the final production model, too. I know that there's a handful of things on Doom parts, so the shots don't work the same. Yeah. So, I don't I don't have a valid answer for how how well I can play Doom because I haven't played a real Doom all that much. Sure. Uh we got a handful of pretty good questions. Uh, let me go down this. Uh, Flipronic brings up something that needs to be addressed in the pinball space. He's He's asking how many doorways you've hit your head on, and I just I need to I need clarification. Why are there so many goddamn tall people working in the pinball landscape? Like, I'm 6 feet. I'm like, everyone's always shorter than me and I'm used to this. Now that I'm like in pinball, I'm the shortest person in the goddamn room nine times out of 10. What What's going on, you you giants? You giants. and your love of pinball. I don't know. It just must have something to do with the the uh difference in atmosphere at that sort of altitude just has you gives you a a predisposed tendency towards pinball, I guess. Do Do you think that there's like a genetic like code connection between like the love of pinball and just being like tall as [ __ ] I don't know. Maybe being taller just gives you a larger everything. So then you're bigger head. So then you're more into logic stuff. I don't know. Everything. Huh. Well, uh, so, uh, Misled's got another good one. He's talking about video modes. I'm assuming he's talking not about the video that's being displayed, but he's talking about video mini modes. He's like that can be a polarizing thing in pinball. He wants our opinions of that. Each of us, what do you feel about how do you feel about video modes, mini games? I'm guessing you don't want to go first. No, I want you to go first. You're my guest. I HATE THEM. I absolutely hate them. I will only ever put one in a game if I am forced to drag kicking and screaming cuz I do not like them. I'm here to play pinball, the physical game. I don't want to play the worst arcade games ever made with two buttons for input. I would I would have to generally agree with you on that. I just they they stop the flow of the game. Like Bram Stoker's Dracula, even Ghostbusters, like all of these things are just like you you put a halt on it in a way that's generally not really exciting. However, I will say mini games that are mechanical are amazing. I'll use the shadow as an example that, you know, essentially it's a, you know, Aranoid or, you know, Breakout or whatever, the pinball machine, right? It's a mini game, but it's a pinball mini game. So Powerfield's a good example. So I don't know. I could probably think of Chad, there's got to be at least one pinball video mode miniame that is not invasive. Well, sign out that's different. So, S Out's bringing up what about the 8-bit uh version of Jaws? That's an entire mode. Like that's a that's an experience in itself that's shaped around uh you know, pinball. Unless you're talking about the actual like uh Shark Hunter or whatever game inside of it, which is a little bit not. [snorts] Yeah. with any any video mode I've ever had to deal with, they're they're fun once or twice, but then they're either just annoying or they're a pattern you can learn and then if you know the pattern, you have this massive advantage over anybody else. One of the things I love about pinball is how random it is. You never know where the ball's going to go and having the predictable element of a crappy video game just doesn't fit for me. There you go. So, this leads into a pretty good question. Roller Coasters is asking, "How do you deal with games airballs and them landing and hitting switches that they shouldn't?" So, this is a really excellent question because you need to be able to the game needs to be self-aware to a degree, right? It needs to know where all the balls are, what they're doing at at any given point in time. And uh we had, you know, there was a discussion about putting a plastic shield on the top of the uh turntable on Winchester to help prevent that. I've had a few air balls uh on my Dune that have like landed on wire forms and completed the ramp shot even though they didn't hit the entrance switch. So, how do you how do you approach those challenges in in the code atmosphere? That that's definitely the thing that makes pinball code the hardest is the fact that you have to be ready to deal with anything at any time because the ball will literally go everywhere. you you no matter how much you think it can't possibly hit this switch after that switch, it will at some point. So you have to like code around handling all of those odd situations and otherwise you just end up with dead ends and the ball the game will just stop doing whatever. Especially if it's a physical ball lock, those are the the anybody that programs pinball like those are the the thing they like the least. Especially with like the seance table where an airball can land in there when it doesn't belong in there. Sure. Kind of goes back to your loving problems. I mean, this is like the ultimate puzzle is like when can a ball fly and hit some random switch and then how do you handle it? Like that sounds incredibly difficult. Uh Carrie Hardy is here. We have to of course say hello. Carrie's asking a question that we addressed on earlier. So I'm going to give him the quick like cliffnotes because he's asking how you got your way into pinball coding. So, do you do you want to do the the 30 second crash course on what you said or or do it do it? Take it away. I can try. Hold on. Let me set a 30 second timer. Oh, no. Don't start yet. Don't start yet. Wait. Wait. All right. You ready? Set. Are you ready? You didn't say yes. I don't know if you're ready. Let's go. Let's go. Okay. Go. Uh, I did New Code for Cactus Canyon using a Pock board on my own and took that to Expo. From there, I made connections and met Scott Danesi, who got me into Spooky to do Rick and Morty because he didn't want to do the code for that one, so he asked me to do it. And then from there, I met Dave. And Dave is the one who invited me into the barrels of fun mess. You got us 8 seconds. There's no more to it. Thank for doing a cool Winchester video. He did all the behind the scenes stuff like about the house and stuff. Okay, stop talking. It's 30 seconds. Uh, anyways, so yes, that's the that's the short version. and Carrie, thank you for hopping on in our our midday uh jamberee talking about Eric and Eric's involvement in pinball and specifically Winchester. Um more fun than engine controllers and injectors. Jason, I don't know what you're talking about. Um yeah, I don't know. Like that's I don't that pretty much runs down everything I can think of for Winchester again. Like I want to bring up the lighting again cuz I really just the lighting it sends such an experience like it really makes this world under glass kind of thing happen. I know that's what Barrels is known for and what we try to achieve, but uh the your your creative decisions on how to handle or how to translate Carl's notes, you know, when he talked about what the basement's supposed to be and how to handle those concepts. You know, you're taking these written words and then applying it to what the actual game can do uh or what you can potentially make it do. And I just that really the how you've chosen to do that is just really impressive. You did an awesome job, man. Yeah. For For me, the the light shows being purposeful and not excessive is important. You know, every time it does something cool with the lights, it should be for a reason and not just all of the time. Yeah. I don't nothing against games that do that. It's just not my personal preference. Well, I think that that's shared across the team, too, because the UI has been talked about, praised for only showing stuff that's relevant in ways that's digestible. Uh, you know, I've tried to make the sound of music convey specific things. The call outs let you know, like, it's not there to be invasive. It's there to provide enough information that you can uh educate yourself unknowingly about the game, right? like it's giving you just enough clues to to know what you're supposed to be doing or what the rules of the game are without slapping you across the face. Yeah. And [clears throat] that that sort of trying to communicate to the player is really important to me for you I even more so on Dune like we very are even more restricted on Dune because there's not as much at least currently uh like side quest stuff going on. So the if something's lit, it's important and it's really obvious and that really seems to help a lot of people because a lot of modern games everything blinks and you don't know what the heck's going on. Sure, there is a lot of secondary stuff in Winchester though with like all the 13th modes and the ability to like super spinners and spirit energy and all those. Uh, but it's all things you could actually do like hitting those all of those blinky things does things in just because the the rules framework that I got from Carl to start building was very very well flushed out and filled in right from the jump, which Dune kind of came together more organically as we went. Like things were, you know, figured out and added on as I was going where I Carl really gave us the Bible to follow from the get. We got all sorts of detail right at the beginning from Carl. So, a lot of those side quest type things are in there. Um, there's more of that stuff coming to Dune now that uh Phil, who did the rules for that game, has a Dune and is playing a bunch. Um, there's going to be a lot of adjustments for other things that you can [clears throat] do pointswise and uh experience-wise, but but there were a bunch of people talking about how like Dune was done and we're not working on it or something. I'm like, I don't know who started that [ __ ] but it's so not true. So, uh I will say uh one an example back to Winchester of being able to give layers of information to the people. One of my favorite things that uh that you did that we did on it was the uh spirit energy for sure. Spirit energy is the playfield multiplier if you're not aware of that. And I think what's really cool about it is that in in certain modes the music plays and it identifies that you're in super spinner mode. playfield multipliers going on. The whole playfield goes dark. It's got blue lights that shine in on it. Just the experience is really cool, overwhelming. You know you're in a playfield multiplier situation, which in a lot of games, I think, when the playfield multiplayer is going on, it's just a little timer in the corner of the UI. You have no idea what's going on, right? But when you're inside of a mode or multiball, something that's really important, the mode's music is the priority, right? But the playfield lights still go down and initiate that teal color. So, you're still aware that you are in multi, you know, playfields, multiball. I can't talk, man. Help me out here. Just finish this [ __ ] for me. I'm [ __ ] Just do it. Yeah. Uh, one of the the key things with any kind of pitball programming is everything has priority levels and there are different priority levels. So, the LEDs are on one priority stack, the music is on a different priority stack, the modes themselves and what can react to what, you know, like if multiple things are running at a time, this one might react first and then this one. But you know that and at any point going through that stack of priorities I can stop it from going any farther all that kind of stuff. So in that situation the uh the LED priority for changing the lighting of the game is different than the music. So that you can still have the mode music because you're in a mode but you still have that really obvious visual indicator of the multiplier happening. Right. Thank you. That's true. It's a really neat experience. I know that these aren't abundant. The games are limited. Sorry. But if you do get to play one, start the spirit energy. It's pretty simple. You just mash the spinner until your meter fills up and then you hit an X target which is up by the keys in the back and it'll make the entire playfield do this cool stuff. And uh it's it's pretty easy to accomplish and experience and it's it's neat. It's super fun. Um all right, we got a handful of questions. Flipronic wants to know what your favorite scary movie is. He said spooky movie specifically. So I don't know if that changes the level of scariness to you. I've never really been a big scary movie guy. God, you're the second person who has said that to me this week and I just I'm so mad about it. I I judge you. I judge you hard right now. I don't I don't hate them. It's just not like I would never list that as my favorite category of movie type. Um I don't know. Well, you got to give Flipronic an answer. So, just pick a pick a random scary movie then. Maybe alien. We're not moving on until you do. What does alien count? What' you say? Alien. Of course, that counts as a scary movie. How would that not? It's a sci-fi movie. I didn't know if it also counted as a horror movie. I mean, that's the best part about those kind of movies when they like cross over tons of genres, you know? Yeah. Uh I would say uh um I'm trying to make a dumb joke by picking a romcom and saying that that's the scariest movie I can think of, but I can't think of a good romcom right now. So, um All right, other questions. Uh, Carrie's asking, "Has Eric ever had to adjust code due to what you want to do with audio to be with the gameplay, Jeff?" Oh, well that's a huge yes. I have I have demanded things from here to change in terms of how the backend audio works on Dune and some of that got into lab better. What's that? Every one of the things that you've said, "Hey, we need to change this." has made the product better. I don't ever argue against things that make the product better. That's true. When we first started working, you were like, "Why the hell would I ever do that?" And I was just like, "Please listen to me. Cumor me. Give me an hour of your time to try this and tell me if it's not easier or sounds better." And then I believe after one or two of those, you were just like, "I will listen to you, Jeff." Pretty much. I mean, we had no we had no audio knowledge on the team before you got involved in Dune. So there was just a lot of stuff I just did not know like details about audio and how digital audio works and stuff that and specifically even how the audio worked in the engine we're using. You knew stuff about it that I didn't know because it was audio related and I just don't know audio stuff. So yeah, like especially right when you first got involved, we did a bunch of work to change things for audio, but that they were all important and made the as a as a specific example of uh of something that we just did recently to check. I wanted to know what the actual loudness coming out of GDO was in order to make streamer life easier so that whatever was actually coming out of the Beink uh was at a as a as a decent audio level. So, we dove in to be able to give me kind of readouts for both buses and master buses in terms of what decibel level they're at. So, we could figure out where to set that so that the amp is doing the most nominal amount of work compared to what the actual beink is doing. And, uh, and you flipped that around in like 20 minutes. You were like, "Okay, here's a tech overlay that has decel readouts for you. Enjoy." So, um, no, David's here. David's here. The big boss is here. We got to We got to We have to censor We have to censor what we're saying. No, I'm just kidding. David has never ever ever censored us and I'm sure he's probably worrying left and right about what's going on over there. But uh yeah, it's good to see you, David. Thank you again. I I don't think you were here but not active last time where I asked everyone to to say thank you for allowing the team members to to do their thing and make such a dope game. And uh if you if you weren't here last time and you've appreciated Duner Winchester, please please give David a thank you shout out right now since he is here hanging out with us. um while I look for another question to answer. Um wondering about code. I've heard okay he's like he's wondering about code giving incentives to hit the drop targets down as he's heard that there's a lot of straight down the middle drains like qualifying on ball saves etc. I don't know if you're talking about Winchester or Labyrinth. Um, but that's something that we adjusted for like Dune's a good example cuz some people their scoops are not misaligned, but if they go under heavy usage, sometimes it can shoot down the middle. So, we put a you put a code in there to help prevent that so that they can continue enjoying the game. I think that's kind of the example of that. Are there other examples of using code to to help improve the players experience? H I yeah there's there's things Carl has asked for since Expo once we got to see the public play it like other than uh before that we just internally had the team playing it. You all have people that are decently knowledgeable about the game and play decent pinball. When you put it in front of the whole families that come to Expo and you see a bunch of people that aren't really pinball people play it, you realize a lot of things about decisions you made that could be made differently. And there's been many adjustments that Carl's asked for since Expo, like making the kickback easier to light in multiple ways and immediately lighting one of the locks on those inline targets because he saw so many people the first thing they try to do is pound through those inline targets and at the beginning of the game it was not lit for something. So you were wasting your time, right? So we're adding a lock right away so that you're getting something when you try to do that. I think a lot of people don't understand that like the pinball experience, right, is very like individual. We're not trying to make pinball frustrating for one person, but what is simple for one person versus what is simple for another is totally different. Obviously, using Carl as an example of a super highle player. So, it is a very delicate balance to try to make sure that the game is entertaining on like a wide scale without making it accessible or some other [ __ ] word that sucks. like the game should be fun on every possible level both you know in your physical interaction with it and how you perceive like the visual shows and music and stuff like that and that's that's what we try to do. So I think that is in line with as much as we can with settings for difficulty like don't ever let anybody tell you you need to play games at default settings if you're not having fun with your game and there's a way you can adjust something to make it easier do it. That's the most I think that's the most important thing that anyone has ever said in an interview on my [ __ ] podcast. Like move the post unless you have a labyrinth because some monster who designed it didn't put movable posts in for the Outlands. I don't know who that is. It's David. [clears throat] Uh Skyler wants to know he's works as a software engineer in video games industry and he wants to get into pinball. Any advice to bridge that gap? Ombro I guess, right? Yeah. I mean, the the sad reality is there just aren't that many jobs in it. So, it's hard to get into. Like, it I'm I would never say I got to where I am because I earned it by making some amazing thing. It was the connections I had and the people that I know. Like, yeah, I made some stuff that showed off what I could do, but it I'm not a better programmer than every anybody else. Like, I'm just a guy who writes code. So, it's it's not an easy thing to get into just because of the limit on how many people there are that actually do this sort of thing. Um, it's true. Unfortunately, it also is good experience to kind of work out the the difficulty challenges of doing pinball stuff. You know, as an example, I did the sound on my Twilight Zone in the pin sound board. If I had just jumped into doing, you know, Dune or or Winchester, without that, the the learning curve on it, I think, would have been a much less enjoyable experience, whereas this was a lot smoother. Um, Carrie's asking for something that's easy for me to answer in the best possible way. He's like, I want a whispers in the dark mode to have a more intense flashlight effect. Well, guess what? The flasher, the only flasher in the game, was not being utilized at expo because we just didn't have time to put it in. It wasn't a priority compared to other things. There is going, the flasher is going to be doing stuff in the future, so rejoice, Carrie. There will be more flashes. Get your flash on. Um, oh my god, chat. You're blowing it up. Joe Joe the Dragon, good to meet you, by the way, again. He said, "Games on location get beat. Any hardware changes?" I'm not quite sure what you mean, but maybe we could address like game. One of the reasons that we were that the Winchester was obviously brought to Expo other than the fact that it's Barrel's a new game and obviously it's going to go there is to kind of test it, right? We checked audits. We saw how many plays were on it. What was some interesting insight in terms of like the games holding up and getting a whole lot of plays on them that you that you thought? Oh, I don't know. I mean, that's really more of a a question for the mechanical guys, you know, Carl and Luke [clears throat] and Travis and uh Paul. But well from a programming angle then is there anything from you know doing a cold restart versus a hot restart or a warm reboot is a little different and there's a lot a lot of plays going on it consecutively with the game not being reboot. Yeah. And they held up really good for that being the first time they've gotten so much random play from people who didn't necessarily know what they were trying to do. So you get a lot more random things happening and they held up great. Um, like I said, the the stuff that we really came away from the show with was ways to adjust things to either help make it more clear what players should be doing or move the code to what the players were doing like with the drop target lock right away because seeing so many people shoot those targets right away. So, we moved the logic to put something happening there because so many people were trying it. that kind of thing, which is which is why this like large scale feedback is really important and why shows like Expo are really important because you know there's not a 100 Winchesterers out in the wild yet, right? So, it's a great way to get a bazillion plays concentrated feedback right off the bat and to be able to help shape it so that when it is in more homes, you know, you've got a even more fun game that it already is. And it's already [ __ ] super fun, which is awesome. Yeah. And the I think the next show it's going to be at is Houston. And the difference between uh stuff that's in the game and how the game behaves between what was at Expo and what it is in Houston is pretty big. Totally. There's been a lot of adjustments. Uh David said that there's just under 3,000 plays in three days. That's a lot of pinball. Dang. Um there's a number of people uh Johnny Button and Jay Biscuit here are talking about how they just put money down on a dune. That's awesome. I think that Dune to me is kind of the un unspoken champ of Expo cuz people were like the lines for Winchester were just crazy long. You had to wait so long to play it. So people were like, I'll play Dune. And then they were like, wow, Dune's kind of amazing. And I think that the the word on the street is that Dune's pretty pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. I Yeah. I think too many people didn't give that a chance because it's Dune and they don't care about Dune necessarily. like whatever, you know, not my thing, but it's a good game and all you got to do is play it and you see that. Totally. And that new alt back glass is amazing. Um, the guys a flipping hour talking about I guess Jared uh David gave the uh prototype back glass to to Jared and he was just glowing about it, man. He was talking about it on stream about how he came home and was just like terrified about damaging it as he's like trying to get back there. Um, you have to take it on a plane. No, I think they drove. I don't know. That's a good question. I should have asked them. It was nice meeting them. Another more Giants in pinball. The [ __ ] 7 foot club is ridiculous. It's ridiculous. Stop being so tall. Uh, system of glitch says, "Uh, I'm very much looking forward to getting Winchester. Man, good for you for locking one in. Uh, I have a labyrinth and dune already. Barrels of fun is three of three with me. Now I have to sell one to make room." Good to hear. Thank you. Uh JBudi suggests putting it in the kitchen. Not a bad solution. Master bedroom. That's what I keep telling my wife. We're just going to start putting a wall of pins on the master bedroom. We're good to go. Time to build a barn. What's your How many games do you have, Eric? I feel like maybe you don't have a lot of games. I have uh 12. Oh my god, you do have a lot of games. Oh my god. What's your collection? Oh my I make me run it down. I don't know if I can. Yep. Hold on. Let me set the timer again for 30 seconds. Oh jeez. No. No, you're doing it. I don't care. All right. Ready? Are you ready? Sure. Okay. But you are you are ready then? Yes. Okay. Go. Uh, Cactus Canyon, Theater of Magic, Creature from the Black Lagoon, uh, Steve Ritchie, Spider-Man. Uh, Jurassic Park, Iron Maiden, which Jurassic Park is the Ellen Jurassic Park. Um, I have four Ellen's. What's the other Ellen? Oz? No. Oh, Godzilla. Um, uh, and then I have, uh, my labyrinth and I have a Foo Fighters. Dude, you did it. You did it at 29 seconds. And an Iron Man. Oh, [ __ ] You missed one. Oh, well. Uh, that is an excellent collection. I really want to put a Papa Dude game into into mine. I don't have one and it's it needs to happen. Uh, that's a banger lineup. Everybody's talking about how how good your lineup is. Um, all right. I mean, now we're kind of just shooting the [ __ ] and answering questions at this point. If anybody else has any questions, uh, please fire away. Uh, we've done an hour of fascinating programmer jib jab, uh, learning about Eric and his, uh, going from it to PT. Is that would you call it? Pinball tech. What would you, what would you call it? I don't know. Just coding. Like I didn't really do a lot of That's such a coder thing. That's not a fun name for it. It needs like a cool acronym like BJ, you know? I don't know if you saw somebody made a video talking about a lot of BJs recently. I don't know if you know that, Carrie. I thought it was funny. I've always been a kind of person who likes to make things. I like to have a project. The reason I ended up doing Cactus Canyons cuz I didn't have a project. I needed a project to work on. Um, and I I like the creative part of it. Like when I was really young, I thought I wanted to be an animator, a cartoonist. Um, and I but I didn't put the time in to develop the skill art skills that takes. So, you know, like doing the color DMD stuff was like probably the most fun I've ever had working on things because it was so much of the the artistic side of it, deciding what colors things needed to be and doing various, you know, shading and whatnot and the logic side of it of doing all those uh maps and stuff to recognize all the dots. And this is really similar. Like I do a decent amount of contributing to the rules and the UI. Like I don't actually make the end products, but I very often mock up the original of something and then the the guys with the skills make it better. Well, I wouldn't don't sell yourself short. I think a lot of programmers in my experience are very only analytical. They don't have a lot of creativity. They're just like, you know, they're computers put in a human body instead of a computer body, whatever that means. But you have you have a lot of creativity and it shows. And I think that that's one of the reasons why these games have such a such a wonderful interesting code base. So, um, Roller Coasters wants to know if you listen to music while you program. Uh, sometimes, not a lot. Fascinating answer. Uh Johnny Button is asking if the Dune code's going to be evolving. We just talked about that. There's Phil's adding new concepts and Yeah. Yeah. I was kind of hoping the next thing we're adding would be out by now, but it's turned out to be more work than I thought. So that's good. That means it's going to be more interesting. Yeah. Right. Is there is there a direct correlation to more work and like better when it comes to programming? Not necessarily. Sometimes it's just a hard [clears throat] thing to do that doesn't turn out to be all that interesting. Interesting. Uh, well, I heard you had a lot of modern pins in your lineup, but I want to ask you a question about which of these three games that you might add to your lineup if you had a choice, if you had space. So, uh, that first pin is Raven. The second vintage classic pin that you could add to your lineup as an option is, uh, it's Raven. And then, uh, if you had if you added space for a third one, It's Raven. I mean, a third copy of Raven, of course. Yeah. Well, no, you have to pick one of these. You can't have three Ravens. No, I've only ever played Raven, I think, once. Um, so I don't know that much about it, but that's [sighs] Is that a godly or is that a data east? It is a godly. You actually You could have had the There was somebody had converted one to look like Predator and it was right next to the barrels. It was right near our booth. You could have come over and done our You You missed our little pyramid picture. Wasn't that cute? Wee. We don't look at me like that. Uh, anyways, which one of those games are you going to pick? You know what? I'll give you a fourth. You can pick Bone Busters, too. Oh no. Raven every day of the week over Bone Busters. That game's terrible. Oh my god. How dare How dare you? How dare get off my stream. All right. Well, everybody, it was really nice having Eric on. I just want to thank him uh for being here and his shitty bad opinion about pinball machines that he knows absolutely nothing about. this son of a [ __ ] Uh yeah, I played for Musters a decent amount of times because one of the guys I used to go to his house for League had one. It's terrible. I just I don't like that whole generation of gots. The flippers are awful. The flippers are really awful. Which is funny because I was looking at the Bone Busters uh pamphlet uh launch card that they gave out for some reason today. It's on Pinside and they talk about how they've like redesigned the flippers and that it has like a titanium end of switch and like it was just like they they hammed up about how the flippers were improved and uh I I don't think Got knows what improved flippers means. Well, and everyone I've ever played the throw is always way too long so a blind guy can cradle on those things because the ball just land there. It is funny how the the you know Winchester's got a few criticisms for this and I I don't really have a pony in this race but like you know vintage games had really steep kind of like end of end of stroke holds whereas like Winchester and a lot of modern games are like more level which is you know I think it's partly to increase the difficulty for it but I I don't know what else what what is the logic for that? Well, it's just a matter of the physical mech itself that like if you want it to go up higher, you need a a smaller coil stop. You can coil stops with a shallower one and get more height out of it if that's what you really want. The reason they don't go up so far on Winchester is because Carl put them down a little bit by default because there are wider shots that are important and having them down a little bit makes the wider shots easier. That's true. You can always hit the middle. That's not hard. But to be able to hit the wider stuff, having it lower helps. But that does come at the expense of losing the ability to trap so easily. This also explains Dune as well because Dune has two really important shots that are that are pretty wide as well. I mean, you're talking about both the fedican multiball lock and also like the far left spinner. Even Even to a certain degree, the the ramps on the left and right are pretty wide compared to a lot of other, you know, pins. Just talk to the precision pinball guy and have him make some new coil stops that are like really shallow and then you'll have higher uh trapping ability. I'm sure he could. You know, I put I put those precision flippers in my Dune and uh eh, you know, they're definitely stronger. I had to turn the coil pulse down to like almost nothing in order to get the same kind of like pulse performance out of it. But they you can't you can't dead bounce anymore. They like it they turns into goly flippers. Like they absorb they absorb like all of the kinetic power instantly and the ball just dies and goes straight down the middle. It's really I was surprised. I expected it to bounce a lot more, but I think that the play in the mech acts, you know, it gives a little bit of like a trampoline effect. Um, so, you know, be aware. I would not have guessed that either. Not to totally [ __ ] on that guy, though. I do have the Jaws uh reel mod, and it's amazing. That the precision reel mod is probably the best improvement to Jaws that you could possibly get because it makes both the reels on the top playfield and the bottom playfield like spin a lot better. So yeah, I I got his upgraded uh spinner for my Avengers. Oh, there you go. It makes a replacement for that thing, too. That it same deal. That being more precise makes it spin so much nicer. Yeah. And it's just kinetically satisfying, right? I feel like that's a term that is used pretty frequently for pinball. It should be kinetically satisfying. Yeah. Anyways, uh thanks everybody. As we do here, uh after we say thanks to our guests for taking the time to come on here and talk about their job. I'm trying to give a face to everybody at Barrels. We're going to go through uh more of the team over the next couple of weeks, couple of months. Um but we go we go raid somebody. We go find somebody that isn't playing Raven and uh and we drop a bunch of pinball lovers on them. So Eric, I want to say thank you again so much. If you have anything you want to plug, I this is a little different than normal cuz I don't know what you're going to plug other than Winchester, but please tell if you got something going on in life, say it. the I mean I don't really have uh other public facing stuff. I generally try to not be public facing. Like I I've never put my name in any of the credits I worked on any of the games I worked on just cuz I don't I don't care about that. But um the only thing I would say is that making these things is absolutely a team effort and everybody in their various specialties at barrels is very important and does amazing work. It's true. including David who drove all of these games up in a giant truck both ways himself and and Carl at least one of the directions. Um, all right. Thanks everybody. I appreciate it. Uh, you got to do Can you Will you praise the Great Pyramid with me? Okay. Thank you. Carl won't do it cuz he praises that inferior pyramid. Anyways, bye everybody. Thanks so much. [bell] _(Acquisition: youtube_auto_sub, Enrichment: v3)_ --- *Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 603472b2-bcdd-4fe8-97ee-dd0db2d86b28*