it's time for another pinball profile i'm your host jeff teals you can find everything on pinballprofile.com we're on facebook we're on instagram you can email pinball profile at gmail.com. If you'd like to support us on Patreon, you can do so. That would be wonderful. Don't worry, the show's always going to be free, but your support is very appreciated. I'm here at Yagpin right now in Edmonton, Alberta, and my first look at Puny Factory from Pinball Adventures, and joining us right now, the man behind it, Andrew McBain. Hello, Andrew. How you doing, Jeff? Good to see you, and thank you for bringing this game, because for many of us here, it's the first time to see Punny Factory. Now, it's been out for a while, probably, I want to say, three months or so, but the first show, I think, was the Northwest show just recently. That's correct. That's when it was first released at the Northwest Pinball Show. Fantastic show. Had a great time. I think you sold a game within 10 minutes. Absolutely. The engraved edition sold instantly when it was there, and unfortunately to your listeners, the engraved edition has been completely sold out. I think it was the first or second day when we released it. but that's exciting now you got to tell me about pinball adventures how this all got started what made you want to make a pinball machine because you have an interesting background with the race car stuff in the past and and things like that go ahead tell us andrew long story short pinball expo 2019 uh we were contracted by rob burke for me and my daughter to go out there do videography and uh take some pictures of the show while we're out there i met Team Pinball, who have the game The Mafia, the Raspberry Pi, was running an entire pinball machine. Fascinated me. Because in our other company, we use the Raspberry Pi and some of our electronic devices that we manufacture. And I thought, what a great idea. And I said, I want to make a pinball machine with you guys. And three years later, Honeypacker is born. Okay, I've seen people make homebrews, and that's one of the great things about Expo, is you get to see that, but you've gone one step further. This wasn't exactly a homebrew. You're selling this, and at a decent price, too, which is also one of the unique things about Pinball Ventures. You're going to be able to get a pinball machine that's got everything you expect in it for a much lower price. That is correct. We took a different avenue than other pinball manufacturers, where we subcontracted several of the major components of the machine out. For example, the cabinet. Another example, all the metal work. And in that way, we can really control the quality of the product that's being made. And we can turn around and reject anything that might have any flaws. I can only imagine how difficult this was to set up and how many hours were put in, like you say, three years ago, a little over three years ago now with that 2019 Expo. Of course, you had the COVID shutdown, so that probably slowed things a little bit. But here you are, plenty of factors available, and we're going to talk about some of the future games coming out. But it's not easy to make a pinball machine. Some have said that. It is not easy. It is not. However, my background is in engineering, and I have manufactured over 100 different products. We have a small little factory in China with our other company. So for us, it's second nature to make different parts. So we were lucky in that aspect. Some of our crew are graphic designers. Some of our crew are marketers. Some of our crew are coders. So when you get five or six people inside a company that specializes on each aspect of what it would take to build a pinball company, it's a lot easier than just starting from scratch. However, it takes a long time to create a pinball machine because every day something changes and you learn something new. And even after the first run of the punny factory, we went back to the drawing board and made lots of different changes. simple things you know a hole here or an adjustment here or an extra screw here but it's just seems that it's constantly a learning procedure on every single title going forward when you get to this point and you mentioned five or six people that you already knew that you already kind of could do different things you can break it down it's still a full-time job you can't just do this part-time while you've got other things going on you have to have that kind of dedication or else it just lingers and lingers? The answer is yes. For the first couple of years, it was a part-time, full-time job for several of us. However, after you've taken the initial step and gone over the first hurdle of manufacturing your first machine, the second machine is quite easy. Really? Absolutely. For the first machine, let's say it took us a couple of years to make. second machine, it's a couple of months. Everything else is in place. So the next machine is basically just... Trial and error. It is. It's just now rules, it's artwork, and it's just making those modifications to make it special and fun. Well, that's one thing when you see Punny Factory, the artwork is very... We're Canadian, obviously, so the fact you chose Punny Factory is probably by design, too, because of Canadians being known for their sense of humor. But great artwork and I want to know more about it I played a few flips here and there I going to get back to it soon But for those who haven played it yet haven flipped it yet what are you doing in Plenty Factory A single level play field We brought back the old Very Target We had to unfortunately the Very Target, nobody manufactured anymore, and the license has expired. I wouldn't be a license, it would be a patent. I guess the patent expired, so we were able to manufacture our own. and we decided to go with a couple of pop bumpers, a couple of targets, make it very simple for everybody, a very simple rule set. You spell punny, you spell factory, you go into the middle up kicker and it creates a pun and that's it. There's other special things to do on the game, several multi balls. We wanted to make it simple and easy as a base game for all to enjoy, not just adults but children as well. So what's the feedback been like first here at Yagpin and obviously Northwest and other people that have purchased this game? Over and over again we hear build quality. People are amazed with the build quality of the game. We decided that if we were going to do this, we were going to do it right. And we decided to use the best materials we could possible. Even like the wood? The wood. that includes Russian Baltic birch with a top coating of maple. Everything on our machines are sealed, the tops and bottoms, and they're all clear-coated, as well as the outside of the machines as well. I guess it would be similar to a spooky cabinet, a butter cabinet. But that's all standard for our machines. We're not charging anything extra whatsoever. Everything is powder-coated, and we've got metal on these machines that no one else has met. And we just decided to do it differently and just enhance that experience of owning a pinball machine. You know, the only thing I saw missing, really, when I looked at Puny Factory is you see cup holders on a lot of games. A poutine holder would have been perfect. It's all yours. Take it, Andrew. It's coming. It's coming. The artwork is very catchy on Puny Factory. Tell us about Brian Arnold, the person you found out of Vegas. That's correct. He's an award-winning artist. lots of awards and he does uh he runs a website called cartoonaday.com and he just basically every day makes a cartoon it was fun fruity the kind of artwork that everybody can enjoy and that's one of the reasons we chose him and uh he was absolutely amazing to work with what are we going to find underneath the playfield you talk about the quality parts too but as you become a homeowner and you're putting out this large sum of money for a machine you want to know that, okay, I'm going to be able to service this, whether you get help from Pinball Adventures or on your own years past from now, and you want to make sure you can fix it. Easy to fix this machine, simple parts, what do we have in there? That's an excellent question. We decided to go a step further and put a cage underneath the play field, and the cage also harness a matrix system. So, to simplify it, you have a mechanism, and the mechanism has a plug on the end of it. The plug goes to a board, that is the matrix system, and the matrix system goes to another board and goes to the end of the play field and goes up into the head of the cabinet. So, basically, it's very easy for the regular person to troubleshoot if a target is working or not working. So, it's just a simpler way to understand how a pinball machine functions and not have to worry about tracing different color wires. Okay. What made you decide to go this way and why wouldn't others use this, which seems to be more simple format? The question is, I scratched my head wondering why other people don't do it this way. We just wanted it to be simple for anybody to understand. when we were doing our research and we got several different games opened up the play field and we would look at how we were going to create a wiring system that was easy for everybody to understand we've all been there and you look at all these wires and go oh my god what is wrong with these people and some sometimes i've heard that there's there's over a mile worth of wires inside a machine so i said i'm not going to do i'm going to make things simple so that's why we decided to go with a matrix system. To take it a step further, our next game, we decided to make our own boards and make a similar matrix system, but we have a touch screen on the head of one of our main boards, and we went a step further and put an LED for every single mechanism that's working on the game. So when you open the head and you look at your board, you will know that every single mechanism them working via LED. The next game, I believe, is Elements, and you're hoping to have that for Pinball Expo in the fall. That's correct. We do have that. We're just finishing up on the code, and that will be released at Pinball Expo 2023, and it'll be out for sale. We'll be taking deposits for that particular unit at the show after we present it. I believe we're the first presenter at the show. That's pretty exciting. It's exciting. That's where it all started four years ago. It did. It started four years ago. Rob's been very gracious to let us come back again and take one of the first spots to a new start game. Sort of what Oktoberfest did back in 2019 when we were there taking photos. I was there, yeah. Were you there? Yeah I think Roger Sharp was the first person to flip I think so I remember that game I think it a fantastic game The Elements game we decided to go with a two game so we have an upper playfield as well, and we decided to put an infinity mirror on the middle of the playfield so that it pulses like a heart. And the theme that we went with would be, you get to play a Valkyrie, you get to play a Ninja, and you get to play a Warrior. and you're fighting all the elements. Sort of a mixture of Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons kind of a theme. We went a step further in our coding, and we decided to make an easy level, and we decided to make it a hard level. So you can pick either one that you want to do, and each one would be a completely different game. Okay, depending on whether it's hard or whether it's easier, or which character you're using. Well, you have to run through all the characters. Gotcha. but in the beginning you choose an easy level or a hard level. But either the easy level or the hard level are completely different games. So you get two games in one. Yeah, okay. And the great thing about this is that when you start the game and your character gets to choose to train or fight an element, and you get lots of choices in this game. That's very video game-like. It is. That's good. That really attracts more people probably. It's kind of fun. We went a step further on this game by putting an LCD screen in the apron, and we also decided to put, as a topper, a giant stretch LCD screen as well, so that all the customers, the spectators, could watch the game graphics as well. And one more step further is that we put in the topper another set of speakers, So now you have four speakers and the subwoofer, so you have quad sound with this particular game. That'll be impressive, especially with elements. I can only imagine how good the sound's going to be. It's fun. Really enjoyed making this game. Very impressed. You've seen now, you've been able to sell Honey Factory. You're going to be able to sell elements and whatever else is going to follow for Pinball Adventures. You have people in the pinball industry that have seen pinball companies come and go and say, we're going to do this, this, this, this. Some of them come through. Most of them, thankfully, do. And some of them, unfortunately, don't. So the fact that you got Puny Factory out, that was the biggest hurdle. That, okay, we can do it. You can play it. It's physically here. You can buy it. What was it like for you leading up to that? Like, just in your head, you know you're going to do it. But everyone else is like, kind of a wait-and-see attitude. there's a big difference between us and the other startup companies. We did not start this company as a main source of income. We did it as a fun project, knowing that we were going to put out six different games. And whether it took a year or whether it took 10 years, we're just a bunch of people really enjoying what we're doing. We have a parent company that makes totally different products that fund the pinball company that we have. And I think that's the difference between us and the other startup companies where they are relying on the sales in order to continue funding their company. They also, I think there's a lot of startup companies that made the mistake of purchasing the CNC machines for cutting their own wood, cutting their own metal, cutting their own plexi. and that in itself is a huge undertake of money and hundreds of thousands of dollars and then if you have staff that are relying on this as a monthly income, you've got to fund those people as well so I can just imagine some of the previous startup companies that they ended up being in the hole a great example is Cosmic Carnival, that startup up fantastic game i flipped it but they they bought everything and they must have been in almost three or four thousand before they sold a single game and it's just i don't think it was possible for them to catch up to sell the x amount of games in order to get back to having a profit so i think that was one of the things that really helped us uh when manufacturing our games. You talk about manufacturing. I have to assume that has to be the hardest part of this whole process. Actually, manufacturing is quite easy. I'll tell you the hard part. The hard part is finding companies that will do small runs of wood or metal for us. Most of these companies are larger corporations that are doing large runs of 2,000, 3,000 pieces. And when I go in and I want a run of 10 or 15 pieces, what ends up happening is that I get put at the back of the line. So I'm waiting and waiting and waiting. It finally comes and we want to make some changes. And then again, I have to wait. I have to wait. So that really in the metal, plexiglass and wood, that has been the hardest challenge just waiting it's not like you can 3d print these and make that small run and i don't know what it's like with the tool and die companies and everybody else doing kind of manufacturing but it would make sense that they would do the big orders first yes correct and then i hear people talk about well it's a it's a simple toy i mean we could make that for 50 bucks or a lot of people don't understand that it's not just a three dollar toy or a one dollar toy from china you have to design the sculpt you have to submit the files they have to do a mock of a mold for you and they don want to punch out a hundred they want to punch out thousands and thousands of them and if you not willing to do that no factory's going to look at you, so when we started manufacturing, and we have some great ties with some companies overseas, we had to manufacture thousands of rubbers, thousands of posts, thousands of lights, thousands of... I could go on and on and on. So our warehouse is full of thousands of parts that the Punny Factory would never use. So we thought about it carefully and picked pieces that we would use on all of our games going forward and got that order in. Thank God you didn't start with something like, oh, I don't know, banana flippers. And then you get stuck with these, it's going on the next game. Yes, that's correct. You seem thrilled with your appearance here at Yankpin. I can only imagine it was the same at Northwest Show. I know it's going to be like that for Expo. You did it. I mean, four years later, here you are with the machine. And more coming. Yes. And again, I'm just a guy who just enjoys what he does. I enjoy making games. And I've said this many times. Whether we sell one game or whether we sell 200 games, It doesn't make a difference to us. If a person is enjoying our game, that just puts a glow in my heart. Is that good peace of mind for people buying machines, knowing that, okay, this isn't the only source of income. You can make whatever is required and rest assured that there's money behind this? People think about that when they have to fork out money. I think that, in my opinion, is that I buy a game because I like it. And I collect comics as well. And I've gone through, let's say, 20 pinball machines, and I have four left that I really enjoy. What are they? I have Gilligan's Island. Love that show. I have a casino. Monte Carlo? No, it's the other casino one. The High Roller Casino. High Roller Casino. I have a High Roller Casino. Stern's last non-licensed, not including BlackBerry. But it's a fun game. I have, what else do I have? We have Flipper Football, and we also have a Break Shot. I love the Capcom builds. I think they're fantastic. I don't have any new games. I just feel they're really fast, and I just like games that have a story towards them, thus the name Pinball Adventures, because all of our games have stories behind them. Well, you mentioned the comics. I mean, here at the display, you've got the books, and you've got... Yes. We started in with the books because we really wanted to learn how machines were made, the different kinds of machines, and who made them, and the history behind them, and how to repair them. And it worked. I think we're on volume four now. And then we decided to just, you know, turn and pivot a little bit and get into making machines. So I'm glad things are going well here at Yagpin. You're very excited about what's coming up for Pinball Adventures. I saw actually a poster here while I was here, the Vancouver Island Pinball Expo. That's kind of your neck of the woods, a ferry at least. That's correct. I think that's going to be our next show. They just released this. It's a new thing that started up over the island, and we're excited to see what they're going to do. I'm sure they'll love having you. And, again, people are going to be excited when they go to Expo to see this, to see elements. Like you say, you're going to be presenting, again, a long way you've come in four years and probably a lot of lessons learned. And I guess with each one, each game gets better, right? absolutely 100 correct we're getting noticed a little bit more we've been contacted by a few major corporations to do some one-offs for them that's good we're now in negotiations and uh so i might be able to share some things with you guys in the next few months that's good by the way i noticed at your booth you had a very talented calgary artist by the name of Jackson Gee you might want to consider that guy he hasn't done pinball yet but i bet he's got that itch just putting that out there. Well, we've met Jackson, and we're in negotiations right now for him to do one machine, if not two. Well, I hope that happens, but no pressure anyway. He's got some good artwork, and he's been on this program too, so we'll see. Nevertheless, you had great artwork from Brian Arnold, and I can imagine Elements is just going to be as exciting. Congratulations, Andrew. It's not easy to make a pinball machine. You've done it. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. I couldn't have done it without all my staff. It's not just me. It takes all of us. I couldn't have done it without them, and they couldn't have done it without me. We all appreciate your praise. Thank you very much. Hopefully you get to flip Punny Factory or Elements very soon from Pinball Adventures. This has been your Pinball Profile. You can find everything on pinballprofile.com. We're on Twitter. We're on Instagram at pinballprofile. Don't forget to join our Facebook group. You can email pinballprofile at gmail.com, and if you'd like to support us on Patreon, that would be wonderful. Thanks very much in advance. Don't worry, the show will always be free. Live at Yankton, I'm Jeff Teolas. Okay, you're still listening. Good for you, because there's a little bonus. Andrew was kind enough to send me a nice little Punny Factory and Pinball Adventures prize package, and I'm going to give it to you. That's right. We're going to do a random draw. Send an email to pinballprofile at gmail.com. Tell me your name, your address, what shirt size you have, and we'll make a random draw, and we'll do that on August the 25th. Good luck. Thanks for listening.