thanks for tuning into the loser kid pinball podcast if you're keeping track we're episode 180 with me my co-host scott larson and i'm josh roop and we have an excellent podcast lined up for today but you know winchester may have sold out if you want to get on the waiting list who you're gonna hit up there scott so hit up zach and nicole mini flipping out pinball also other things that they have they have dune they have labyrinth they have all barrels of fun and other games too but right now we have the barrels of fun guy uh new guy new designer that you may or may not have heard of if you are into pinball um he he's been playing for a few years he's uh he's probably like i don't know how would you rate his pinball skills josh scale of one to ten scale of to 10 12 out of 10 12 out of 10 yeah probably okay so anyway uh zach and nicole many flipping out pinball if you want to get on the list or get anything um definitely give them a call and josh i'm gonna throw it to you and you are gonna interview or introduce our esteemed guest so carl d'Python Anghelo has been around for a while now uh competitive play he also runs inland empire streaming which is amazing uh you know how most people like oh i can complete a mode or two Carl's like, nah, we're going to get all the way to the end and destroy this game. That's kind of what you became famous for, if I remember correctly, through streaming. And now you've created a game that everyone fell in love with day one, and it sold out all 525 in 48 hours, if that. Two days. Two days. Absolutely insane. So I want to welcome on Carl. It is great to have you on. How are you doing? It's great to be here. Thanks for having me on. Awesome. Okay, first off, how did this even work? You just ran into David one day and you're like, you know who has two thumbs and wants to design a machine? This guy? David got word. I was working on a homebrew machine and I was on the Fast Slack channel and he saw I was posting on there. And we also have a friend, Shane, over at Ace Kogi that I had mentioned I was working on a homebrew. And so David got word of that and wanted to meet. And we met one, I want to say it was January of 24. little did I know but they had just seen Dune Dune Part 2 for the first time they had just toured the Winchester Mystery House but basically I showed them my homebrew my Whitewood and he liked my ideas what I had in there and asked if I would be interested in working with him and so just we didn't know I was going to start on a game immediately we just said okay because I have a full time job I wasn't leaving that yet so So it was a matter of how much could I get done? You know, what could my role in the company be? So I came on and we started and then I got put on this game, shockingly. So the one question I have is the Whitewood, what became Winchester? Is that a different game for the homebrew? It's completely different. So Winchester Mystery House was made from scratch based on the elements in the property. so the question i have is with the winchester mystery house so this is a very famous house especially in you know the western united states specifically california a lot of people know the story and you said you toured this at like 20 years ago or something like that when did you find out about the winchester mystery house geez um i mean growing up in california i'd say i always knew about it by and i was somewhere i always wanted to go but it's one of those things i'm never in Northern California. It's a six hour drive from here. So it was one year going to California stream. It's like 10 minutes or 15 minutes away from where that show is held. So my wife and I went and toured it. And that was the 20 years ago just to check it out. And it fascinated me at that time. So when David brought it up that they had the license to this house, I mean, it's something no one would ever expect as a pinball machine. Right. Okay. Even if this game leaked, who would have guessed it? No, no. So but I was he mentioned it and I was thrilled. I'm like, oh, because I love haunted houses. I love theme parks. It's it just it fit all all the things I'm into. And so so what about the thing? So I'll I'll do a quick summary if that's OK. So this is the Winchester Mystery House. So this is this is the wife of the heir of the Winchester, the rifle that that won the West. uh she um now her husband died when he was like in the 40s the did i get that right it's pretty young yeah pretty young and no kids or did the kids die the they had one child they had one yeah so she was a widow in her 40s and um she went to see i think see a medium or a seance or something like that to try to connect. And the medium told her that because of the association with the rifle, that she had spirits around her. And so to confuse or to entertain the spirits, she continually built on the house. And so this is the reason why the house is so fascinating is because there are things in the house, such as like a staircase that goes to nowhere or a a door that opens out on a second story that would plunge you to your death and things like that. It's just kind of this hodgepodge of rooms to basically confuse and entertain the ghosts or the spirits. Excuse me. And so that is what's going to go into this haunted house motif. And so there's a lot of things that you can possibly do with that theme to explore, to have people go around. So how do you explore something like that, and how do you channel that storyline into a pinball rule set? I mean, it's a lot of original content in here. We took the house, we took the rooms from the house and thought exactly that. How can we convey the spirit of the Winchester Mystery House into the game? We kept one of the ghosts that visitors have reported at the house, Clyde. He's known as the wheelbarrow ghost. He's found in the basement. So people report that in Winchester Mystery House. They actually have an asset for him. They have an image. They say you can see a photo, and they point out this one individual. This was Clyde in the old-time photos. But a lot of this was just coming up with an original story based around the stairs to nowhere, the doors to nowhere, All the odd, the 7-Eleven staircase, all the odd elements that are in the house. And then just finding story elements that would work. Make new ghosts, make new spirits, I guess I should say, and just have everything revolve around that. Tell us about the tower. So there's a feature in the play field, the upper right corner where the tower falls. There has to be a story about that. Right. So the house was originally seven stories. That's at the height of it. In 1906, there was a big San Francisco earthquake, which damaged a lot of the house. And that tower was one of the things that fell. So we decided to actually bring that back into the game. You can see it on the back glass on the right-hand side. You'll see, like, this goes to the image of the tower. And we put it in the game itself. And we'll have an earthquake that drops the tower, among other things. We're going to use it for more than just that specific event. So you can see the tower going up and down. But that's the reason we put it in the game. So where did the – what I really noticed and I think stands out to a lot of people is the turntable. And with the diverting and different paths, and it really makes it into a winding maze. Where did that part of the concept come from when you were building? That – it kind of came organically. I wanted a way to convey how the house is confusing, how it's easy to get lost in it. So I thought, okay, multiple paths, multiple ways to get lost. The other thing was I had the staircase to nowhere that I wanted to add a 90-degree angle to the player so you could see the ball come up, get caught on that. And so I needed some sort of pathway to push the ball into there. I wanted it to fall into a subway too. So that's kind of how that turntable grew over time. Originally, it was just a two-shot diverter to get up on that staircase ramp. and then it slowly morphed into four shots and then the the eight that it eventually ended at but yeah it was just meant to be a way to show how confusing the the house is and how there's hallways that go this way and that way and you don't know where you're going pretty much definitely and the other question i have too is i mean this is your first game i know you were working on a homebrew and you've played a ton of games you've obviously had your hands on and understand a lot of pinball machines. But the geometry just felt so good while playing this at Pinball Expo. Everything just felt smooth. It flowed well. It didn't feel like there was very many rejects, at least from the game itself. Maybe I was shooting terribly sometimes. But did you take inspiration from other people? How did you figure out the geometry and stuff? Was it just tweak here, tweak there? Yeah, a lot of it was tweak here, tweak there. It's just 20, 25 years of playing pinball. And I used to restore games. So I would, you know, rebuild games on the ground up, you know, do play field swaps. So or like I would modify games to make them play a little better. If I found a shot was clunky, I would, you know, bend some ball guides, reposition some screws to make it play a little better. So I think just my experience in pinball overall led to what I think makes a shot work well. How many individual ball paths are there in this game? I actually haven't counted everything. There's eight different paths. There's three entrances to the turntable. Do the math, I guess. There's a lot. The one thing that I noticed during the gameplay was how quickly the turntable rotated, like even between shots. It wasn't like between balls. It was like you'd flip it. And right before the flipper, it would change the path. So how are you going to predict? Usually, at least elite level players, not hacks like me, elite level players want to know exactly where the ball is going when they're taking the shot. So how do you anticipate that when that turntable is spinning so quickly? Well, one of the things I wanted to do was make sure that everything was open so you could see everything. So you can see, when the turntable turns, you can see exactly the ball path your ball is going to take. There's no surprises. I mean, the left orbit, maybe there's some hidden stuff as the ball comes down, but it's just a straight shot down to the flipper on the left-hand side. But everything else is open and visible so that you don't lose track of the ball, because I know people don't like losing track of the ball, shooting it in somewhere and then where is it going to come out kind of a thing. How is it, so obviously this being your first game and whatnot, But I assume this is the first time you've managed a team when it comes to pinball. And you had some really great people on this team. You got Jeff Dodson, who does Dirty Pool. Sound was fantastic. Like, this was next level. I was super impressed with it. You've got Brad Brad Albright, who did artwork. Did you do most of the mechanical engineering with the mechs and stuff like that? Or did you have someone do that for you? So I did a lot of the mechanical engineering on it. And then I also had Travis and Luke help out on it over time throughout the project. but a lot of it was on my plate to start with at the beginning. I was going to say, because that turntable is smooth as butter. Like Scott said, it's like turning on a dime, and it just does so quickly. Is that just like you said, years of having hands-on games? No, I mean, just having the idea of the turntable, we really didn't know what we were going to make it out of. And I thought, let's make it like a ramp. And that's basically, it's this big stainless steel platter. if you pick it up. It's a heavy beast. But it's the stepper motors that keep that. It's just a single stepper motor direct driving that turntable. So it's a really simple mechanism overall. And it just turned out so well. Yeah, amazing. Does it rotate both ways or one way? It rotates both ways. That's amazing. Tell us about the dead end shot because that certainly surprised a lot of people. So there are two dead end shots on the turntable. The north and the east directions. There's just two. And that's what you're asking about, or are you asking about the staircase to nowhere? I'm talking about there's a staircase shot, right, that goes up and then comes back down. There's also a dead end shot, too, right? Right. So, yeah, there are two targets on the turntable that are dead end shots that signify the empty halls that you go down. There's the staircase to nowhere. That's the one that the ball veers left on and there's a magnet on that, on that ramp. It's like a very small ramp, but there's a magnet that grabs the ball so that we can turn the turntable and shove the ball down into the basement. And now tell me about the basement Cause you you don have an necessarily an upper play field or a lower play field in the game But we do talk about going to the basement and going to the second story How did you communicate that to the players that, okay, now this is where you are? Because that can be confusing if people are like, I don't know exactly what the goal is on the game. It can be. And part of that is, I mean, I'm saying that the shots that go from the staircase into the subway, I signify the subway as the basement. So nowhere in the game does it actually say that. But at the same time, we do have a basement mode. We have a basement room on the map. So the entire game, if you look at the play field, you have this blueprint of the house. It's got the 13 rooms. There are actually 14 listed, including the foyer. And that has the basement in the lower right. And that's a mode for the basement. But then we also have the wheelbarrow ghost multiball, which takes place in the basement. and that's where that staircase lock happens. That's when the ball is grabbed and shoved down there so that you can meet Clyde the wheelbarrow ghost who is in the basement. You know, one thing that I really like about this game that when we first started playing, that I saw in your videos and stuff like that, I like to explore a pinball machine. I know some people play for score, some like to fill out a machine and just see what nooks and crannies it has. This key concept where if you start out with a key so you don't have to really traverse the trails. You can just open the rooms, and you can earn more keys by hitting the drop targets there. I love this concept. When did that come into play, and what made you decide to go that route? The second time I was touring the Winchester Mystery House while on this project, we went on their Explore More Tour, which is you wear a hard hat, you go into the third floor of the house where you don't normally get to tour. It was actually really cool to see these unfinished rooms and such. But we reached a point in the tour that we entered a room and our tour guide tried to open the next door to continue our tour. And it was locked. And we couldn't go any further in the house. So we had to get a radio for someone to come up and unlock this door. So that gave me the idea of putting these keys in the house that you have to unlock doors to get further into the house. And so the idea was just with the game, I didn't want anyone to be locked into playing the same thing over and over and over again. So the keys are a way to add the variety so that you can use a key and explore how you want. You can go to that last, you know, you can go the furthest room on the map. If you collect enough keys as your first mode, if you really wanted to, it's going to take some time to do it. It's going to be difficult, but you could do it. So walk me through the modes on this game. Did I hear correctly there are six modes that you are currently planned in the game? Did I get that right? Currently, there are six modes in the game. There are 13 planned. So there's a lot of 13 references because 13 was Sarah Winchester's favorite number. So she has 13 all throughout the house. So we have 13 targets, 13 modes. There's the 13 features. There's just a lot like that. So, yes, right now there are six modes. And we have seven more coming. one of the modes for there's a room, the Daisy bedroom, actually has two modes for the one room, depending on if you visit it before you have the earthquake wizard mode or after it. So you'll only get to play one or the other in the game. You will never get to play both. But do you want to walk through what's in there right now? Like the storylines and such? Yeah, walk us through it. Okay, so you start off with the three rooms, the Venetian dining room, the servant's kitchen, and the twin dining rooms. Those are your options. And you can unlock the basement. If you go to the Venetian dining room, you're going to see a spirit sitting at a table staring at a candle. And what we have is there's a villain we haven't quite introduced yet named Henry. He's kind of trapped these spirits into these tasks, or they're forced to continue doing what they've been doing. So you'll see her sitting at a table with a single candle lit, and you have to finish lighting the candles. to free her spirit. And then for all these, when we get the wizard modes in, the spirits you free will actually be helping you in the wizard mode. So if you play a wizard mode early on, you may only have three spirits. If you play that same wizard mode later on in the game, maybe you've got six in the mode. So there's some variety there to make it a little more dynamic. The kitchen, there's the spirit there. I'm going to forget her name right now. Dang it. anyways she's um she's at a stove and she doesn't want to ever let the flames die so you have to distract her she goes downstairs and you'll see her on our pepper's ghost display and while she's down there you can make shots to turn off the oven basically to extinguish the flames and if you extinguish them all then you've freed her spirit uh we've got the sans room which is the sans room at the winchester mystery house is a unique room this is really tiny room you wouldn't actually You think it's a seance room. There's no, it's this plain room that Sarah would go into conductor seances at 12 and 2, 12 a.m., 2 a.m. But the trick with this room is once you exit it, there's no way to get back in the way you came. So in the mode, after you leave the room, you have to trek around the house to get back into the room because you hear the bell tolling. You hear the Winchester bell, which is what she used to call the spirits after seances. So you have to get all the way around to get back into the seance room to see what's calling you back. And if you finish that mode, it actually starts seance multi-bell for you. The twin dining rooms, those are two nearly identical dining rooms in the house. And what you have there is you have a spirit, the silver man that's trapped in the second room. And you have to free his spirit. So you have to break this. It's as if he's in another dimension and you're breaking through that room to set him free. What's left here? The basement is in there right now. That's where you go into the basement. The lights are off. And you have to restore the power in the basement. And these angry spirits are coming at you. So you have to hold down your action button to make a light flash in order to dispel the spirit temporarily as you traverse the basement to try and get the power back on. And then, how many is that? Five, six? There's the Daisy bedroom. This is where we, it's a young girl named Maribel that's playing with her dolls. And she needs your help finding the jewelry associated with each doll. And if you mess up, she's not very happy at all. and you'll start hearing her music box make some really odd music, and the dolls will start to have red eyes and such. So don't mess up there. The idea there was to be creepy, and if you see our tilt warnings, those are the dolls from that room. I think that's the six that are in there right now. There was one mode that I was watching you play where the ghost was capturing your scores, and you actually had to either catch the ghost or or exercise the goat or the spirit so you could capture those points is that tell me more about that that's the playful multiplier room for the entire rule for the entire game so once you start your multiplier there's a spirit meter on the right hand side of the screen you build it up with a lit spinner that goes up to 30 seconds maximum and then there's a x target which will activate your playfield multiplier and once you activate that the spirit is stealing your score your score is completely frozen and you don't earn any points until that timer is done and you collect your score and you've got 15 seconds to collect it at the spider web magnet at the right orbit otherwise you lose all those points that you should have gotten is the are these 15 seconds is this like a double or triple scoring so there's there's an incentive for you to keep trying to rack it up and collect it well that's the the only time that your score is frozen is when it's 2x or 3x yeah so it's funny because like when you did the original videos on the reveal day of this one of the videos you said there's only it's only 25 code complete and when i got my hands on the game granted i only played like three or four games so i didn't get to super dive deep this felt like a fully fleshed out game already yeah how much more are you expecting i I mean, 75% is a lot compared to what you already have in there. I may have been a little light on the 25%. I'll admit that. But I was trying to think through, you know, we still have seven modes coming in, you know, in the house. Then we've got three main wizard modes. We've got a whole bunch of side quests, a whole bunch of side quest wizard modes. And the idea with all of this is I'm trying to plan all the wizard modes and such so everyone will be able to see them. Except for maybe the very final one. The very final one, that's going to be a challenge to get to. but I think everyone should be able to play skeleton key multiball. That's when you get 13 keys. I think everyone should be able to get all 13 items in the upper right, play the five modes that are associated with those, and then play the multiball that comes after that. We have a right ramp mode that's coming in the game soon. We have a super spinner. There's a lot of stuff that's not there right now, and that's why I said 25% initially. Gotcha, gotcha. I mean, it looks amazing. just yeah and it's funny like when you said 25% I'm like ooh should he have said that but like everyone playing the game there was no one that was like this feels bare bones everyone was like this feels really good no one got through everything that's for sure and even I was paying attention as people were playing very few people even played the daisy bedroom that's in there right now because that's one of the further rooms in the house from from the foyer from where you start so it sounds like that's for the best because you don't want people screaming and running out of pinball expo but no the other thing i think that's really cool about this that i haven't seen very many other games do is the ouija board for the apron and like with the lighting up with the players and the numbers and everything like that where did that come from and is there actual ouija boards in the uh winchester house or is it just it's just part of the theme they sell ouija boards in the gift shop we put a spirit board on the game because we g is a licensed product gotcha okay spirit board yeah um um so we always wanted something in there i always wanted some sort of spirit board in the game and originally we had one that had a moving planchette on it that was a magnet base and it would just you know you go over the entire board and spill out things that'd be way cool i was wondering yeah it's very yeah yeah and it's seeing it and watching the planchette just move around it is fantastic but you have to stare at it to see what it's spelling so it just doesn't make sense for for a pinball machine it's not yeah exactly so with your third eye yes so much better and and so uh brad came up with this idea of putting the you know making the entire apron the spirit board and it just took off from there and having the numbers the lid planchette it made it look so nice it would be hilarious though to still have it moving and if someone's watching over your shoulder that doesn't know this game right like and someone starts freaking out the the thing's moving what's moving is it saying something weird hey for me i'd probably say you stink at pinball yeah all right carl the coolest part one of the coolest parts in my opinion this game is the peppered ghost effect and the ball catching back there in that back corner and just like spider webs grabbing the ball and it's shaking and stuff where did that come into play because it's it's such a cool concept well we have ghosts and we needed a place to show ghosts so it's uh we tried for a while to to figure out how to put the ghost in the house we we knew we were going to put a large sculpt of the winter mystery house inside the game um but we had trouble figuring out exactly how we were going to display them. We had a projector idea. We had showing them through windows, you know, lighting up things. But we landed on that Pepper's Ghost just because it's such a great effect. It really hasn't been used enough in pinball, I feel. I mean, sure, you had Pinball 2000 and you've got some, you know, you have like Ghostbusters and dialed in, had little tiny screens. But this is a larger screen that, and because it is, we can interact with the ball with the various things that we'll have in there. Well, it looks pretty amazing. The one thing that I kept shooting when I was playing was kind of the spiderweb effect. And so the ball flips back and on the spiderweb, and it really took me a second to look at it and say, okay, what's going on here? I know this is an image here, but I couldn't figure out how you were doing it until I realized, oh, it's a Pepper's Ghost. But it looked so good integrating with the ball path. I thought that was brilliant. And that's the idea, and we're going to have a lot more in there. coming up, of course. Who came up with that? With the spider web? I mean, I had the magnet in the game. The spider web, I think, it might have been Eric that made a graphic and then Trent spruced it up I agree with you that Pepper Ghost Effect has not been utilized enough in pinball The first night that I actively remember being exposed to pinball I got to play a Circus Voltaire Simpsons Pinball Party Whitewater Twilight Zone an Addams Family considerably all the best games And this was 2012. so this was like before the modern that we know now the lcds the game that stuck out the most to me was revenge for mars and that's the game that hooked me in because destroying those little aliens on the playfield and blowing up the ship and and the big chicken on the playfield and stuff like that was mind-boggling to me and shout out to douglas smith if you haven't checked out his recent video he took a revenge for mars and put it in a new modern cabinet oh yeah yeah it's a really really cool video uh like i said i'm i'm nostalgic that's like the game that hooked me right but i totally agree with you this pepper's effect and it's it's funny too because it's also it's pepper's ghost right so like it even is a little on the nose of winchester house even though you're not supposed to call them ghosts they're spirits but spirits yeah so but no seriously this is just such there's so many cool ideas in this game one thing that makes me slightly nervous though because in one of the videos david's like carl i let you go ham on this game this isn't what you're always going to be doing so do do we need a temper expectations going because you're making another game that was what was announced yeah i'll be working on future projects for barrels absolutely but with this having pretty much the kitchen sink in it do we have to temper expectations he was talking more about having the freedom to do what we wanted to do with it I think Sir was very open to our ideas and did not push back on pretty much anything. I mean, just one or two things. They were fantastic to work with. That's amazing. One of the things was the ghost, right? Yeah, yeah. No, the ghost was mine because they called the client the wheelbarrow ghost. That was something Jeff thought of for some reason, and I didn't correct him at the time, and I shut him down. All right. Okay. We're dispelling rumors right now. There you go. Now, the real question I have is, Carl, you're one of the best players on the planet. So designing a game that you can shoot is a little different than a game that I can shoot. So how do you find that balance for the normies out there who are playing pinball and we don't have the skill set that Karl DeAngelo has? I mean, there's a combination of shots in this game. So I think some of them are easier and some of them are harder. Like the spinner shot is definitely one of the harder shots in the game. But the center shot, the center hall where the modes are started primarily, that's one of the easier shots. The inline drops are an easier shot. So it's just finding a balance of what's nice to shoot on the flipper and make sure that the code is aligned with those shots as well so people can progress, even if they can't find those more difficult shots in the game. i do i do feel like your main mech or one of your main mechs the the turntable was very good to shoot as well and i think that is is a good idea because then you interact with that mech a lot more right same with i like that the keys didn't feel as dangerous to go after because of where they're located um the one that is dangerous that i did like and had to get used to was the inlines and it feels like they're a little tighter what made you decide to put inline targets since i mean they're always iconic like metallica that's one of my favorite parts but like you don't see them enough outside like that in tna you know i'm saying people love inline drops that's in watching people play at expo it was often the first thing they would shoot for in the game i see the inline drops they want to get behind them and so it's just i enjoy in lines and yeah they're underutilized in games overall and i wanted a way to have a hidden passage behind some sort of shot and that was a great way to do it it's very thematic though because if you're going to be you know opening doors and opening passageways that that's a great integration into into that product that process so when now barrels of this is the question i have with barrels of fun games so with other games so like stern games they're they're pretty easy to update at least for a entry-level player like me. So how do you make this process easy for code updates on Barrels of Fun? Because I have no idea how the Barrels of Fun, like the operating system works and how it gets that. So tell me about that. So there's a USB update and a Wi-Fi update. I think the Wi-Fi updates are offline at the moment. But it's a download a single file, unzip it, put it on a USB drive, and then just put it in one of the USB ports on the PC that's in the backbox, and it automatically updates everything. The Wi-Fi updates when they're working, when they're back online. It's going to the menu, and it won't automatically update. You do have to go into the menu and select it, and then it downloads and restarts and everything. So it's a simple process either way. It's none of the imaging stuff that you see on some other games. Okay, so you did talk about, and I did notice too, on the tutorial and when people were flipping, you did mention that left out lane is a drain monster. And I noticed a lot of balls going out there. So how do you prevent that? Because if you, if you look at the way, you know, okay. The, the game to me, when I look at it, it has a little bit of a, you know, a deep shot on the right, short shots on the left. So I would say if I were comparing it to other games, Jurassic park is similar that way. Simpson's pinball party is similar that way, where there's a lot of close things up there. but how do you prevent, you know, if you continually are draining out that left side, how are you going to prevent people from doing that? So we, the lane is adjustable, the in lane. So there is a post in there that you can, you can see, you can make it bigger. You can make it smaller. You know, you get, yeah, you can make it. So it shouldn't drain as much, even though it probably still will. The, the, the other thing is, is the kickback to make it easier to light. So we have changed the plan based on player feedback. back and so the kickback there are more opportunities to relight it throughout the game so to so you should not you know if you see it's unlit you should have an immediate opportunity to relight it if you choose to at all times the left orbit will always relight it and that's part of the plan but now we've also added a mystery award in case that you know because often it'll be lit your kickbacks off you know that if you shoot the orbit you'll get your kickback lit but then the magnet the spider web grabs it so we've added another mystery award so the spider will actually award it so you're not always stuck uh going damn you magnet why'd you grab my ball okay the one question i have is if you have the control over being able to light the left out lane for like a ball save would it be would you consider saying okay if you don't light that you can actually get more points because you're playing dangerously you're living dangerously baby you could but it's a matter of how do you implement that mechanic and how do you you know figure that out come on it's like dangerous stuff over there like the cap the ball is you know it's all the way on the left hand side of the game so that will often if you're not careful drain you out the left outline by design so so i know one thing that people um get nervous about is when there's a lot of mechanical moving parts on a play field and whatnot um it breaking down is what's the kind of tests that you guys go through to make sure that these are still going to be robust and and people are going to be happy with them for years to come i mean it's a lot of it's a lot of play and a lot of design pretty much just making sure that things are you know just just bang away on the game once they're ready and and test test test test test yeah like anything i know like other companies have like they set up a game just for the mech and it just plays and plays and plays for like hours on end do you guys do something similar we we haven't yet but it's on the list to do on future games to have a uh you know just just bang away on a target or whatever for a hundred thousand cycles kind of a thing absolutely um i think we would be lying that anyone was going to guess that this was going to sell out in 24 hours so the real question is when do we get another chance at a carl d'Python Anghelo game like when do we get to see i know we shouldn't be asking when like what's the next game i don't want that like i think a lot of people are actively like when do i get to buy like another chance of getting a car when is the next one not sold out uh i mean it'll come it's it's you know it's i can't say any specifics of course but but yeah definitely definitely working on projects so okay and then one thing i asked asked you at uh expo but i don't think a lot of people have asked or thought about is you live in california and you have a full-time job and barrels of fun is in houston texas it is a full-time job so uh is it gonna be a while like are you gonna are you gonna quit your job and move there are you gonna retire what's the game plan i am working my way towards a pension after being where i am for 25 years so i'm trying to get that just last little bit so I don't waste those 25 years working there. And then we'll see where things take us at that point. And what does that mean for like never drains and stuff like that too? It's a lot to juggle right now. It's absolutely a lot to juggle. We want answers. No, I'm joking. We need you to have this figured out all right now. Well, you know, I was juggling it the last 18 months already, so I know I can do it. I know I can manage it. It's just, it's a lot. So I was looking for some help with the software. Or see if I could pass it along to someone else. For now, I'm just reducing the number of tournaments that are able to use it. So I do occasionally say no now, which is something I rarely ever used to do in the past. It's a weird boundary. You can get busy, yeah. Okay. Now, what else do you want to bring up about Winchester that we didn't think about? Just the team that knocked it out of the park, I feel. Josh and Julian on the display assets. They're fantastic. Great stuff coming. Josh really, he modeled all these rooms. You know, he took pictures of the rooms in the Winchester Mystery House, and he's got some great detail in it, especially in the Grand Ballroom, which will be featured on the Wizard Mode. There's this beautiful organ in there, and he spent so much time modeling this organ so it would look great in the game. And then we'll have some organ music coming from Jeff, too, to match that for the Wizard modes, which is going to be really exciting to see. We have a tutorial that's coming very soon. So if you have never played the game before, the idea is to give players a quick overview. You'll hold down the action button and our tour guide will narrate, along with lights on the play field and instructions on the screen. So how to tour the house, how to start your mode, how to start Sands Multiball. Just 30, 40 seconds. Just very brief, just for complete beginners. And then for the homeowners, we'll have an option to turn it off so you won't even be asked. So you won't be bugged when you start the game. Because otherwise you'll hear, is this your first time here kind of a thing. They may ask that after I've played a few times. Either way. Okay. We see you're struggling. Would you like some help? Like on the Mario games now? Yeah. When Luigi dies, or yeah, when you die too many times as Mario, Luigi's like, do you want me to help you? We can give you some stars here to get you through the level. Okay, that was like Super Mario World, like because my kids were really young at the time. And they're like, do you just want God mode so you can get through this? Okay, so Carl, you've been doing this for a long time. Everybody has that one game that hooked them into pinball. What was your game that you remember connecting with? Jeez. Jeez. I mean, I want to say the first game I ever played was the Cyclone, and I was big into theme parks and roller coasters, so I'd almost say that, as funny as that is. I do remember my family used to take trips to Vegas every summer, and me and my brothers would get a roll of quarters each, and they would go play arcade games. I would play pinball. And one year, Circus Circus, I remember Terminator 2 being rolled out right there, brand new. I sat on it for three hours playing it on my 10 bucks I had. So that's another one that was a big influence on keeping me going on this. But then at the same time, I had a break in college where I didn't play anything really, not until I, me and my wife bought a house and had space. I went, oh, maybe I can buy a pinball machine. Bought a Whirlwind. And so I'd say one of those three, Cyclone, T2, or Whirlwind are the ones. Which is amazing because that's all three different designers. I love the diversity there especially. Are you taking knowledge from those favorite games and stuff like that to implement into your games as you move forward? I don't know. I don't know what my style is yet. What common aspects you'll see between games. You have four flippers in this one I do have four flippers yes So I do like multiple flippers I not a big fan layout fan I was going to say, the only game – because it's funny because games come out and the first thing that happens is comparisons, right? Because a lot of people want to – they want to be able to, I guess, play it without playing it. You see some pictures and you're like, oh, I think this will make more sense once you do this and that. i do feel like this game has like a little bit of a whirlwind with the cross shot with the drop targets and that uh maybe a little bit of foo fighters a little bit of um judge dread with with those in line or not the in lines with the drop target with that flipper up there but honestly overall i mean we're really nitpicking because i feel like this is like uh it's kind of like that this it's funny because like your first game really feels organically different and it feels different yeah yeah and so i just like i think we're i'm just curious if this is your your freshman attempt i'm just curious and like excited to see where you move on from here because this is just amazing in my opinion thank you it's it's it's uh it's kind of scary to you know think about what comes next yeah i guess you try to do something different be you know not let him breathe josh he's enjoying the success he he just barely spiked the football like we're already looking for a 10.5 to see how it was funny though so we did our expo episode and I mean you guys by far stole the show in my opinion with Winchester that's my personal opinion Winchester and Dune those were my two favorites and my top ones Winchester, Dune Portal and Harry Potter and in all of those really felt like they leveled up the the companies they were represented all of them took a big step up which is which is a big deal because everybody's competing with stern which is you know which is making so many games compared to everybody else it felt like everybody really stepped up to the plate and really hit home runs but it made me laugh because like we did a 23 minute piece on barrels of fun because it was just such a good show for you guys it was good showing yeah and someone was like why are you guys hyping on a game that no one can get a hold of like we're not hyping it's just a good game like well we were here we got a hold of it we played yeah so we shouldn't talk about beetle juice at all because it's already sold out so uh you know there's if you can't get it there's no reason to talk about it okay the best part about this though is that and even talking to david This was an experiment, really. And he even talked about it, saying, look, we took a risk on a – it's a licensed game, but for all intents and purposes, it's pretty much as close to an unlicensed game as you're going to get in today's day and age. And then he's like, and it's Carl's first game. Carl's an elite-level player. He's great. And this is taking a risk on things. And all three things together, and even he admitted, if we can get two of those things really to gel, then we can have a good showing. Even he didn't expect three or four things to level up so quickly and for it to be such a great show. So in anything, that is like a big take. It's good for the future of pinball that there are more options out there and everybody is leveling everybody else up because – and having someone who is an elite level player like yourself, you're going to look at things way differently than I will because you're going to see – it's like the matrix. you're the one who sees all the code that's going up and down and i and i'm still just just trying to you know trying to not drain down the center most of the time well i i mean at the same time like i said earlier it's it's it's my job now to make sure that anyone can play the game and anyone can have fun all skill levels you know if i if if someone steps up to the game and doesn't know what they're doing or doesn't understand it doesn't have fun then I have failed. So, so my next question is, um, do you need like some testers maybe in the Utah area who are willing to, uh, to work out the code, maybe find some space? I don't know. It's Vernal or, or Salt Lake, you know, either one of those options would be really good. I think you can talk to Dave. I had to talk to Dave on that. It's funny too. Cause like I, you know, I, the fun house is fantastic. Like Haunted House is one of the games I was kind of first introduced to when I got into the hobby. Oh, that five-level monster? Yeah, yeah, because I bought an amazing Spider-Man. My friends were like, while you're out there, buy a pinball machine for me. And I was like, I don't know. The guy had a Haunted House he was getting rid of. So I was like, we're buying that. Wait, wait. You bought Spider-Man and Haunted House? Those are like the two worst functioning games. Anyhow. They blow all the time. But it's funny because I didn't put two and two together until Winchester came out. And we're at Expo. And I always tell people I'm from Dinosaur Land. but the one thing after winchester i'm like oh i also live like 20 minutes from skinwalker ranch i didn't realize skinwalker ranch is as big as it is because i grew up next to it you know i'm saying like yeah anyhow carl's looking at me like have you heard so okay then no winchester right yeah yeah yeah sounds creepy um yeah we we won't go down that road but those that know what skinwalker is i actually got to go work on the ranch here in the next week so oh uh yeah i should give an update you need heating air heating and air conditioning on the skinwalkers yes yes so the aliens and the uh the shapeshifters still need heating and cooling as well i guess it's modern comforts aliens you think they'd have the technology yeah really who's boiling water nowadays not not even aliens want to boil water so they had enough technology to get to earth but They can't. No, right. They can't boil water. Anyhow. Okay. We're down a rabbit hole. I apologize. Okay. Okay. How many, I didn't get to this. How many balls are in the game? Six balls. Six balls. And are the multi balls. Do they actually, do you have a six ball multiball in there? There will be a six balls is partially because we have a three ball physical lock so that we could still have three balls, you know, or you've got two locked on there. So we could still have at least four balls in a regular multiball without releasing those kind of a thing. But there will be some multi-balls in there that use all six balls, depending on various things that you've done. You may have a three ball, you may have a six ball. It depends on how you've done in the game. Would that be lock stealing? No lock stealing, no. I guess one other question I do have, too, because we've talked about this a little bit on and off for this episode, is as you're moving forward, you're going to want to make a game that is more that everyone can enjoy. How do you do that code-wise, too? Because sometimes you can get overcomplicated with the code as well. Right. So like this, I took some risks, I feel, with the mode setup, with how you pick your room and then you don't go straight to your room to actually play that mode. So players do have the option to hold down the button and it'll skip them straight to the room. So whether that's complicated or not, I don't know. But we're going to instruct players about it. And again, that's part of the tutorial. to teach players that they could do that, to try to make it easy enough to understand. I think outside of Jersey Jack's Pirates of the Caribbean, has there ever been a game that's really had a tutorial? And really, that's just a compass pointing you what shot's the best to do. You know what I'm saying? Right, right. And so it's just weird because modern pinball is so in-depth nowadays. This tutorial concept, it's weird to me that this is the first time it's really being implemented. I used to do the video tutorials for Stern on the attract modes with the arrows pointing everywhere. So we kind of started on that. We built that originally for the Heads Up Championships that the IPA was running so that we can convey to the stream what the goals on the games are. So it's an evolution of that, I'd say, except it's player-controlled now. Yeah. Shout out to Tom Graff. So you're a very busy man because I was chuckling. I don't know if you saw the picture, but the tournament at Expo supposedly was streamed by IE Pinball. yeah no respect yeah do not disturb carl signs too which i thought was funny also which is hilarious but i just saw his i don't know if you saw his meme but it was 18 innings of baseball at six hours long hold my beer because then you know because at the time they took the picture was like one in the morning on saturday so anyhow yeah let's take on cricket you know yeah well cool um i i feel like we've asked all of our questions scott did you have anything else you wanted to ask you know i i'm just really excited for this game i i love that we have more options out there more options for all the different people out there it lets you explore these smaller themes that a lot of people aren't going to get it shows me that Barrels of Fun is going in a great direction. And really, all three games have been solid games. I am not an early adopter. And so when Labyrinth came out, I'm like, I'll see. I'll see what's going on. This Expo was the first time I got to play Dune and also get to actually get my hands on Winchester. And I will say all three of them felt solid. They felt thematically immersive and they felt very much a finished product of the big leagues. So I, I can say at this point, barrels of fun is a product that I would say, go ahead and buy, buy with confidence. The, everything seems so good and I'm really excited getting you Carl on board, uh, such an elite level player that understands geometry, understands code and being able to do this going forward. I'm really excited for the things that you guys are going to bring to us as fans because right now it seems super bright. The future seems bright. Absolutely. And we're super excited, too, the future. Everything's going to be great. A lot coming. Love it. I'm excited. Well, if someone wants to get a hold of you, Carl, even though it sounds you're super busy, how do they get a hold of you? I do stream occasionally still on IE Pinball. So check that out. come join the chat and and put some definitely watch if you want to learn how to play pinball the right way watch carl i that's the bottom line like it's it i i can barely like godzilla's over my shoulder and i can barely get you know 500 million on it and carl gets that before like the first city it's crazy i i will not lie it did hurt my brain when you got avengers and you done oh i'm trying to think what it was you were you were linking some kind of center it had to been like the soul gem the soul gem the the a flip soul gem or whatever that was i think and it was insane and it was like the score was just blowing up and i'm like how how do i do that oh you were also you were advancing your timer so it was pretty much like an infinite timer oh yeah and you were shooting like the the loop for the the hurry up with the gauntlet i want to say and it was just insane to watch you just like butter man like ever it just the time the time jim's underutilized in that game people do not like to use it for some reason they want every other one but i love the time jim for that game is yeah that game is underrated i i still don't feel it it's funny because it's got to be keith's easiest playing layout in my opinion and yet people like it's just the most complicated game ever it's like i i still have it it's it's actually in storage right now and i still love the game but yeah it's uh yeah so carl is the stuff curry of pinball right now. He's able to hit shots from everywhere in the field. He's hitting threes every day. If you want to get a hold of us, we are LoserKidPinballPodcast at gmail.com. Also hit us up on all the socials at LoserKidPinball. If you want a jersey like us, it is World Series time, baby, so you might as well get your jersey to represent. LoserKids are in it this year, I guess. Toronto. I sympathize. We're from Utah, so the little guys going up against the big guys, I might not be rooting for either or but man i can sympathize for both sides and i i stayed up late for that dodger for that dodger game the 18th i i fell asleep like five times oh it was insane absolutely insane also are flipping out if you want that discode for the funhouse uh 500 off loser kid at checkout and same with uh if you want that portal thousand off at checkout loser kid in the discount code and scott you got anything else for us yeah we'll do we'll do a future episode on portal since now we've been able to play it uh we wanted to make sure this one was focused on on carl and his excellent game and barrels of fun but yeah look for that in the future but there that production is ramping up too so that that deal is still going on so please reach out and absolutely go play pinball go check out barrels of fun and watch carl learn how to play Bye!