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Homebrew Developers Panel - 2024

Pintastic New England·video·1h 14m·analyzed·Feb 7, 2025
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.037

TL;DR

Homebrew panel showcases custom pinball machines with technical details and developer insights.

Summary

A homebrew pinball developer panel from Pintastic New England 2024 featuring builders discussing their custom machines including Warhammer, Borderlands, King of the Arcade, Pincraft, and Battle Stations. Developers share technical platforms (FAST Pinball, Mission Pinball Framework, P3, Cobra), design challenges, and lessons learned. Notable innovations include Borderlands' articulated tilting playfield controlled via joystick and Battle Stations' head-to-head competitive format.

Key Claims

  • Borderlands homebrew features a fully articulated, controllable playfield using linear actuators and Arduino stack, allowing players to tilt the game via joystick like the game Labyrinth

    high confidence · Brian (Borderlands developer) detailed the system: 'what if I could control the playfield and make it steeper, make it lean, make it do all sorts of stuff. You can pick up the controller and you can play it like the game Labyrinth.'

  • Borderlands playfield control system developed over two years with friend contributing ~150 hours of Arduino work

    high confidence · Brian states: 'A friend of mine did a ton of work... He showed up with it in a Christmas box... He did like 150 hours of work because he was out of work at the time and bored.'

  • Borderlands uses CNC-cut custom playfield with 3D printed ramps and features, reducing assembly errors to zero misplaced screws

    high confidence · Brian: 'I ordered my CNC playfield... I was like, let's go with four [wrong screws]... they all bet against me, and there were zero wrong screws.'

  • King of the Arcade is based on Pinball 2000 format with Pepper's Ghost display shooting down onto playfield

    high confidence · Mike Testa: 'The King of the Arcade is off of the Pinball 2000 format with the monitor shooting down onto the top of the... Pepper's Ghost.'

  • Battle Stations is a head-to-head pinball game with six balls, flat playfield, hinge in middle for maintenance access, and no scoring system

    high confidence · Developer states: 'There are six now [balls]... the hinge came from the requirement to maintain the pinball machine... The only objective is to beat the other players.'

  • Battle Stations originally had 14 balls but reduced to 6 due to launch speed constraints

    high confidence · Developer: 'We originally had a lot more. We had 14. But we found out we couldn't launch them fast enough.'

  • Warhammer homebrew upgraded from one-flipper to three-flipper design in recent rebuild

    high confidence · Aaron (Warhammer developer): 'It's three-flipper now, so that was definitely an improvement... cutting and drilling, and you get it done.'

Notable Quotes

  • “It is what it is. Next time it will be working better. But, yeah, the control system was sort of the beast that we wanted to take on with this, right?”

    Brian (Borderlands developer)@ 11:10 — Reflects pragmatic homebrew developer attitude toward setbacks; emphasizes learning-focused approach to complex innovation

  • “Everyone here needs to throw this man $10 so that he can patent this so that somebody else won't steal this idea and do it incorrectly. Because you need to protect this. You did something really, really interesting and fun.”

    Panel moderator/Jillian@ 10:38 — Highlights the innovative nature of Borderlands' articulated playfield and acknowledges intellectual property protection concerns in homebrew space

  • “No. Okay, fine. Next question.”

    Mike Testa (King of the Arcade developer)@ 19:24 — Humorous deflection reflecting time constraints and casual panel dynamic; shows developer prioritizing action over lengthy explanation

  • “This game is going to flip this weekend with cardboard ball protectors. And it's going to have a bunch of stuck balls in it.”

    Mike Testa@ 18:47 — Demonstrates pragmatic homebrew philosophy: prioritize functional completion over perfection, iterate with expedient materials

  • “I want to make sure everybody likes it. So that's just how I work. I want to, you know, I'm an entertainer.”

    Mike Testa@ 20:40 — Reveals design philosophy: universal entertainment appeal and player engagement over narrow competitive optimization

  • “What I really appreciate about is there's no score. The only objective is to beat the other players so we see kids, we see people that really aren't super pinball players, they just they go up to it, they approach it, they play it, they don't know exactly what they're doing the first time but they want to play it again and figure it out.”

Entities

AaronpersonBrianpersonMike TestapersonLynnpersonErnie SilverbergpersonJillianpersonConnorpersonBorderlandsgame

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: Deadline-driven accountability working: moderator successfully challenged Brian and Mike to have games ready for follow-up show after prior year's soft launches

    high · Jillian: 'if you want to go to the game just have Jillian tell you that you have to have him here and that's the expectation it will be... nothing gets done like a deadline and being pressured'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Articulated playfield mechanics (Borderlands) introduce complex engineering constraints: kinematics envelope collision prevention, ball routing through moving walls, drop target placement changes to accommodate tilt range

    high · Brian: 'when I lean the playfield 15 degrees to the right and then up... my apron was going to blow right through the glass... when you're leaning far to the right, there's a hole now between the playfield and the cabinet... drop targets moved over'

  • ?

    design_innovation: Borderlands homebrew features patentable articulated tilting playfield using linear actuators controlled via joystick—a significant mechanical innovation not seen in commercial machines

    high · Moderator urges crowd to 'throw this man $10 so that he can patent this' and emphasizes 'this level of innovation isn't happening in all the manufacturers'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Homebrew community prioritizes accessibility and player engagement over traditional scoring complexity; Battle Stations design deliberately removes outlanes and scoring to attract non-expert players

    high · Developer: 'The only objective is to beat the other players... kids, people that really aren't super pinball players, they just go up to it, they approach it, they play it... they want to play it again'

  • ?

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.222

0:00
here to present the homebrew panel, something I'm passionate about, but don't have enough time to ever do myself. Give it up for Jillian. I live vicariously through these fine people. Yes.
0:13
Harassing and encouraging people to bring flipping games every year. That's right. Or unflipping games. And this year we've got a couple really special ones that we're going to talk about tonight. So let's get started. Let's talk about the format and why we're here. We want to showcase these homebrew games. My mic's a little tinny, if you could turn it down, please. We want to showcase these homebrew games that are here at Pintastic. We're going to give priority to the people who have brought games for the first time or people who have brought their first game. So people like Lynn, which I do have a slide in here for Lynn, who has four of his own games and a new one every year, but we've heard Lynn talk enough. So if you want to talk to Lynn, you should convince him to do his own seminar and you should find them in there.
1:01
It's got to happen. Where is it? What? I want to, where is it? We'll cut it short. Len, get up here. I'm going to make that happen.
1:11
So really this is about sharing successes and in corporate speak, lesson learned, which means all the great failures we're going to hear about, which is what actually makes this really interesting. Because everyone here is really candid about how much they screw up, how much they do wrong, and how much pain goes through trying to fix those things and sharing those for people so that they don't have to do the same things.

  • King of the Arcade ramps use copper wire formed structures with cardboard backing, experiencing ball-sticking issues

    high confidence · Mike describes: 'the ramps in this are really neat... this ramp here is literally copper wire... there's cardboard in there... it's going to have bugs.'

    • Battle Stations developer@ 28:15 — Articulates design success metric: accessibility and replayability through engagement rather than traditional scoring complexity

  • “You don't have to get the first draft perfect. Right? It's going to have bugs. It's going to have problems. And sometimes going with the easier to use, more flexible, cheaper materials, it gets you along the project further.”

    Mike Testa@ 18:37 — Core homebrew philosophy: iteration over perfection, pragmatic material selection to overcome development bottlenecks

  • “A week ago, this didn't even have a cabinet. So there were more important things to worry about. And two weeks before that, it had no harness, no wires whatsoever.”

    Lynn (panelist on King of the Arcade)@ 23:23 — Illustrates typical homebrew build sequencing and deadline-driven completion, with cosmetics lowest priority

    • Warhammer
    game
    King of the Arcadegame
    Pincraftgame
    Battle Stationsgame
    FAST Pinballproduct
    Mission Pinball Frameworkproduct
    Cobra Pinproduct
    Multimorphic P3product
    Pintastic New Englandevent
    Pinball Expoevent
    Pepper's Ghostproduct
    Pinball 2000product
    Arduinoproduct
    Linear actuatorsproduct

    competitive_signal: Battle Stations deliberately removes competitive scoring elements and simplifies objective to direct player combat; resonating well with casual and child players despite being mechanically sophisticated

    high · Developer: surprised by reception at Pinball Expo and Pintastic; non-experts approach game without intimidation; no outlanes force engagement; kids keep returning to play again

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Borderlands underwent significant playfield layout iterations based on controller/tilting mechanics feedback; code development lagged mechanical completion (3 modes added in 2 weeks with help)

    high · Brian: 'I don't think it had any modes two weeks ago, and now it's got three modes... find people that can help you. That's definitely one of the tricks.'

  • ?

    manufacturing_signal: CNC-cut playfields combined with 3D printing dramatically improved Borderlands build quality and speed; factory cuts achieved zero misplaced screws, satisfying shift from handmade prototyping with Dremels and routers

    high · Brian: 'Going from my first prototype whitewood... fighting everything... then just having this one... all the parts got 3D printed... came online in an hour... was so satisfying'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Established homebrew developers (Lynn, Ernie Silverberg) actively mentoring newer builders; knowledge transfer enabling faster iteration and fewer repeated mistakes

    high · Mike Testa: 'he's a very good teacher, and he lets me make mistakes so I can learn from him. And also be able to not make some mistakes that have been made in the past'; Brian reaching out to Ernie for code assistance

  • ?

    technology_signal: Pincraft demonstrates long-term viability of homebrew games at multiple events over 4+ years; ongoing enhancements (wizard mode shortcut) keep established games relevant

    medium · Mentioned at Pintastic 4 years ago, Pinball Expo, Allentown, York; still receiving feature updates

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Homebrew developers embrace imperfection and expedient material choices (cardboard, copper wire forms) over perfection; prioritize functional completion for testing over cosmetic polish

    high · Mike: 'This game is going to flip this weekend with cardboard ball protectors... you don't have to get the first draft perfect... sometimes going with the easier to use, more flexible, cheaper materials, it gets you along the project further'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Mission Pinball Framework is dominant software platform across homebrew community; used by 4+ of 5 showcased games (Aaron's Warhammer, Brian's Borderlands, Mike's King of the Arcade, Battle Stations developer)

    high · MPF mentioned consistently as standard platform choice across diverse developer projects

    • 1:32
    We're going to try to keep it for each pin, for each person, to the who, what, when, where, why, how of why you would build your own machine instead of just buying it because it's twice as expensive to do it this way. It is. And then we're going to give some time at the end to ask questions, share feedback, and have a conversation. We're going to try to stay on time as I do run the programming in this room. I'm going to throw you all out right at the end, and I want you all to go over to the homebrew room and see these pins. with these people so that we can flip this room over for the next thing. Thank you.
    2:04
    So we're going to talk about Warhammer first. So Warhammer was here six months ago. Has it been eight months?
    2:14
    Seven, eight months. Okay, last show. And it was the first showing you had of this, Aaron. So do you want to talk about what you did since then? The soft launch? Yeah. My soft launch of six months ago. Yeah.
    2:31
    I mean, where do you want me to start? Where would you like to start? Right there. Why? When? So I guess this game's at like one, especially one year. It's like I started one, you know, four months before Pentastic, and I started with basically nothing. I bought stuff from Fast, wired everything together, and then said, oh, you know, expletives. I have to build a cabinet now. And so I just started picking up stuff and cutting things and assembling a cabinet. And I got it to the first show, and it flipped. And it didn't have much to it, but it did flip. And so now a year or like seven months later, I'm here again showing it off and the improvements that I've made so far. I've changed a lot of stuff around, been in pain for certain times. and I'm happy with the improvements that have been made with the time I've had. All right, so let's just go over the quick stuff. We've already done this with you before, but what's the platform? What are you coding on? Okay, so the hardware is Fast Pinball. The code is Mission Pinball Framework, and we use those two together.
    3:45
    I might as well just go down the list with everybody else while we're doing this right now. Yeah, so I'm Cobra Pin with Mission Pinball Framework as well. Fast Pinball with Unity.
    3:57
    And so I have two games. One of them is a P3 platform. The other one is Fast, but they're both using Mission Pinball framework. So MPF across the board. With the exclusion of Unity. And Unity.
    4:12
    Lin Ball, I don't know. Lin Ball. Pat Panting. So since the last time you were here, any major accomplishments in the last seven months? Yes. So stability. Like, we've got code. I've got a multiball in. I've got some light shows. I've got a little bit of rules. It's three-flipper now, so that was definitely an improvement. That's a big change. Yeah. You know, there's certain – you find certain things that you don't really like, and you say, I want to make this more fun. Maybe I can make this a little more shooty or interactive with the player. And so I said, yeah, I can go three-flipper here and shoved a flipper in it. It only took me a little bit of time, but cutting and drilling, and you get it done.
    4:56
    At the end, we're going to come back and talk to everybody about feedback that you got from the last show, feedback you've gotten on this show, and things like that.
    5:06
    Poor Mike. This is torture for you. I'm loving this. so let's move on to Borderlands which is I just have to say I'm sorry I didn't put your name on the slide Brian was here sitting over there last year when I called him out and went you will have a flipping pin here for next show and here you are we've corresponded back and forth a bunch I've seen pictures and video of this it didn't do it justice nothing gets done like a deadline and being pressured into doing something so if you want to go to the game just have Jillian tell you that you have to have him here and that's the expectation it will be that's it one of those words I'm a glutton for punishment so I've been working like crazy on this thing trying to get everything up to the vision I have in my head getting it into reality this game started a little over two years ago at the last show in Charlton, the concept sort of came around there. It started a little bit before that, but the premise of the whole game is a feature that's actually not working because it got damaged in transit, but this system has a fully articulated controlled play field. And so this was a concept I had two years ago that what if I could control the play field and make it steeper, make it lean, make it do all sorts of stuff. You can pick up the controller and you can play it like the game Labyrinth. So we built the control system. We got it with RC prototypes, motor drives, just had literally a piece of cardboard on a piece of plywood. It was the day after the Charlton show we went to the hardware store. I happened to have some linear actuators kicking around my basement because I work on robots, and we just slapped it together. I'm like, well, yeah, I can put a ball in the center of that, and I can move it around with a joystick, so let's go. So the last two years have been getting the system functioning. A friend of mine did a ton of work. That whole system is running on an Arduino stack. He showed up with it in a Christmas box, and he's like, here you go. Here's your stack. It's fully functioning. All the code works. I put an InVision Pinball framework for you. Load this file, and let's go have some fun. And so he did like 150 hours of work because he was out of work at the time and bored.
    7:25
    So, yeah, that dropped it, and that really lit a fire because I knew I had to come. and I had a fully functioning control system until yesterday at 4 o'clock.
    7:36
    And so the game was designed around that. And so there's lots of fun modes where, you know, you go and you're helping a bartender find her ingredients and every time you bring her something, she gives you a beer. And then the play field starts to wobble around a little bit. And the more times you do that mode, the more the play field wobbles until it's pretty unshootable if you get to the final mode. But it's possible.
    7:58
    So that was the premise of the whole game. It's here, it's flipping, it doesn't move, unfortunately. We were going to get parts here for tomorrow, but they're out of stock, it turns out. So it'll be working at the next pinball show, and we will take the play field out of the cabinet before it gets transported next time. What do we have to do to make this happen? Who do I have to call? I did a lot of work already. We can try. I think the potentiometers in the linear actuators got jacked up on the drive here. So we might take it. It's flipping. We'll all go play it for a while afterwards, and then if it gets quiet, I might rip it apart and see what we can do. We have a box of toys to go over at the end. We'll pull those out. So I'm a mechanical engineer by trade. I have been doing CAD for a long time. So everything here in the game I built myself. Everything on the top surface is custom designed. There's a whole CAD file that I have for everything. So I ordered my CNC play field, and things just showed up, and they just dropped on and screwed down. And it was like, oh, that's so nice. My friends were helping me, and they're like, so how many of these screws do you think are in the wrong spot? I was like, let's go with four. That's my over-under, and they all bet against me, and there were zero wrong screws. Whoa! Nice. There were some that were missing. They didn't... I had to wait three weeks for the thing to show up, so there was time in between. More stuff got built.
    9:14
    So it was so satisfying. Going from my first prototype whitewood that was all handmade with routers and skill saws and Dremels and fighting everything to get it right, and then just having this one, and it was like, while the thing was being built, or the cut rather, all the parts got 3D printed and it just, like in an hour, it came online. It was so satisfying. So there's definitely something to be said about get your game flipping, do your prototype, learn what you need to learn. I couldn't have done it without it because I learned so much about the shots. You're not going to know this stuff building it. But then the satisfaction of having it just go together and be right, aside from the upper pop bumper maybe.
    9:51
    But yeah, it was fun to have that come in and that was like a month ago that Playfield showed up. So it's been fun to work on.
    10:01
    I think the moment I had yesterday, Wednesday, I don't remember what day it was. These days drift together here.
    10:10
    We were sitting there and I'm like, I don't think you realize what you actually built. You built something I've been trying to build for a while. I want a self-leveling, self-pitching pinball. I want to make sure that every time I press that start button that everybody has the exact same experience. and with three linear actuators under a play field where you're already indexing and leveling, this can be perfectly leveled and pitched at all times. And so everyone in here needs to throw this man $10 so that he can patent this so that somebody else won't steal this idea and do it incorrectly. Because you need to protect this. You did something really, really interesting and fun. And it's really neat. And this level of innovation isn't happening in all the manufacturers. I mean, they don't have the opportunity to work on small, single, one-off prototypes and to see the feasibility. And you did. And it's – sorry that it's broken here and we don't get to see it, but this is really impressive. I'm beyond, like, grief and, like, sort of in acceptance slash sadness mode right now. So, like, if the game flips, we can have fun. It is what it is. Next time it will be working better. But, yeah, the control system was sort of the beast that we wanted to take on with this, right? And there's, like, weird stuff. Like when I lean the play field 15 degrees to the right and then up, like, you know, three days ago I learned that my apron was going to blow right through the glass. So we had to bring up the kinematics and like change the envelope. So like the game knows where the play field is. It's like, oh, well, we should probably make it not do that before the show. So that got fixed. And it's a matter of like, you know, when you're leaning far to the right, there's a hole now between the play field and the cabinet. And you can have a ball go down that hole. And so how do you put walls up knowing that when you lean the game, you're going to smash it into your cabinet wall? And how do you lay out the game so that there's drop targets on the wings? And I couldn't put them on the wings because I'd smash into the wall. So there's actually the drop targets moved over, and there's a flag with a jog in it so that I could get the thing to be in an out lane, even though it's not under the out lane. So there was a lot of thought that had to go into the layout and where things live so that when this thing does start to not be a normal pinball machine anymore, it doesn't just fall to pieces. Yeah, and I just want to call attention to, like my pointers there, the little Borderlands pinball puck, if you will. So that's the controller. So when you shoot the Claptrap shot in the back, there's a video mode that comes up from Borderlands 2 as a video game. So there's tons of assets on there. that was one of the realizations that like this is a good thing to do because the fan support for this game is ridiculous i was able to find so many assets to pull and use for the game it's sort of crazy but when you shoot that shot uh you have to go hand out invitations for his birthday party and you do so by taking up the controller and actually tilting the game around to get the ball to go into those shots so there's actually a shot in the out lane in a little hidden hole that you have to navigate either down through your shield or up through your flippers to find that little hole. And you can only do it because you can actually invert the game and tilt it. And so, yeah. It's... Go back out of the outline. And then you can... Well, you can't come back out of the outline if your shield's up, though, because you can't drop a target that way. So it's interesting. That's like one of those pinball mazes that you see. Yeah, yeah. That's sick. The two-knob labyrinth thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that. Yeah, and so there's a mode that we're writing that you've got the... So there's a story mode where you're fighting monsters, they have health, and if you do the good shots, they lose their health, and if you do the bad shots, you lose your health, and there's a jackpot shot, but there's an anti-jackpot shot. And so in this particular mode, if you hit the anti-jackpot shot, there's a video of him throwing a car at you, and then I drop the play field 15 degrees to the left. And so now you've got a broken leg or whatever it is. And so you've got to play the game like that until you get a good shot, and then you'll heal yourself, or you can get the health targets and heal yourself. And so there's another one where you can do a timer mode, and you have 30 seconds to do a thing, and as you're doing it, the play field's just getting steeper and steeper. Or we can lay the play field almost flat and just totally nuke whatever speed you have in that game to make it really lethargic. So there's a lot of really fun tricks you can do. Once you write the code for it, which that's my one weakness I would point out. If you look at the skills needed to do a pinball machine, I'm pretty high on a lot of them, and then just zero on code. And so I've been reaching out to Ernie and a few other people to help me build these modes, and I don't think it had any modes two weeks ago, and now it's got three modes you can play, and so find people that can help you. That's definitely one of the tricks. You have some shots that are impossible without that feature, right? Yeah, so without the tilting, some of the shots are pretty challenging.
    14:51
    Let's move on to Mike Testa. Oh, God, here we go. Another person we challenged seven months ago. Yes. He's been talking about building a homebrew machine for years. Does everyone really give Mike a round of applause? Thank you.
    15:02
    He started this game before I even met him. Yeah. This game has been in the works for a while. He needed a deadline, and it's here. It's finally out of my garage.
    15:14
    Yeah, pretty much, pretty much. And I really just finished this artwork, like, I don't know, two days ago? Seriously? Yeah, it's really tough to do anything on a Wacom tablet when you're – when you got like maybe two, a half an hour, maybe an hour until the kids wake up. Dad, dad, put me back to bed. Yeah. If you love your kids, that's – you want to – you got to do your thing. But yeah, they're great. But, yeah, it's just – that's – I guess when we're talking about weaknesses, it's just finding the time to really put aside or sneak in here and there to really work on it. But I was able to, and that's – I'm here. I'm freaking here. This is the accomplishment, really. And it's good. Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Ryan. So, King of the Arcade is off of the Pinball 2000 format with the monitor shooting down onto the top of the... Pepper's Ghost. We love Pepper's Ghost. And a lot of help from Lynn on this. Yes, very much so. All of that that he's been working on over the years. He's a very good teacher, and he lets me make mistakes so I can learn from him. And also be able to not make some mistakes that have been made in the past, which is very helpful. So I'm sticking in the right direction to make sure I'm, you know, make sure things run smooth. And that's a, you know, from a guy that's been doing it for, God, how long, when did you start?
    16:50
    2006? It's got to be before that. Yeah, but you're making like a digital table before that. So you're like, yeah.
    16:59
    So this is what I'm talking about. This guy's been doing this for a long time. So he's picked up on stuff. And I'm very fortunate to be somewhat of an apprentice to be able to continue the learning. And, you know, I'm more of a idea guy when it comes to it. And design is something creating has always been, you know, the artist in me has always been, you know, inherent. But when it comes to like code and whatnot and, you know, there's weaknesses and there's strengths. but you've got to do what you can do best, I would say. And, hey, he didn't burn the shop down with a blowtorch. I know, I know, I know, because that was definitely a concern. And he was right next door to where you were blowing a blowtorch and that thing, too. He was right on a wood table. This is true. And so some of the things you can't see is that the ramps in this are really neat, by the way. Everyone, again, at the end of this, go in and play these games. But this ramp here is literally copper wire. so he literal copper wire form there's cardboard in that I'm sure there's some duct tape in there there's cardboard in there now because it was getting stuck up a couple places I'm pretty sure it's going to be once we go back in there the ball won't be stuck I knew exactly where it was if it's just getting stuck in places where you already knew and you know how to fix it F it cardboard the ball still got stuck a few times in the back of course it did I know there's a couple more places I couldn't fit back there but you know we use cardboard professionally I sure you don But this is another thing You don have to get the first draft perfect No Right No It going to have bugs It's going to have problems. And sometimes going with the easier to use, more flexible, cheaper materials, it gets you along the project further. Right? This game is going to flip this weekend with cardboard ball protectors. And it's going to have a bunch of stuck balls in it. But so is Brian's game, who has beautiful ball protectors and edge guards in it that are 3D printed because his aren't perfect yet either. I've got the feature where it runs down the rails and then you can put it on the cabinet. You have gutter lanes on the side of yours to bring it back down into the cabinet. It's an easy get that way. We've got to get you a little better grabber to throw it back on the field. A gigantic fuck that pops out. Where are the Freddy mechs where you can just slap it? So Mike, do you want to talk about... No. Okay, fine.
    19:27
    Next question. Oh, my God. I didn't know how loud it was going to be. I'm so sorry. It's okay.
    19:37
    Unintentionally. Kind of like me screaming for no reason. It's fine. We talked about the code and the hardware and the platform. We talked about how you got to where you got to. Where did this idea come from? Why are you doing this?
    19:49
    God, how do I summarize this in very – okay. So I started hanging out with Lynn a while back. I won't go too much into that. But we were playing games together, and then eventually he told me, hey, I'm making a game. It's called Tower Flight, Adventures in Tower Flight. It's on Steam. Download that game. It's amazing. Anyways, shameless pitch. Sorry about that. Well, not sorry. It's a good game. And I helped him out on that a little bit. And afterwards, you know, it was received pretty cool off the bat. And they're like, hey, let's make a table together. I'm like, yes, let's do that. And he was like, yeah, we can make like a one-off thing. I'm like, I don't want to do that. I'm in it to win it, man. I want to, like, I want to do this for, like, if I'm going to put something out there, I want to, like, make it, you know, so everybody enjoys it, not, like, so there's, like, a couple things, like, oh, I like this shot, and then just do the shot over and over. No, I want to make sure everybody likes it. So that's just how I work. I want to, you know, I'm an entertainer. Clearly you can see that. You can hear it in my voice and, you know, song and dance, man, if you will. But what is it? You're a good actor, too. Thank you. Appreciate that. Yeah, Neapolitan, you know, 2000s. Yeah, it is.
    21:00
    But, yeah, you know, share the wealth when it comes to what you can do. But, yeah, what I really wanted to do is I want everybody to be able to enjoy it. So this iteration, it's not, you know, it's going to take some time to really get more into it and be able to progress for the progression of this. But this is, the groundworks, they're there. You know, I know what I'm going to add to it. I know what needs to be fixed. I know what I need to work with just to fine tune. But, oh, Jesus Christ. I know. Thank you.
    21:39
    So, okay. All right. Let's do that. Okay. So I was just thinking it would be a fun little thing like a meta table.
    21:49
    Where do you see arcade games? They're in an arcade, right? It's a pinball table. So the play field, it's an arcade within an arcade. Very meta. You know, hipster-ish time when this came out. So this is very relevant. Anyways, but pretty much with that, it's the king of the arcade. This is a competition where everybody's trying to get the high scores.
    22:11
    These are all the characters that you can see. I've got names for them. I have stories for them. A lot of things are written. there's back things that don't need to be like there are there you know i'm a i you know i'm an actor i'm a director i'm a writer at heart so this was so important lynn was kind of like being like don't worry about the artwork you just put slap something back that i'm like dude knowing that the table is not going to be exactly where i want it to be and like my deadline i knew what i could accomplish and i knew that i could i could set the stage in one set A picture is worth a thousand words. I wanted to set the stage so you can look at that and be like, it's a blank table. But by looking at that and getting an idea, then you're going to be able to see, like, interesting. You pick a part. Look at the – what are they? Give me your mic. Oh, yeah. Look at this backlash. People – I put a little light on it for a reason. Pick it apart. Look at it. If you want to ask me questions, I'll go in depth because there's more to it. This is going to show you what this game will be. So a little back story as to why I told him don't worry about the artwork. A week ago, this didn't even have a cabinet. So there were more important things to worry about. And two weeks before that, it had no harness, no wires whatsoever. So we had more important things to worry about. This is true. But luckily I was able to make a little bit of time. Thank you, my wife and kids and family for being so supportive in this process.
    23:50
    And, yeah, time. Jesus, when you don't have time, man, you got to make it. And, yeah. Yeah. All right, so our next person, we have two machines from you. Unfortunately, the slides are in the wrong order. So I'm going to skip this one, battle stations. But we're going to talk about Pincraft real quick because Pincraft has been around before. PinCraft has been around. It was actually here four years ago. And I've seen it at other events across the country as well. It's been to Expo. It's been to Allentown. It's been to York.
    24:22
    So has there been any advancements in PinCraft? I see there's a little more polish on it than some of the last times I've seen it. But anything since last year? Yeah, so PinCraft we consider complete. But what I did do is we added the ability to advance to the wizard mode. So if you actually go to the mode selection, there's the Ender Dragon Challenge. So you can go in and play the Ender Dragon Challenge and get right to the Wizard Mode and challenge that. Because it's actually a really fun mode, and it's very hard to get there. He did that because I keep making him poke the switches and cheat to get me there.
    24:53
    That's actually very correct. That sounds like a real afternoon. Now, you make these pins with your son, right? This is a hobby you guys do together? Yes, it's a hobby I started with my son Connor, which you will see him in the homebrew room. Trust me, he'll tell you all about the games. So it's something we started together when he was very little, and now he's very big.
    25:16
    And besides taking on this standard form factor, I guess we can call it, pinball machine, you guys recently went and decided to do a heads-up challenge. Correct. So Battle Stations, which is in the center of the room, is our brand-new from-the-ground-up homebrew game. the inspiration really came from other head-to-head games like joust and you know there's a couple of them like the soccer game and I played football yeah anyone I can get my hands on and we were just at one point we had this little air hockey table in the basement we put a pinball on it and we were batting the pinball around at the hockey table and was like this is fun like why are why don't the other head heads feel this way and we said you know let's take all the stuff away that's causing it not to be fun. You look at jousts, you're trying to go for score, and they put all this stuff in the middle that is in your way, and what you really want to do is just attack the other player. So that's where Battle Stations really came and got inspired from.
    26:18
    So we also, constraint-wise, we wanted to fit a standard pinball glass. So that's where everything started, measurements, was I want a standard pinball glass, and I want it to sit flat. We're not using really a bunch of unique parts. Most of the parts you can find off the shelf that were used to build it.
    26:39
    It's a custom cabinet, but otherwise it's running fast. It's got its mission pinball. It's been three years now in the build cycle. I kind of intentionally glossed over pin craft because I really want to talk more about battle stations because I really want to hear some of the design and build challenges and how well this hinge, you have a hinge literally in the middle there to have the two things pitched. Is the ball getting damaged on that? Have you seen anything there? So the hinge came from the requirement to maintain the pinball machine, at least in a homebrew state, because all the other head-to-heads, there's a really awkward way to actually lift it, or you look at joust, you actually have to go in from underneath. So the hinge just came from, hey, I've got to be able to lift this up and actually work on it.
    27:29
    We haven't seen ball damage or anything from it, but we're looking at maybe alternatives. But it actually worked out really great, honestly.
    27:38
    The other challenges we ran into is none of the stuff's the right height, so all the mounting hardware had to go lower than you typically expect.
    27:47
    And again, it was just getting it to all fit in that custom cabinet with that constraint of I'm going to use a standard glass and standard lockdown bars.
    27:55
    So that took quite a bit of work. it looks fantastic it's been busy every time i've tried to go in there uh i actually wanted to try to get a play on it with either you or your son and i just hadn't it's a blast but too busy in there to even get in there and do that yeah what i i really appreciate about is there's no score the only objective is to beat the other players so we see kids we see people that really aren't you know super pinball players they just they go up to it they approach it they play it they don't know exactly what they're doing the first time but they want to play it again and figure it out. And that's what really pinball is all about, is you can't just walk up to a game and play it. You have to want to come back and figure it out. So it kind of sparks that in the players, and I think I really appreciate that. That's the reception I wasn't expecting, but really surprised me when we put it out at Expo. And here as well. If I remember correctly, it doesn't have any outlanes.
    28:47
    All the outlanes go to the flippers, correct? There is one outlane on the right side. Because that was another thing that as I was watching people play it, I was like, wow, this is pretty engaging because you don't have a lot of shots just going out and you're getting to make a lot of shots. So how many balls are in the game? There are six now. Six. We originally had a lot more. We had 14. But we found out we couldn't launch them fast enough that you only needed six.
    29:15
    I'd imagine the traps were a problem, too, if you had too many on one side. Well, that was the other problem, yeah, because you could get too many balls on one side, so they'd jam up. So we found that out awfully quickly that you think it's a great idea, oh, we'll put as many balls, like, oh, we'll have 14 balls in the game. They'll all fly out at everybody. And you realize, well, I can't get them to even kick out fast enough to make that even work. So six actually works much better now.
    29:39
    Yeah, another lesson learned across the, I wouldn't have expected that. Yep. David. Question. How about the displays? You've got displays for each player. Can you talk about how far along you are on using those and what your aspirations are?
    30:21
    or for software actually on the screen, just to kind of say who won and make the ship explode. But we're planning on adding some more in there as well as we go along.
    30:31
    But it's funny, the feedback we get is often, oh, add more. And the problem is the game works because it's less. So we're very cautious about adding more and actually upsetting that balance.
    30:45
    All right, I'm going to move on to the honorable mention slide. Because you do have four machines here. and you're a friend and I love you or something so excuse me you want to talk about Christmas? yeah sure get him up here come on Lynn come on but I'm sitting here he's not going to move he's not going my butt is on this chair okay yeah Yeah, so the Christmas machine, it started off as 12 Days of Christmas. I've streamed pretty much the whole development process on Facebook, and I recorded all of that, so it's all going to go on YouTube as well. I didn't stream the last, I want to say, 20 hours of just the wiring and getting the cabinet ready and all that, but the vast majority of the important part of designing the play field, getting the play field up to a flippable whitewood and doing some of the art and whatnot, that's all there. And actually, I streamed some of the programming I did, too, for a bunch of the basic modes. And then, you know, when you stream, you have to focus on the stream, and I need to just focus on just getting the game done so that I just said, nuts to the stream, I need to, you know, finish the thing. But, yeah, I started the first week in November of last year, 2023. and I want to say I compressed my time down probably only about 40 to 60 man hours total to make this game from nothing to what it is including the cabinet and everything.
    32:23
    It takes a lot of practice. I might have done it before. It's not just I have a lot of practice, I have a lot of systems in place I have software that I just copy paste and then it's ready to go I have play field templates I can just start off with. And I have a whole process I can kind of just do. Yeah. But Christmas is there. It's also the first one that doesn't use the augmented head. It uses a regular standard head, except, well, Unico 26-inch screen came out last year, and those things are awesome. And I wanted not a back glass, but a screen. So that's what it is. I hope they have a 32-inch screen that comes out at some point, because I really like a bigger screen. And yeah, that's kind of it. Oh, and the reason I didn't make Christmas argument because I was regularly thinking about it is when I was at Expo, a couple people played Magic Forest and said they hated it because it was too dark. So this is my response to them saying, nuts to you, now this is bright and you can see everything. Love it. Love it. My answer to that is not everybody's opinion is as valued as other people's because that one's wrong. It may be wrong, but there's now a nice bright game that anybody can play. And the shots don't rattle that much.
    33:38
    So one of the things I love about Lynn is his process, the way that he goes about things. And sometimes they come up and they appear haphazard. And, well, this is never going to be done. I'm never going to finish this. It's good enough, and I'm going to move on. And then other things, you are an extreme perfectionist, which I also really appreciate. To a point. When you fold the head down on this, and of course he showed me, because he knows how much I appreciate details like this. when you fold the head down on this machine and look at it from the side, the ribbon on the side of the head lines up with the ribbon that makes the package for the rest of the cabinet.
    34:13
    And it is just like you took the time to do the math, the engineering, the everything to make that happen. There was no math for that. No, no, no, no, no. It's called make everything in one big Photoshop file so the patterns all line up and then fold the head down when you put the side on and kind of hope that it lines up and then realize you're a millimeter off and say, screw it.
    34:34
    No one will notice. Well, no, you loosen the head nut and you push the head up a little bit and you change it a lot.
    34:42
    Details are hard. You should have just lied. So now that I know that Lynn's turnaround time for a brand new game is 60 hours, can I challenge him to make every single other holiday this year?
    34:53
    Oh my God, yes! Well, normally I'd say yes, but I'm going to say no because between now and Expo, I want to work on all four of those games, replace three play fields, new art for Haunted, well, actual art for Haunted Cruise and actual art for Frozen, new ramps for Haunted Cruise, and software all across the board and make them like fucking amazing for Expo. That is a way better answer than my dumb question.
    35:17
    But I got my laughs on that. You got your laughs, but you know what? Your dumb question? Fuck you. How do I have to edit? That's why we're not streaming this seminar. Turn that off. Go back to the other one. No, it's not. Oh, this is better? Yeah, well, no, that'll go on the screen behind you when we tell them to. This is on the screen behind you? Not at the moment, but it will be when we tell them to. Now it's on the screen. You see, it's right... You shouldn't have given me that!
    35:49
    Julian, don't you know better than this? No, I don't. Oh, I should run around and... Oh, gosh. Try to find Steve Ritchie. Okay. Yeah, idea. So I gave you that not to point at the audience and Lynn. I gave you that so I could stand over here and be lazy. Yeah, but you gave it to the wrong person. Finally. No, you gave it to the right guy. I got it. It's fine. Don't go. You opened your mouth now. Oh, sorry. Now you have a job.
    36:17
    Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Show us the box of toys. The box of toys. We're going to tell you to stay on task. Yeah.
    36:25
    If you wanted to stay on task, I wouldn't be the moderator. There's a couple good ones in here. But we love you. I have no idea why.
    36:33
    So why don't you start talking about this? Hold on. I'm just going to get them out on the table and then get out. We will.
    36:41
    We know. Put those anywhere. They're spare parts for a reason. That was a really dumb day to quit drinking. So I'm big in the 3D printing. I'm big in making models. Part of the fun of this game was I got to design all these cool mechanisms. So it was like what are some cool things we can do we never seen before The 3D printer kind of really let me open the door and look at that So this is a ramp I designed So this is I call it a nurture ramp and there's no diversion here, but there's two exits. So if you hit the ball really hard, it comes out the top, and if you don't hit it hard enough, it falls down to this lower level here. But I was thinking, I really wanted a reliable way to get to the mid-level, and so there's also this side scoop. And so I have a backwards flipper in my game. And if you get it just right, you can pop this chute here, and it comes up, and it comes out the side lane here.
    37:37
    I'll give a plug to this. The printer I have is a Bamboo X1C. It is amazing. It prints really nice parts. You can do multicolor printing. So, like, it's plausible to make that all one. Ooh, look at that. We can print this as one piece, and it'll just do all the colors on its own. But the real thing it does is the speed. So this side part here is about 90 minutes off the printer.
    38:05
    And so it lets you do some work, send the parts to the printer, work on something else, oven dings, you go pull your part up, you drop it in there. And so it really allowed me to iterate quite a bit on the game. So one of the things I had to do was figure out exactly the right envelope so all of my parts I did have sort of a wire frame around like, okay, will it fit? And so this ramp, whenever I put it in there, I have to scooch it just right because there's only one sort of orientation that actually fits in the machine. But then this is a four-hour print, and now I have a brand new ramp.
    38:40
    So it was a lot of fun to just come up with cool ideas. We've got... So the other one that I thought was fun... Let's see if we can put this together. This one's cool.
    38:53
    So this is a Helix captive ball. There's a pin in the way that I'll just grab that. You ejected it. That was pretty cool, yeah. So I wanted to come up with a new captive ball. So the ball sits here in the bottom, and when you hit it, it goes all the way up to the top, and then it falls back again. And so this is the version that was my prototype. It doesn't have any sensors in it, and I just wanted to figure out, like, could I do it? The other thing that I decided would be fun to suffer through was using wires because I liked the way it sounded. It turns out once you put the glass on, you don't hear it anyway. but it looks pretty and like mixed materials is something I like a lot like if it's everything's just you know one color 3d printed it sort of loses its dynamics it loses its fun so I wanted that shiny wire in there the challenge with that was these are crocheting it's like the circles you get when you knit through them and so I bought those on Amazon I dremeled them into a hoop and then you're like just manually bending them trying to get it to fit in there just right and then you super glued in and you walk away with all your clamps on there and then you go to fit it and it turns out that the wire is actually stronger than the printed part and so now your part doesn't fit so if you look closely this it's dremeled to hell because i didn't care i just wanted it to work and then the next one i built that's in the game i took a lot more care on and in the design i made a jig that held this really strong so that when i was doing the wiring and the gluing that would be the part that held properly and when i took the jig off the amount of dremeling didn't go to zero But it went it went much lower than it was for this one So one of the things I really enjoyed in the game was just kind of coming up with things. I've never seen before
    40:28
    There's a mechanism that's not here There's another mechanism where you know, I've got this ramp so again 3d printed There's a little diverter here. So this is a servo this thing works really nicely When you open the mode you can load a ball in here and there's a mechanism that It's like the little penguin thing where it marches up the steps. Oh, cool. But it's circular, and so when you fire, it's a post-Sesos solenoid. And so when I pull it down, the ball moves one sixth of a rotation, and then when it releases, it moves the other sixth of the rotation. So you can load three balls in there, and every time you do it, it goes chink, chink, and the ball moves to another zone. Love that. load it it just fires a whole bunch of times and all the balls dump out but um yeah so if you have the ability to get a 3d printer get access to one if you've got the ability to learn how to do cadding which you can really come up with a lot of stuff this is the bamboo x1c um that again it just spits parts out so fast and you there's some oh yeah so so what i was saying earlier like this This isn't your normal drop target.
    41:41
    But if I put this on an out lane, when the game tilts, I smash the solenoid through the wall of the cabinet. So I needed to get the system over further. So this is how I get my out lane with this particular part. Silent patent. Offset drop target. That's amazing. Getting this to work just right. So now it's got some flex in it. And so I had to mess with the latches and whatnot. And currently the one in the game is not functioning.
    42:08
    But this was just another kind of silly thing. I had to come up with a solution like, well, I've got a JGP pirates. It's like, I could just scooch the in lane to the inside, and I could do the crisscross they do. But that seemed like more effort than I wanted, and I wanted to look like just normal out lanes. So this was the solution for that. And it turns out there's also a post in the way. So you get this nice little knockout for, oh, crap, I forgot that's there. Right. So this is the gen two of this design. But. Do you still get the, on the end of the ball of that helix, do you still get that sound? You get the whap noise, yeah. Yeah, it's really satisfying to watch it go up and then sort of circle the drain and go down again. And the ring, it actually goes through a light ring, which is a feature I wanted to have. So the light ring is sort of only kind of coded right now. My primary focus, so like for me, the challenge is the coding, right? I'm pretty good at doing artsy stuff, pretty good at designing mechanical components. I can wire OK. What are you using to design your pen? So I'm using a program called Creo. It's similar to SOLIDWORKS. I use it professionally. I've been using it for like 20 years. So I'm pretty efficient at getting all sorts of weird shapes. Yesterday, we were shooting off this ramp here. And so last night, I went home and I just made a diverter for this thing. And I brought it in, and I had some hot glue, and it just went on there perfectly. And it's like, oh, it's just so nice when the things in your computer match reality, because I know that when I print it, it's just going to work.
    43:35
    So the hard part for me was the coding. It's like I can spend an hour doing hardware, and that hour will be useful. Or I can spend an hour doing coding, and I might have a thing that works sort of kind of at the end, or I might just destroy my code. And so I would always sort of just lean to like, well, I'll just do some hardware. We'll do the code later. And again, leaned on some people, and the code got done in a couple weeks. The code that's here got done in a couple weeks, primarily because it's like, well, if the game's not done, I don't know how I want to write the story. like I know what I want to do, but if that shot's not there, if that switch isn't wired, if the solenoid's not working, if the light's not on, like it didn't feel like there was a lot of value in doing the code for it because there was nothing to tie it into. So I really leaned heavily on the hardware for a long time and then only recently started to sort of pivot away from it because things have stopped moving every single day and now it's sort of gelled.
    44:28
    Things like this really interest me because it's something I don't remember or it was something Mark said or something you said, Ryan. about play field layout and positioning from underneath to prevent things like this. Because stuff like this makes manufacturing really hard. Unless you have a 3D printer and you're only making one. If you're only making one, right. That's prototyping. Exactly. And so coming up with creative solutions for stuff like this for one of parts is fantastic. It really is. And I love the quality on that, by the way. I'm a huge Borderlands fan. So the whole theme just kind of speaks to me. All the little details that I see everywhere as a fan of the franchise.
    45:10
    I don't want to spend too much more time on you, but do you want to talk about the East Rogue? Yeah. So there's two wire forms in the game. We were kind of messing around with how we wanted them to work. You've got the one coming off this ramp. You've got the one coming off the inertia ramp that's going around.
    45:25
    And the game, there's some pretty hard shots in the game. They've been opened up since the hand-built first Whitewood, but it's still pretty tricky. and I like a game where you can do some control and catch your shots. So these actually bring the ramps not to the in lanes but to the slings, and they do it in such a way that for the most part I can drop it in front of the sling without triggering it. The left one, the sensor is a little aggressive, but you get about a 50-50. I previously mentioned you're a masochist, so you just decided that slings is the way. Yeah, no, no. I want to drop them into the slings and then have them run off so you can catch it. So that way, if you want a reliable shot, if you hit a ramp, you've got a pretty good chance of catching the ball and thinking about what you want to do next and then taking your shot. So that's where these came from.
    46:10
    Ryan, thanks for bringing that up, because it's one of the things I feel about your game is that if you stage more balls in certain parts, like where there's one spot where you capture the ball and it gets shot out someplace else, and if that goes and hits that sling and goes across, that goes across the... If those bolts were staged, I'd swear he's Scott Denisey. Because the game would just be mean at that point. It would just instantly start throwing stuff towards the drain.
    46:36
    Yeah. That's because Scott hates himself, and he's a crappy player. He hates all of us. His words, not mine. Scott Denisey loves making hard games, but he doesn't even try to be good at them. He just likes watching other people suffer.
    46:50
    He hates other people, and he's one of my best friends at this point, I'm also pretty bad at pinball, but one of the things we did yesterday was I just like we got here You know watch the people play it and then get a mode going and they would drain it It's like ah so like every mode has a ball save now It's just like you know what you get a load you get a ball safe and the timer Doesn't work so you get a mode you get a ball save it could be five seconds later It could be four minutes later, but don't worry. It's there waiting for you and if you get two modes Then you get two ball saves waiting and you know, it's the stuff. It's like it's just good enough, right? The thing you find with pinball is I'm staying up until like 5, 6 in the morning some of these nights because there's no stop.
    47:31
    That's done. Well, if I just do this real quick and send it to the printer, then I'll have it in the morning. And then you send it to the printer. Well, that's only 45 minutes.
    47:41
    What can I get done? I can stay up for 45. I could do the wiring over there. And then when this is done, it'll – oh, well, actually, the wire – so let me just solder the connector on. And you're like, oh, shh. It's 5 in the morning. The sun is coming up at that point. Yeah, like what, birds? Birds chirping? Oh, boy. I have work tomorrow, but I think I can get this couple done 5 a.m., wake up two hours. Working from home with employees that are all in California for the most part definitely helped my pinball hobby a little bit. Having family that puts up with my shit and, like, lets me, like I can send my wife a message. It's 6 a.m. I'm going to bed. Can you please take the kids to school? I need an extra 30 minutes of sleep.
    48:19
    That's definitely helpful to have a little bit of flexibility. but to Mike's point, it's just about finding the time. I don't know how many hundreds of hours are into this, but I was doing 40 or 50 hours a week for the last month on the game just to get it where it is because I had a vision of what I – I've been off the web. My goal for this was to just plop this thing down. When I saw Jillian last time, she was like, who are you? I'm like, I'm an enigma. I hide in the shadows. And then my goal was just like, here you go, world. This is my first game. And so really trying to get to that level with printed art and just all the little things. It's like every minute you put into it, unless you're doing coding, feels like something you get that time back out of it. You can see it change. I love the coding. The coding makes it awesome. I need to learn it.
    49:04
    But yeah, it's just everything you put into it, you get back, right? You can just watch it. You just spend too many minutes on coding. It doesn't take that much to write a book. I'm just terrible. You're stuck at it, Lynn. I know it's because I suck at it.
    49:15
    Code better. You've got three L's there. That's why it's not working. Like, do you know how long I've been trying to fix that bug? Are you serious? Yeah, there's three hours. You can't see that? I'm like, no, I went to, I get four hours of sleep last night. I can't see anything. Welcome to programming. Yeah. I'm not, I don't have the mind for a programmer. I have the artist engineering mind, not the syntax mind. Just be glad you have good compilers now, whereas C++, if you missed that semicolon 20 years ago, you'd have 10,000 errors. Wow. Start in the middle. Every once in a while, Mission Pinball will say, it looks like you did this. You should do this. And you're like, but it's like 1 in 10 maybe. Error in config file. All right, Mike, go ahead. To add on top of that, like I was saying before when it came to our strengths and weaknesses,
    50:05
    really our games and us as designers, we're really trying to explore what we can do but also show everyone our strengths, our weaknesses.
    50:17
    It's a showcase of what we can do. I was talking about, I forget who I was talking about this to, but a bunch of different people, a bunch of different designers, a bunch of different homebrewers.
    50:29
    We need to work together. Like, we can easily take someone else's ideas or at least just put something else on there and put our own little thing, but we all have the same goal. We want to make a game. We want to make this so we can use each other to be able to do what our master plan is. Just like any other company.
    50:55
    That's what they do. They have different little jobs for everything. I see a lot of people doing it on their own, and I think that's really cool. But this is phenomenal. These things are so cool. like they have like people have been in the industry for years and years and years to do what you do and this is in i'm just it's blowing my mind some of the little things that you've showcased in your game it's just like if we ever are like i'm stuck on something like we should always be like i'm a call away let's work together and this is just this is going out to everybody else that will see this we should be working together what's the discord that we're on So I'm trying to homebrew. It's on Discord. There you go. So Ernie's got a Discord. There's a handful of people on there. They also have weird hours. You can jump on and be like, anyone see what the hell's wrong with my code? Like, what's going on? I know. 3D printing. Like, oh, hey, you know, here's how you do X. Code, what's that? Like, my brain doesn't work that way. I can't think that way. I wish I could. I've tried. Lynn, I tried. You put me in front of Unity for a little bit. I can make this ball run around, and I'm like, I can't do anything else. I just threw him in the deep end. Yeah. Immunity is a little bit of a default. It's all right. So on that note, let me voluntold Brian here into something else. So when this hits YouTube, you need to go and put links to the discords and things onto the video. Yeah. Make sure that actually happens because I say it's going to happen every year and it never does. Yeah.
    52:26
    Yeah, all of those things. So somebody collect a list and he has now been voluntold. Sorry, Brian. Do you hate me? don't I love you that much that's what it is and I trust you that you'll get it done and on that note just so you know I can code like a wizard I can't do this right and so yes we all have our strengths and weaknesses and I think there's a lot of people here who help each other out which is fantastic so we have about five minutes left I want to make sure we get time for questions there's a little padding at the end of this but I'm a hypocrite if I take it because I fought for it and I'm making everybody else stick to it but we're going to take princess's privilege maybe So one of the last questions I have is what's next, right? Some of these games are finished. Some of these games aren't finished. What's next? What's the plan? And what are you committing to bring me back next year?
    53:16
    And then I have to find suckers in the room. What? You have a whole year. You have a year this time? A whole year? A whole year instead of seven months. Great. Unless you're going to Expo. And then Expo is what? Five months from now? October. I'm not going to Expo. Unfortunately.
    53:31
    You want to start? Go ahead. Where to start? So, code That's probably the biggest one, is code I finally got things together Audio boards Really assembled and put together And I'm kind of happy with my layout Or design, even though it's not very innovative That's something we never talk about as a sound package What we're doing for sound packages And we will fix that for next year We'll focus on sound stuff My game kind of shoots like an old Williams But I want to do really modern code with it and get it up to snuff. It's a combo. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with it. It's just, you know, it's feel. But that's my biggest goal for next year or next show. Wonderful. My goal, get the control system working again so it actually does like the thing it's supposed to do. Beyond that, it's going to be advancing the code. There's a whole bunch of modes and stories I want to tell with this game. And then I've got a ton of media assets, but you don't have to take the time to go through them and pick and choose what you want to use. And so a lot of it's just going to be going through, like, what sound do I hear? How do I figure out how I can turn off the pop bumpers and the bass mode when I've got another mode running? And so, yeah, it's get the game tilting.
    54:44
    Sounds funny to say. And then get the assets and get it all programmed up. So for me, I've set the stage. but we have to have modes we have to have what is in plans which is already written bunch of stuff that's already like in set aside like i know what's this game's gonna be which is good a lot of times that's not the case but having this and including it onto a blank page with the and of course the pepper's ghost is definitely going to help me out to show that if there's anybody out there that can animate, I want an opening animatic. I not saying that it going to be able to happen this year but that something in the future I really want I have a storyboard man I really want that Yeah So Battle Stations that prototype is actually done. So my goal next is I'm going to build another one. Nice. Four players.
    55:49
    No four players. Less is more. You get caught up in them. We're going to create a second one.
    55:59
    The pinball octagon. Too many ideas. We're going to get a second one. We'll have artwork and the full package in the play field. We need to repackage it to get the artwork in and there's actually going to be a Lexan overlay over the hinge. So that's in progress. I think we have another homebrew that's more traditional. It's in progress, but I'm not going to announce it yet. Probably two years yet on that one. Cool. Very cool. Questions from the audience? Is there a video of the play field maybe? Yes, it is. Come by and we'll put it on the main screen on Borderlands afterwards.
    56:35
    There's proof. It's there. I've seen it move. Yeah, I saw it move earlier. I was like, what is that? It's sick. I also have my laptop that has CAD on it, so if people want to see some CAD and some poke around in the game, we can spin that for a little while too. Cool. Truly impressive CAD. Maybe. Yes.
    56:56
    Anyone else? You didn't find your volunteer for next year yet. No, I'm not going to do that. Ask a question. I will. All right, who's thinking of making a pin?
    57:09
    Yes. What are you working on? Thinking. I'm very, very, very excited. I talked to Brian and he's here on for quite a while. He's an exceptional help.
    57:25
    Great direction. . Yeah. . It's okay. It's Aaron. In terms of, like, just how, like, would I tweak my geometry? Like, how long would it take me to get the shot right?
    58:52
    Yeah, I mean, you can get most shot geometry, kind of tweaked in maybe like an hour or two. It doesn't take that long before you're like, you've drilled like maybe four or five holes, and you're like, all right, this didn't work. All right, this didn't work. This one kind of works. I'm getting close. And then you're like, okay, I'm really happy with this one. And then you get to that point, and then there you go. And then you take out the wood putty, and you fill all your holes, and you're like, okay, this looks like shit, but we're getting there.
    59:18
    It's really an iterative process. And, yeah, it sucks time, and it hurts. and you eventually get there. You will eventually get there. You just have to put in the effort and your time. That's really it. Poster paper and painter's tape.
    59:33
    Duct tape. Yeah. Duct tape and poster. Anything you can use. But yeah, there's lots of things you can do to accelerate your process. Obviously like Dave.
    59:46
    You're all talking about doing the real materials. how far could you get in a computer and just simulate what the geometry is? Are you referring to like maybe a computer application where you can play your – what is that? VPX. You know what it's called. What is that? VPX. Yeah, VPX? Yeah. Or like maybe like drawing it up and then cading it? No, VPX. VPX? Yeah. I dabbled with VPX a little bit when I first started. Just like, hey, look at this. I can make a pinball machine. it's a lot of effort to put into the game. Like, I mean, you get something that you can see on a computer, but it's not, like, 20 minutes.
    60:28
    That's a pretty heavy hurdle. If you're way up, does it reveal clunkiness early or anything like that? I mean, like, a little bit, yeah. Ryan says yes. So Ryan has talked about this ad nauseum in two other seminars at the last hotel where he talked about his goal in VPX was to put a flippable pin together that was fun before he drilled a single hole so that he could get it out to all of us and all of his friends. I had to go load VPX on my computer and play it for an hour before he would be my friend again. He was voluntolding all of us. I think I might have learned this from him, actually. Probably. I'm sure you knew that way before. I did know that way before.
    61:09
    But it was a crucial start. So go ahead, if you want to grab a mic, actually. I'll allow it, I'll let you know that. But we can... Turn it on when it gets to you. Ooh, nice catch.
    61:24
    It's not my first catch from Jillian's poor throws. So I won't get into too much of the weeds because this is actually in some of the old seminars, and it's going to be... We're going to mention it a little bit more at the American Pinball Seminar about Berrio's Barbecue. That's tomorrow, right? I don't know. I got to make sure I show up. Go ahead. But VPX is an incredibly useful tool for people who are like, back here, you're trying to save some time. It doesn't work for everybody because it's another tool you need to learn. Like you do need to learn it. It's not quick. But once you're fluent in it, kind of like how Lynn can throw together an entire game in 60 hours because he's fluent with this entire process, I can make a game from like napkin doodle or even thought, idle thought in my head to completely realize concept in less than three days of being paid at my salary job. So that's the game that I'm working on right now that's going to be professionally produced was designed in three days in VPX. And then after that I was also able to start iterating incredibly quickly. You're right with the simulator that is 95%-ish accurate. So even backhands, backhands usually suck with VPX. They do. And I will give you that. Backhands are awful in VPX. Plan your backhands accordingly as a player. Like I said, it's not perfect, but I have heard it from. And your ramp heights. Your ramp heights are also not great on VPX. My ramp heights are great. On VPX, the ball can fit through a spot that it gets. Yep. That's interesting. Dead on. Anyway. Never worked for me. I've been able to get my games to the point where. So I use VPX, the simulator, as my Whitewood Zero. So I never build my Whitewood Zero. My Whitewood Zero is completely virtual. And I'd say 75% of my iteration is done there. Because you're right. I immediately can see this is never going to work. I'm going to not waste my time on it. Or, hmm, hmm, close. All right. Over here. And it's the exact same as Aaron's process, except I don't have to bondo six holes afterwards. That's it. And so I've been told by my play testers that when they got my white wood, they said it shot like a level two, level three white wood that they're used to. And I was like, good, because I spent months moving things every so slightly before I basically traced it in my CAD program. So it is very useful, but you have to have the mindset that you're going to sink the time into it. And if you're fluent in it and you can understand how to learn from it, you can greatly save time at no cost. And that was the real thing I pitched it for in the previous Homebrew seminars, which was it's a great entry point with zero cost. So if you're just thinking about it and you're not quite ready to take the dive into the, you know, pinball machines are not cheap anymore. And like Jillian said, if you have a 2X playfield price multiplier on anything that is custom built. so if you're buying games for $8,000 y'all can do the math on how much these gentlemen have spent building their games my wife is here dude shut up also I'm way under that budget sure I'm sure get out of here leave go Portland you have a good accountant right he says 2x it lowers the barrier of entry to people will find out if they really want to do this And then by the time you've messed around with VPX for long enough, you're like, I want to. Like, you'll know that it's something you're willing to put the time and cost into and you'll be able to figure out at no cost if this is for you. So that's why I say it. Those three salary days, are they 20-hour days like these guys or are they normal people's days? They're at least ten, yes. Because those are the ones I get most excited about. Designing a brand new game, that's the one they can't kick me out of the office. It's when they want me to do boring paperwork stuff and fight with managers that I want to get the hell out of there as soon as possible. But more about that tomorrow.
    65:34
    I'm not going to change my mind. So I kind of poo-poo VPX because of the various issues I have with it. But truth be told, the first games I made were on VPX because they were for PS3. And I wrote a converter to convert from VPX to Lua and Polygons to run on PS3. So the original games were all in a cross converter from Visual Basic to C++ and everything. So the first games I did were technically on VPX8. And, yeah. So I've used it. I understand it. And I don't like it anymore. The physics have come a long way in 10 specifically. Try it again. No, I have a Wacom tablet. I can just play with that. So, yeah, I started with VPX as well. Because I need to save time.
    66:23
    I think it's another tool, right? It's another thing you can use. The zero cost entry point is definitely factual. For me, I play with it a little bit. I happen to be really skilled at the designing, and I can put things in my hands. I'm much better at having things in my hands. One of the things I'd say is I have a lot of 3D printed parts, but when you have a hammer, everything's a nail. And so that's why I have a 3D printer that can spit out exactly perfect things in hours, and that's what I leaned against to get this out of here. I don't have a wood shop. I wasn't interested in doing a lot of stuff on the play field because it's just hard. And so that was the smoothest way to watch the game transition with high efficiency. Literally it's that same thing in your exact same chair like two years ago. When you have a hammer, everything's a nail talking about 3D printing. Oh, there you go. Hell yeah. Anybody else thinking of making a homebrew machine? Yes. Okay, good. By the way, you've been voluntold. I want to see it next year. Flipping game, doesn't have to have any logic or any rules. White wood in a cabinet, flippers. Cabinet's optional. If you bring a play, you played your game for a long time before you put it in a cabinet. On a rotisserie, cabinet's optional. So I've had a few different ideas for a few different machines, but the one I'll say is, because it's . Check, check, check. Is this on somewhere? That was me. No, it's not on. . All right. With your borderlands table and how it moves, I also had an idea like that except not side to side as well, just up and down.
    68:20
    And if I ever make it, it would be a space-themed game. And you go to different planets and lower gravity. The table is more flat.
    68:31
    That's actually pretty cool. Yeah. Do it. Peer pressure. You got a year. You have a year. Got a year. Bring us something. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be. Somebody knows robotics and knows how to do that kind of stuff. Lynn and I will literally just pick up the front and back. Oh, yeah. Up, down, okay, we'll do it. Don't even have to say anything. Just have different types of tasers for us. Yeah, just tell them. Exactly. I had started with the notion of having one, and then I thought about all the things I could do with more, and I'm a sadomasochist. Feature creep. I was going to say the same thing. Let's go creep. But you've got to start. I think that's the thing that we've heard here repeatedly over the last, God, it's been six or seven years. Getting old. Starting is the hardest. It's every single... Yeah, every single... Just get started. Get it here. So the best I can say is you owe me a machine next year. I want to see something with some flippers and something. The rest of it doesn't matter, but I think when you get to that point, you'll start innovating. So speaking about getting started, I have a fairly large shop now, and I'm thinking about starting a pinball-specific maker-type space for everybody. Yay! I'm thinking about it so if you guys are interested come talk to me this is me right here come talk to me it's still Lynn yeah I'll take it so I'm thinking about different types of options for it and what not but yeah there's a lot of people in this New England area that just want to make games now and the future And as everybody's saying, hey, community helps. Like, one person knows something, someone else doesn't know something, and another person has already dealt with the problem that you're dealing with and can tell you, don't do that, stupid, right? Uh, having a space might be useful specifically for that, rather than a general makers or a general this or that, where, oh, yeah, I'm, I'm making a new table, like, a new, uh, dresser. Oh, okay, great, that doesn't help me with pinball. Or, or, or doesn't. Um, but, yeah, so I'm, I'm thinking about that idea. So come talk to me. Doing with homebrewing. Sorry. Yeah, something like that. I don't know that. I haven't thought that far ahead. I just came up with this idea like three weeks ago because I have like 6,000 square feet now. Yeah. You know what's nice about that idea is that what a lot of people won't tell you is that making homebrew games is kind of a curse because then you get stuck with this machine forever. which you can't park with because you've got hundreds and hundreds of hours of your life into it, even when you don't want to look at it anymore. And so if you set up that space to also be like a rotating spot for people to park a home. No, you see, I have a solution for that. Emily, it's called EMP. She's gone?
    71:27
    It's called EMP. My three games, soon to be four, are all at EMP. And so the public plays them 24 hours a day, seven days a week, basically. Nice. And if you guys make a homebrew game, have the public play it. Otherwise, you won't know what's wrong, and you won't know how well it holds up. Don't make a game to have in a vacuum. There's no fucking point in that. Make a game for people to play.
    71:53
    Bring your games. Get your games played. I just want to let people know, bring your games. I was here last show, and my game just flipped. And I didn't have ramps or really a lot of stuff finished, but I still brought the game. and the benefit yeah but the benefit of coming to the show is the fact that you get a lot of people to play your game you start figuring things out it's the little things that you don't get at home in your basement or wherever the heck you're building your game you're not going to get that experience so it is absolutely worth bringing your game to the show Lynn can attest to it bring your game please bring your game what was I telling you like all couple months leading up to this bring your damn game I didn't give it two shits if it flipped or not it was going to be here for people to play it and see it and tell you what's good or not because you needed it to get that fire under your ass exactly it's true I have to cut this conversation off because I'm the one who complains that everybody goes over an hour and we're now at an hour and 15 minutes shut off the mics they're unplugged now so the rest of you thank you for coming This is the highlight of my weekend here. I do a lot of work here to get all this AV stuff set up and everything, but this is the reason I do it is for this community right here. This is actually the most important thing to me. So thank you for being here and supporting these people that did something amazing. I think we forget how hard understanding computers and software and code, physics, geometry, art, math, everything all into one. And as you heard, not one person can do it by themselves. So it takes a community. Except Lynn. Lynn doesn't count, though. No. Lynn does everything. I'm the enigma here. Lynn's a wizard. Yes. Okay? I'm a wizard. I'm a Jules Verne of people. So thank you for coming here and helping me support these people and encouraging new people that will have pins for us here next year. Yes. You've been committed. You said it. It's going to happen. These two got roped into it by me years before. So come take a seat up here. Come talk about what you've learned. Come be part of this great community with me. and maybe someday Lynn and I will build a pinball machine. I want to get some time in my life.