There's a Star Wars there. What is going on, Dwight? Yeah, no, I like seeing you guys. I'm turning my camera back on. It is like we're here. Here we go. Hi, Dwight. Hey, Chris. How's it going? All right. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me. So good to have you, man. And we want to really pick your brain about the game and ask you a few things about the code specifically, because I know that's kind of your realm of expertise. So this is the second Stern Star Wars game that you've coded. Are you a huge fan of the franchise? Of Star Wars? Yeah. I'm a founding member of the Church of Star Wars. So, like, I was there in 1977. I watched Star Wars in the theater nine times before I left the theater. Well, like the last couple, like the last two times, well, one was in a drive-thru, and two of the last three were in a second-run theater. But it, like, ran forever. So, like, I kept saying, hey, you know, mom, dad, aunt, uncle, you know, somebody, take me to go see Star Wars. And I saw it a whole bunch of times. Has that love persisted? Have you seen every, obviously you've seen every movie, right? But did you go see it multiple times? No, yeah, yeah. Every time, like when the new trilogy came out, I would go get tickets in advance the moment they came with them, they went on sale, and I would buy. So I would buy. So like it's going to open on Friday, but Thursday night you can go. And they kept creeping back the hour, right? So like at Thursday at 6 p.m. in the evening, you can buy tickets, right? So I would go and I would get Thursday tickets, and then I would get Friday tickets, and then I'd get Saturday tickets, and then Sunday tickets. And, like, Stern would take everybody out to go see the movie. So, like, I would often see the movie three times within a 24-hour period. Oh, my God. Well, I understand why you're involved with this game, because The Mandalorian is in your wheelhouse. No, I love Mandalorian. Like, I love it for the same reason everybody else does. Like, going into it, I was, so when I first heard about it, before I even knew I was doing the show, I was wanting, like, a dark, seedy underbelly of the Star Wars universe. and then when I saw the first episode I'm like oh well that's not what they're going for they're aiming for more mainstream Disney you know and then so I was a smidgen disappointed but then you see all that cool action with him in the bar and then the Ravnet coming up out of the ice and all of the great humor I was sold and then every single episode was great and then we couldn't wait for the second season and yeah totally agree So Dwight you and Brian both worked at Williams in the 1990s but even though you worked on Revenge from Mars, the sequel to one of his games. I don't think you've ever worked together on a game. Is that true? Yeah, that's completely true. And I'd forgotten about Revenge from Mars. So I count Revenge from Mars as like a game that I had creative input on. And it's one of my major projects that I've done in, you know, in like the hundred years I've been working in pinball. But Revenge from Mars was, you know, was me and Lyman and Keith Johnson. And the three of us each sort of split that game up software-wise. And to me, the dad of the project was George Gomez. George Gomez was the designer of the game. It's the sequel to the hit game from Lyman and Brian, right? So Lyman and Brian made Attack from Mars, and then Brian was mostly a consultant, like an executive producer of Revenge from Mars, and didn't have day-to-day kind of creativity, at least at my level. I think he met with George as often as they needed to, and they went over what they wanted to, but then when things filtered down to me. I didn't have much interaction with Brian at all. I completely forgot that Brian, that he's attached to that game. Of course he is, because he did Attack from Mars. So how was it finally getting to do a game together? It's great. I love working with Brian. So every designer, every person you work with on every team brings strengths and weaknesses to a project, and Brian brings a lot of strengths to the project. We worked for a smidgen on Pool Sharks. So Pool Sharks was Brian's I think his first game. Yeah, it was. how to get in this business was on pool starts with Brian. Brian has a lot of programming experience himself. How closely did you guys work together on this game, on the rules? He didn't do any programming on the game. Okay. But we collaborated quite a bit. Like, we collaborated on every part of the game. So, I mean, in my mind, you know, I draw the line at anything that's not tangible is sort of my domain. Right. And if it's, you know, and if you can touch it, it would be Brian's domain. And he had every input on what we did. We, like, threw things against a whiteboard and we drew, you know, and we, you know, met, you know, over the drawings and we laid out the, you know, the framework of the game together. And the same with the toys and the same with, you know, the same with, you know, the layout of the game. I had input on it, but, you know, it was ultimately his design. So when you're given a license as amazing as The Mandalorian, how do you approach the rules and objectives? I mean, do you go linear and story-based? Do you go mode-based or something completely different? And also, how do you do it in a way that does justice to the show that so many people love? I mean, that's a big undertaking for you. So that's a great question. And there's lots of little questions in there. And basically, you're wanting the process of how we take on any game, you know, even if it's, you know, especially one as magnanimous as, you know, as Star Wars, right? Right. Because you're always going to piss some people off. I always started at, like, well, who is the player? And then I go from there. And Mandalorian was kind of easy. Like, of course, the player is the Mandalorian, right? So you push start, and the player is the Mandalorian, and he's going to then try and do things that, you know, like, you know, I mean, the player is going to try and do things that Mando had to do in the show. And then I'm like, well, what did, you know, like, in a nutshell, what does Mando do in the show? Well, he's always broke. His ship is always needing repairs. He's needing equipment. He's, you know, he's trying to scrounge together some Beskar, you know, and he's constantly going on these missions. and the game kind of wrote itself at that point. That's a great point. Yeah, so we made a game where you're going on missions and those are modes, and slightly more interesting and bigger modes are multiballs, and then even bigger, more interesting modes, like some of the really watershed moments in the show became wizard modes, or just an episode like the prison episode where they're on the prison ship, we turned that into a wizard mode because that was sort of self-contained But it was just so big. Like, often we would take an episode and we would split it into, like, maybe two modes. Or the interesting part of the episode only was, like, 15 minutes of footage. And we would go, well, that's a mission. That's just a mode, right? But, like, the prisoner episode where they got to the ship and then they worked their way through. And then the guys all turned on Mando. Do you guys remember the prison episode? Absolutely. So that became a wizard mode. So we were constantly going through all the episodes and figuring out, well, what goes where? What's going to become a mission? What's, you know, a mode? What's going to become a multi-ball? What's going to become a wizard mode? And then we have this new thing in the game called Encounters, where we have a whole set of rules. Like, you have to complete three encounters to get to the final, final wizard mode. And all the encounters are done on the mini playfield. And so we had to work out, well, what's fun about the mini playfield? And what parts of the episodes and the story would fit there? This is a long answer. Is this the right answer? It's good. It's leading into things we're going to ask you about later. So you're kind of answering multiple questions. But speaking of the mini play field and what you're playing there, we did want to ask you about that. So this is kind of a natural transition. Right. So then the other thing that I thought of is, well, I really like giving the player choices. And in the beginning, we had three different areas where we were going to give you choices. I wanted to bring back a game mechanic that I did in Game of Thrones because it just seemed to fit. It was really natural. Like, you gather Beskar, and then you turn it into pinball things, you know, or armor and equipment and weapons, because the Mandalorian is always with weapons. So, like, you push start, and you have a flamethrower, and then you gather Beskar, and then you can go to the foundry and trade the Beskar for a rifle or for whistling birds and stuff like that. So, you know, we just made all this into the game, and it just, you know, it kind of wrote itself, like I said. So let's talk about modes, because it seems like there are a lot of mini-modes, all under different names, like Missions, Encounters, Hunter Modes, and Random Ambushes. So let's tackle each one briefly, if you're up to that. Yeah. On Missions, there are five missions, and they started at the scoop after hitting the left and right ramps. What can you tell us about the kind of objectives you're going to be going for here? You know, there's three different objectives in the game. There's missions, multi-balls, and encounters. And the first third, you know, the basic third is modes, which we call missions. And they were smaller things in the game. So, like, one of our missions is the very first episode is Mando arrives at the sort of western town. And our cut screen at the beginning of the episode is him kind of crawling on the ground on the hill with a spyglass, looking down at the town, trying to figure out what's going on. And that's where we see IG-11 for the first time. So we took each of the little pieces of story that would fit nicely in a mode and turned it into a mode. When you're in these modes, are they quick, you know, shoot this and that modes, or are they more fleshed out? No, so, right, great question, because we have modes like missions, and then we have more smaller things like ambush, and, well, ambush turned out to be a wizard mode, but anyway, we'll get to that in a minute. So there are different sizes. Our regular mode is like 30 or 40 seconds on the clock, and you have to complete a series of goals, you know, that sort of fit with the story that we're doing. So, like, you have to kill all the guys on the roof, and then you have to get the big gun, right? And then you have to shoot some more guys and then get into the door. And then, you know, at the end of the mode, we see the cut screen of the door falls down and IG-11 and Mandor there, you know, as silhouettes. Cool. And then at the very end, it's the child, Grogu, with Mando, kind of a silhouette of the two of them together. Powerful ending to the first episode, right? Yeah, so that's sort of the difference between a regular mission and a mini-mission is it has more story. Right. All right, well, let's talk about encounters because you touched on that briefly, but it's an interesting thing, and I really want to know about the upper play field because it seems like it plays a relatively big role in this game. So you hit the left ramp, it sounds like, twice to activate the upper playfield. The first time around. The first time. Okay, drops the ball into the upper playfield. On the pro, you've got one flipper. On the premium and the LE, you've got two, and it kind of rotates. What are you doing up there? I know there's lots of targets. Are you trying to hit all of the targets, and are you trying to hit them all in different ways in different modes? That's a great question. We did lots of experimenting with what can we do on that playfield because we wanted to maximize the differences between it and sort of a static play field that, you know, like we've seen a dozen times on different games. What's really cool about it is it can be flatter than the play field you're playing on, right? So it can be more flat like the ball is just you know kind of takes its time coming back to the flipper And then it can be all the way 65 degrees you know like bonsai run almost Right And everything in between. So what's really fun about it, what we decided to do, and I'm not going to give it all away, but when you first play your first encounters, you know, so story-wise, it's like we took the, like he's trying to get the Jawas and he's trying to, you know, get back on top of the Jawa ship. because there's short little scenes with him climbing. He's doing like the Batman climb up the sand crawler, right? So because when you're on the mini play field, everything's happening really fast. The ball goes up, hits a target, comes back, and half a second has gone by. So everything that's happening needs to be kind of frenetic. And so we pick scenes and story from the game, from the show, that made sense in that thing. But you're wanting to know more about the fun of this little mini play field. and the fun of the mini play field is we give you this little sort of short little kind of goal like in the beginning it's just you have to hit two targets right so you hit two targets and then that takes you to a bonus level and then the next time around so each encounter is three levels so like you're fighting the Jawas across the entire encounter but it's broken up into three parts right and then so for the first one you have to hit two targets and then you get a bonus level then four targets and then a bonus level and then six targets and then a bonus level. And the bonus level... Sorry to interrupt. Does that all happen at once? Are you playing or do you have to restart the encounter to get to phase two? No, it all just keeps going on. It's all, like, ongoing. So you shoot the left ramp and that lights your encounters. And then you shoot the left ramp again. And then from then on, if you're in an encounter, the ball will divert to the mini play field. Okay. Right? And then until you complete the encounter. And completing the encounter is completing three levels. and each level is some little objective that you have to get through to get to the bonus level. And the bonus level is where the points are. And what's fun about the bonus level is, so like I start you off slightly tilted, like slightly more tilted than the play field, than your normal play field is, but still pretty easy. And you hit two targets and then the bonus level then instantly goes flat and then is constantly moving. So like you're constantly moving and trying to hit these two purple lights because the targets on the mini-play field are RGB. So they're like yellow, like static flashing two lights, and then you complete them, and then it's two purple lights moving back and forth. And you have like 10 seconds to hit the two purple lights as many times as you can, and then I'm going to kill your flippers. And like Carl Weathers, you know, at the end, Carl Weathers goes five, four, three, but most of the time, you're off before then. But, you know, like the bonus levels are where the points are and the fun because, like, the whole thing is moving. So it goes really, really, really flat, and it's easy to hit the purple targets, and then it starts getting steeper, steeper, steeper, steeper, and then it's more difficult, and then it goes back shallow again. And that's where the fun of the game really is. It's trying to complete very simple objectives while the play field is moving on you. Do you make those objectives easier in the pro? Because it seems like you're limited a little bit more with a static environment. So the pro is not as fun, but it's still pretty fun. So, you know, so on the Pro, we're also going to, you know, we're going to do slightly different tricks with the lights. But, you know, and I'm still going to kill your flipper if you keep the ball alive too much. But you can, so it's much more tricky on the Pro because I can't make it really, really steep on you. So we're experimenting with, like, I'm going to change the flipper power, you know, to simulate the steepness. Huh. So it might be a very different experience on the Pro then. It is a very different experience than the pro. I'm currently working on it right now, but I think we've really got something. What's really fun about it is there's a small amount of objective, and then you get to this bonus level, and then you're like, oh, in the bonus level I'm going to try and do as much as I can, and the timer times down on you. So you still have all that urgency and Carl Weathers counting and stuff. So I think the pro is still pretty fun. Does Carl Weathers ever appear in a Star Spangled Top hat on this game? Five times. Excellent. Okay. All right, moving on to the hunter modes.