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Final Resistance Pinball: Interview with Designer Scott Danesi

Bro, Do you Even Talk Pinball·podcast_episode·45m 16s·analyzed·Mar 7, 2023
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.031

TL;DR

Scott Denise reveals Final Resistance design: cyberpunk alien-defense game balancing traditional pinball feel with P3 innovation.

Summary

Scott Denise discusses the design and development of Final Resistance, a new Multimorphic P3 module launching at TPF. He explains the cyberpunk-themed gameplay (players defend a city against an alien invasion), innovative mechanics (cannon ship that fires balls back, Yagov-style kickers, spinner counters), and his design philosophy of creating a traditional-looking pinball experience on a futuristic LCD platform. Denise works full-time at Pinball Life while designing games part-time, and collaborated with artist Johnny Crabb and rules designer Bowen Kerins.

Key Claims

  • Final Resistance is not a continuation of TNA but its own game in the same cyberpunk style

    high confidence · Scott directly addressing community speculation: 'This is a lot of people think like, oh, it's a continuation of TNA or something. I've been getting a lot of questions about this. It's actually not. It's its own little thing.'

  • Scott designs pinball games in his spare time while working full-time as an engineer at Pinball Life

    high confidence · Scott: 'I am not a full-time pinball designer by any means. I do all this in my spare time... I have a full job I actually the engineer over at Pinball Life'

  • The cannon mechanism can fire all three balls back in rapid succession (less than a second)

    high confidence · Scott describing ship mechanics: 'it can lock balls and then fire them back at you in rapid succession. So it can actually, like I'm talking like less than a second, it can get all three balls out of there.'

  • The lock shot behind the drop target serves three purposes: lock, captive ball, and inner orbit

    high confidence · Scott explaining design: 'So it's like basically I'm just intercepting that shot where we can use it as a lock and we can use it as a captive ball and we can use it as an inner orbit.'

  • Final Resistance intentionally uses static inserts and traditional pinball aesthetics to win over P3 skeptics

    high confidence · Scott: 'I wanted to deliver a game like when i had this vision for this thing i wanted to deliver something that could win over people that are still skeptical on the p3'

  • TJ (Multimorphic's mechanical engineer) engineered the cannon mechanism based on Scott's SolidWorks designs

    high confidence · Scott: 'TJ took over on that and made it actually like completely function with his engineering genius'

  • Johnny Crabb (Jurassic Park artist) did the art direction and includes hidden Easter eggs he didn't tell Scott about

    high confidence · Scott: 'he hid some things in there that he didn't even tell me about until I found them later by accident'

Notable Quotes

  • “I wanted to deliver something that could win over people that are still skeptical on the p3 because of the lcd screen, I wanted to show them that it's absolutely possible to make a traditional game with little bits and pieces of really cool things the P3 can do just kind of sprinkled on top, but nothing really in your face.”

    Scott Denise @ ~mid-conversation — Reveals design philosophy addressing P3 adoption concerns; addresses skepticism about LCD-based pinball

  • “I make more of an impact on the pinball community doing my 9-to-5 job than I do building games like this and doing audio for games... just because of all those flipper rebuild kits that you guys get if you need a star post for your game or something, I've most likely drawn that up in 3D”

    Scott Denise @ ~mid-conversation — Emphasizes value of parts engineering work at Pinball Life over game design; shows dedication to community support infrastructure

  • “I kept hearing people, because I love the P3. I think it's great. It's fun. It's innovative. It's really futuristic pinball... There was a lot of people with this, like, stigma attached to it, like, saying, you know, it's not real pinball.”

    Scott Denise @ ~mid-conversation — Explains motivation for Final Resistance: proving P3 legitimacy to skeptical community

  • “It's a game with static inserts. Those inserts never go away. When the game's in attract mode, those inserts are still there on the LCD... I just made a traditional pinball machine on a crazy futuristic platform.”

    Scott Denise @ ~mid-conversation — Core design principle: maintaining traditional pinball visual language on P3 platform

  • “It's not like TNA, but it's not like a JGP game where it's got this crazy, huge, you know, deep story to it... It would probably be similar to Rick and Morty.”

    Scott Denise @ ~near end — Positions Final Resistance ruleset difficulty in context of his prior work

  • “There's a ton. I'm not telling you what they are. You guys just figure it out.”

    Scott Denise @ ~discussion of Easter eggs — Confirms hidden Easter eggs in artwork designed to reward close inspection by players

Entities

Scott DenisepersonFinal ResistancegameMultimorphiccompanyJohnny CrabbpersonBowen KerinspersonTJpersonPinball Lifecompany

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Scott Denise remains full-time employee at Pinball Life while designing games part-time; plans no career transition despite successful game releases

    high · Scott: 'I don't have any plans to leave Pinball Life. I do really enjoy my job'

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Strong positive reception to Final Resistance reveal from Pinside community; players enthusiastic about traditional-modern hybrid design approach

    medium · Scott: 'I will say as a fan of your past work when the game got revealed today I was like this is exactly what I was hoping for from a Scott game on the P3 I think you seen a lot of similar reactions from folks on Pinside'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Jerry (Multimorphic) expressed concern that Yagov kicker might break flipper hold due to excessive power; Scott designed conditional activation via diverter as compromise

    medium · Scott: 'Jerry's mad at me because he's like, what if it breaks the flipper hold or something?'... later describes diverter control system

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Scott intentionally designed Final Resistance with static LCD inserts and traditional pinball aesthetics to prove P3 legitimacy to skeptics

    high · Scott: 'I wanted to deliver something that could win over people that are still skeptical on the p3... I just made a traditional pinball machine on a crazy futuristic platform'

  • ?

    event_signal: Final Resistance making official debut at TPF with multiple production units; expected to be major attraction based on prior Weird Al popularity

    high · Scott: 'I'm unsure how many games they're going to have there. So we've got, I know they're building a few production prototypes. So those are most likely going to be there.'

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.136

0:00
What's going on, guys? Kevin with Buffalo Pinball here. I've got a special treat for you tonight. We sat down with Scott Denise, designer of the new Final Resistance game for Multimorphic. Actually talked to him on my payphone to his payphone. So the audio quality is going to sound like we're talking on payphones because that's what we're doing. Because we're both crazy and we have payphones in our game rooms. But it was a great opportunity to ask him some questions on the day of the launch of Final Resistance, the new game for the P3. his original license. It's got his great music in there. Some killer mechanics that we've seen in that teaser video.
0:37
Spaceship shooting balls back at you. Yagov style kickers. The lock behind the drop target. Spinners with counters. Oh my goodness. Wait till you check it out. Final Resistance. Be sure to tune in next Friday night here on Buffalo Pinball on Twitch. Twitch.tv slash Buffalo Pinball. I'll be down in Texas live streaming the game with Scott and the team. uh, from Multimorphic headquarters. So in the meantime, enjoy the conversation, learn a little bit more about Scott and his game. And, uh, we'll see you next Friday for the reveal live from Multimorphic headquarters. We should probably talk about the game stuff, huh? Cause that's kind of, that was kind of exciting today. Game. Okay. Here, uh, Pat the weirdo, final resistance looks sweet. Will there be a soundtrack release? There, there will be a soundtrack release. So I am going to, uh, I just, so for now, like, just so you guys know how this works, I'll tell you a little bit about how the sausage is made on this thing. When I write music for games, they aren't full songs at first. What I do is I write music loops for the game to, like, put in the game and make the game actually really, you know, really engaging and stuff. And then once we get to a point where it's a little more subtle than I get sometimes, then I can turn those songs, those game loops, into full actual listening songs. and then I get those mastered and then we release those things and it's all this like process. So I do plan on doing a limited edition cassette again and we are in talks with a record label for a vinyl again too. So yeah, because I know, yeah, I know, I know. And I owe you some other stuff too because I've got some other cool vinyl that you're going to want. now we're done maybe when we meet up for the stream you know I could actually yeah I'll do that if it would survive the trip to Texas that'll be fine I'll just put it in my backpack nice I mean we can throw that through the thing there's no problem if you guys didn't hear I'm going to be flying down to Texas next Friday to stream the brand new game Final Resistance with Scott and crew down at Multimorphic so So tune in for that. It's going to be Eastern 7 Central on Switch at Buffalo Pinball. So looking forward to hanging out with Scott and showing off the new game.

  • Bowen Kerins (Papa tutorial creator) designed the ruleset for Final Resistance

    high confidence · Scott: 'Bowen really, really understands my brain... So, yeah, he did the rules for this thing'

  • Scott plans to release Final Resistance soundtrack as limited edition cassette and vinyl

    high confidence · Scott: 'I do plan on doing a limited edition cassette again and we are in talks with a record label for a vinyl again too'

  • The Yagov kicker on the right orbit can be activated by a diverter when the ship is 'attacking,' firing the ball back at high speed

    high confidence · Scott: 'if that ship is really pissed at you, it can take that orbit away from you and fire the ball back at you at 100 miles an hour'

  • “He probably just had the ability to go wild with creativity here versus working with a license to, right?”

    Kevin (Buffalo Pinball host) @ ~art discussion — Notes Johnny Crabb had more creative freedom on original IP vs licensed Jurassic Park

  • “In this case, there are not in this game. I saved all those for Weird Al.”

    Scott Denise @ ~multi-ball discussion — References previous project (Weird Al module) and design philosophy choices

    • Buffalo Pinball
    organization
    Total Nuclear Annihilation (TNA)game
    Rick and Mortygame
    Weird Algame
    Jurassic Parkgame
    TPFevent
    Multimorphic P3product
    Pinball Arcadeproduct
    Kevinperson
    Jerryperson
    Stephenperson
  • ?

    licensing_signal: Final Resistance uses original Scott Denise IP (similar to TNA) rather than licensed franchise, allowing greater creative freedom

    high · Scott discusses original cyberpunk narrative; Kevin notes Johnny Crabb 'had the ability to go wild with creativity here versus working with a license'

  • $

    market_signal: Multimorphic and Scott planning live streaming from headquarters at TPF; Buffalo Pinball hosting premiere coverage

    high · Kevin: 'I'm going to be flying down to Texas next Friday to stream the brand new game Final Resistance with Scott and crew down at Multimorphic'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Johnny Crabb (Jurassic Park artist) and Bowen Kerins (Papa tutorial creator) confirm involvement in Final Resistance as artist and rules designer respectively

    high · Scott discusses collaboration: 'Johnny did a lot of research... he really could kind of get used to, like, how my brain was working' and 'Bowen really, really understands my brain'

  • ?

    announcement: Final Resistance officially launched as new Multimorphic P3 module with detailed mechanic reveals

    high · Interview conducted on launch day; teaser video released; multiple production prototypes being built for TPF

  • ?

    product_strategy: Final Resistance incorporates spinner counter mechanic with context-dependent functions across multiple game modes

    high · Chat question about spinner reaching zero; Scott: 'Well, it depends what mode you're in'

  • ?

    technology_signal: P3 platform confirmed to support high-definition backbox monitors and complex mechanical integration (cannon, kickers, diverters)

    high · Scott discusses technical capabilities: 'Those P3 monitors in the back box are so high definition, it, like, blows my mind'

    • 2:59
    So take us back, like, to the beginnings of Final Resistance. Like, what was the inspiration for the game? And I guess, like, what's my goal as the player in the game? All right. So, yeah, check this out. So I'm not going to give too much away yet, but I will give the basic synopsis of the thing, right? So this is a lot of people think like, oh, it's a continuation of TNA or something. I've been getting a lot of questions about this. It's actually not. It's its own little thing. It's just in the same cyberpunk style that TNA was.
    3:33
    So what this is is really you are part of a crew. This is a long future civilization. The corporations have taken over. Everybody's a barcode. government doesn't care about the citizens the world is kind of going to crap so the people who live in this city kind of like run and own the place this is nothing I made up this is a cyberpunk it's a cyberpunk theme or cyberpunk world these are very common in storylines so you're in this world Now I'm like – I'm coming up with this idea, and I'm like, you know, I really want to have this group of people defend their city against something really good. So I was like, I'm going to have them – I'm going to have this alien ship come in and start antagonizing the city, trying to take resources. and these people have to fight against these aliens and get them out of here just to save their city and to save all the people in that city. So basically that's the big premise of the game. You're fighting these aliens to get them out of here. So this big ship has come in and it has landed on top of a building, right? And it's got this lift ramp in front of it where it's got that, I don't know if you saw the video, you can see there's a big shield that comes down in front. You can't shoot the ramp that's underneath it, and you can't shoot the scoop that's underneath it as well. There's actually two shots blocked by that thing. And the alien ship, you can actually do stuff in the game to get that shield out of the way.
    5:23
    So, yeah, you go through a bunch of battles. There's different battles, different types of battles, different things that happen.
    5:30
    There's a couple different multiballs. You can deploy reinforcements It's actually really, really cool This game is It just turned out so amazing It's going to be really fun The mechanics of it are ridiculous That ship that you're seeing That's in that back right corner That's taking up a ton of room in there Has a lot of stuff inside of it It's like doing all sorts of mechanical things That cannon mechanism On the ship Fires the balls It can lock balls and then fire them back at you in rapid succession. So it can actually, like I'm talking like less than a second, it can get all three balls out of there. It can just, like, real fast. And dealing with that as a pinball player is just a new experience. So it's kind of fun.
    6:21
    It's like nothing I've ever seen. So it's kind of neat. Was that a TJ mechanical wizard invention again? Yeah, so this is interesting. That is a piece of mechanics that I had drawn up in SolidWorks already.
    6:38
    And then what I did was I placed it in when I did the original. What I did was I worked a lot with TJ on this, and I drew the layout in SolidWorks and did the wire guides and everything like that and did the ball guides and all that and the scoop here and all this stuff. So I did the basic layout of the thing, and I dropped that cannon mechanism here, and I said ship goes here, and I made like a mock-up, you know, and just like pointed out all the other stuff.
    7:06
    And from there, TJ took over on that and made it actually like completely function with his engineering genius, and it was quite amazing.
    7:18
    He's incredible. We've got a good question in chat here. Sure. The difference between – oh, go ahead. No, go ahead, man. What was the question? I didn't see it in there. talk about the difference between designing a traditional pinball machine versus doing something on the P3. Oh yeah so that's a super interesting question because the P3 system is really really different when you're doing pinball design because there's a lot of visual assets that you have to think about when you design a game with a traditional wood play field you can just like throw you just you just stay where you want your inserts what you want your art to look like and then from there you have to use those inserts to tell a story. But now that you have, like, a complete LCD here, there is a ton of stuff that you can do to tell the story and to help, you know, guide the player along. And it's a ton of extra work. Not going to lie. It's actually way more work to make a P3 game than it would be for a traditional game, just because of that video asset. It's crazy. Because you also have to think about the back box, too. yeah so you have to do all this extra animation for the play field but what i noticed about the well at least what we've seen so far of uh final resistance is that it has more of a like traditional look to the play field talk about your thought process on that yeah for sure so i wanted to yeah absolutely i wanted to deliver a game like when i had this vision for this thing i wanted to deliver something that could win over people that are still skeptical on the p3 because of the lcd screen, I wanted to show them that it's absolutely possible to make a traditional game with little bits and pieces of really cool things the P3 can do just kind of sprinkled on top, but nothing really in your face.
    9:07
    So this game is, like, to me, it's pinball. Like, it's a game with static inserts. Those inserts never go away. When the game's in attract mode, those inserts are still there on the LCD. it's actually really really cool and it's a really neat concept uh to try to make a like make a machine that looks like what you would expect a pinball machine to be on this crazy futuristic platform so so does it do like uh crazy animations around the inserts and stuff like that or is it totally static all the time oh it does there's cool there's cool animations that happen around the inserts the inserts never go away which is the key part so like when you're when you're because that's what we're familiar with you know like we're familiar with inserts never moving you know we we expect you know if there's a lock insert there uh we don't expect that lock insert to go away we expect it to turn off right the light underneath it turns off um and that's what we're emulating here and i wanted to emulate you know that older style traditional pinball machines.
    10:16
    I'm just really excited to actually get to stream this and kind of show you around the thing, Kevin, because it's going to be super neat to watch you just explore it and see what's going on.
    10:28
    I can't wait. I watched that teaser video like 15 times today. Yeah, I can't wait. That's funny. That teaser video was a lot of fun because Stephen put that together.
    10:44
    He's really good at that stuff. And then he shoots it over to me, and then I'll put audio on it. I shoot it back to him. I say, did I miss anything? You know, he double-checks everything for me, and then we hit the go button on it today.
    11:00
    But, yeah, that's actually – so the music on that second teaser video is one of the multi-ball tunes in the game. Nice. I will say as a fan of your past work when the game got revealed today I was like this is exactly what I was hoping for from a Scott game on the P3 I think you seen a lot of similar reactions from folks on Pinside and stuff Yes this looks amazing You talked about wanting to bring some of the old school traditional style onto the P3. That seems to be kind of your sweet spot, I guess, like mixing the old with the new. We saw that first with TNA, and now we're seeing it with the P3, but on a different level. So, you know, there's a lot more mechanical action on here than on TNA, although there was a lot of mechanical, but it was like more traditional style mechanical. Here we've got ramps and diverters and cannons firing back at you and stuff like that. So it's cool to see that evolution in your design process and see you bringing that to the P3 platform that I obviously love and have been playing for a number of years, and hopefully you can bring more folks on with this game. Absolutely, yeah. I think it's just, you know, there's a lot of people that just still aren't sold on it, and it kind of confuses me, you know, what's holding them back. And I think I kind of get it, you know. I get the – you get really used to seeing things like inserts and seeing things like just kind of be a little bit more static and be in the same place all the time, you know. Like, for instance, I did put a timer between the flippers on the P3 just like Rick and Morty and just like TNA because, and that, and I did it because I just, I like that there. I think it makes a lot of sense, but something to keep in mind too, is that timer is always there, whether it's on or off, it's still always there. So your brain knows, you know, exactly what that means when that turns on. And there's a thing where, you know, if you take away too much of that, certain people just kind of are off put by like, they're, they're kind of put off by things moving around and, you know, they're not sure like, oh, I don't know what that means now. It moved over here or whatever, you know what I mean? So I try to keep things really static on there and, you know, just really, I mean, I'm saying the same thing over and over again. I just made a traditional pinball machine on a crazy futuristic platform.
    13:25
    And there's alphanumerics on it. I don't know if anyone noticed in the back, but I really pushed for putting the score displays in the back box again, and that's in there. And those are always there, and they're always showing the score just like TNA does. Yeah, I was so focused on the play field during the teaser, I didn't really pay attention to the bag box. So now I'm going to have to watch it again.
    13:46
    Yeah, I don't know. I mean, maybe it wasn't on there. I don't know. I have to go look again, too. But it is there for the game.
    13:53
    So, yeah, that was just a really cool, fun thing. Nice. So, Scott, let's talk about some of the play field features and see what I can remember. I didn't remember. One of the first things that stood out was the lock behind the drop target. That's one of your signature moves, right? How is that similar or different from the other games where you've done something like that? Oh, this one's actually really cool. So I've experimented before with Rick and Morty having a lock shot that actually goes all the way around to another shot. So that horseshoe thing in Rick and Morty was a lock, and, you know, if both of the drop targets were down and it wasn't capturing anything, it just acted like a horseshoe.
    14:28
    In this case, that shot that you saw with that drop target that was flashing yellow in the promo video, was that's an inner loop shot. So if you shoot that shot, it's actually going to loop all the way around and come out the left orbit.
    14:43
    So when you lock a ball in there, you can actually hit that ball hard enough to have it exit out the left orbit, which is super cool.
    14:53
    So it's not like, yeah, it's like basically I'm just intercepting that shot where we can use it as a lock and we can use it as a captive ball and we can use it as an inner orbit. So there's three purposes to that thing. And that shot can also grab the ball, too, and pull it out of play, which is really neat for just making the whole thing dynamic.
    15:12
    So you actually load it from a different shot? You load it from behind? Is that the idea? You just load it straight up. No, you can't load it from behind. It's actually – there's no shots that come out those inner loops. I put some – I've got a ramp inside there that you can't really see, at least not from that promo video, but it keeps it from any sort of ball from coming out of those shots. So it's, you know, is that the best idea? Probably not because I probably want some more dangerous. I love dangerous shots, but I took away those two shots as being super dangerous. Like if you would, like, slow roll something through one of those, it can't come back out. Yeah, it's really neat. I mean, unless it's like halfway in, then it can come out, but, you know.
    15:55
    Question from Chad. What happens when the counter reaches zero on the spinner? Do you want to give that away or not? Well, it depends what mode you're in. And so that, you know, there's different modes that do different stuff, right? So, yeah, you just have to see what's going on. It's used for multiple different things.
    16:13
    Yeah. It's very cool. I thought that was it. Go ahead. That was exciting. But there is a really cool feature here that I don't know if you guys noticed or not. But for the people who are fans of the game F-14, which I'm a big fan of, there is something called a Yagov kicker on the right side. So that right orbit can actually kick the ball back at you at a very, very high rate of speed. to the point where Jerry's mad at me because he's like, what if it breaks the flipper hold or something?
    16:55
    He's probably mad at me. I hope he's not listening right now because he's going to get mad at me. I think it would be okay. So you were saying in Discord that that doesn't always kick it back, though. Yeah, so there's a diverter there. So most of the time it acts like a normal orbit like you would expect, but if that ship is really pissed at you, it can take that orbit away from you and fire the ball back at you at 100 miles an hour. Oh, I love it. Yeah, so it's cool because on FRD, that Jagoff kicker is cool, and when you shoot it, it kicks your butt, but that's all it does. So to have that be a shot, sometimes it kills you. Yeah, and you wasted an entire – not wasted. You used an entire shot just for a Jagoff kicker, and it seems like a little bit of a waste to me because it's a really cool thing. if done rarely.
    17:44
    So in this case, there's a diverter, which is really cool, because that thing pops open. You don't really know if it's popping open or not. I mean, there's an indicator. There's an LED indicator telling you if it's going to be active or not. But, you know, we're still working on the software to try and figure out the best way to communicate that to a player or maybe don't communicate it to a player and let them find out. Surprise. I mean, because if your enemy is attacking you, he's not going to let you know, right? They're just going to do it. Yeah, they're just doing it. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, there's a lot of that little bouncing stuff. We're going to be, you know, I'm going to be watching a lot of people play this at TPF and really get some good feedback. And I think that it's so valuable to, for me anyway, to just watch people just play this thing and see what makes them excited, see what makes them a little frustrated, you know, and then we can kind of adjust as we go, you know, to make something really special.
    18:41
    Yeah, absolutely. Let's talk about the team a little bit. You got one of the standout names for me was Johnny Crabb from, if you've played Stearns Jurassic Park, he did all the art on that. That was his first spin-on machine. What was it like working with him and the other members of the team? Yeah, so Johnny's great. So I'm not the best art director on the planet, right? so what I I look for a lot of inspiration from the artists themselves um when we're doing this kind of thing and I say like here's here's really what I'm going for you know uh Johnny did a lot of you know he did a lot of research into stuff that I liked like he did a lot of research into TNA he did a lot of research into just these other random things that I do um and you know I went up, I was in Montreal and met up with him and had a good time and just, you know, got a chance to talk with him a bunch before the project actually kicked off. So he really could kind of get used to, like, how my brain was working and what I was kind of looking for. And he helped a lot when it came to this stuff. And when I was like, I don't know what to do here, like, what do you think? He would actually come up with something that was just really, really good. So a lot of this, you know, a lot of this art was really like he helped me a ton, like direct himself even, which is really crazy sounding. But yeah, it was quite awesome actually working with him. He's very talented. He does a lot of really cool graffiti stuff around Montreal. I don't know if you guys know that or not, but he does huge murals and huge, like really cool, intricate graffiti, like 3D looking graffiti things. And so if you look at the back box artwork on that game, on Final Resistance, you'll see that there's a ton of his, like, tagging and stuff all over everything, which is really neat, and it's really special because it's legitimate. You know what I mean? Yeah, for sure. If that makes sense. Yeah. Are there any Easter eggs in the art we should look for? Oh, there's a ton. I'm not telling you what they are. You guys just figure it out. Go to TPF, look closely at the back box monitors. Those P3 monitors in the back box are so high definition, it, like, blows my mind. Like, I don't understand what kind of monitor that is, but whatever it is, it's really, really good, at least the one in my machine here. Kevin, I don't know if you noticed that or not, but it looks incredibly good. Yeah. So go up to one of those machines, take a look at that thing. You know, I don't like spoiling all the Easter eggs. We can talk about Easter eggs maybe, like, in a year from now or something if people haven't found everything. But there's definitely some cool stuff in there. For sure. Absolutely. Yeah, and he hid some things in there that he didn't even tell me about until I found them later by accident. Oh, that's awesome. So that was really fun, yeah.
    21:32
    I think the game, as a former Jurassic Park owner, I think this game looks better than Jurassic Park.
    21:37
    He probably just had the ability to go wild with creativity here versus working with a license to, right? All right, yeah, it's crazy. I think there's some of his art on JJP's Guns N' Roses, maybe. Oh, yeah, maybe one of the posters or something? Yeah, yeah, I think so. Yeah, because the alley has all those concert posters. I bet one of them is his.
    22:00
    Yeah, yeah, that's right. I think there is some of his on there, yeah, which is super cool, too. Yeah, that's awesome. Because he's done actual concert posters for Guns N' Roses. No doubt. Question from Chad. You made TNA as a solo creator. Now you're employed as a full-time creator. Is that right? What was that like? I guess the transition from doing the homebrew TNA to where you are now with pinball. Oh, yeah. So this is kind of a crazy story. So I am not a full-time pinball designer by any means.
    22:31
    I do all this in my spare time which is kind of nuts I have a full job I actually the engineer over at Pinball Life So all those pinball parts that you guys are buying are you know most of those things are engineered by myself, produced by Pinball Life, and sold by Pinball Life. And that's what I do from 9 to 5 every day. Then I come home, and I, you know, can't stop my brain, so I just keep doing stuff, and I start designing pinball machines. And so the first thing I did was I was still working from Pinball Life, but I started building Total Nuclear Annihilation as a homebrew just for fun, just to see if I could do it.
    23:13
    And, you know, it turned out really well. It had really good reception, and we went through that whole thing, just super high level, went through with Spooky. They wanted to build it. They went through the rest of the process, all in my spare time still, and, you know, built it. It's very, very, very difficult to do this kind of stuff in a part-time position. You have to have a crazy brain, I guess, like an ADD brain real bad.
    23:46
    But, yeah, so that happened with total nuclear annihilation. Spooky wanted me to come back, do Rick and Morty, did that. And then after Rick and Morty, I was like, you know, Jerry wanted me to try and do something. And I had some ideas for a P3 module where I was like, you know, because I kept, this is where this, where Final Resistance comes from, is I kept hearing people, because I love the P3. I think it's great. It's fun. It's innovative. It's really futuristic pinball. It really goes along well, like, next to traditional pinball, right? There's, it's two different things. It's, you know, it's another pinball machine. But there was a lot of people with this, like, stigma attached to it, like, saying, you know, it's not real pinball. It's not, you know, it's like virtual pinball or something. And it's like that just kind of blew my mind. I'm like, you know what, I bet you, like, and I'm just saying this in my head, I'm like, I bet I could make something in there that would just like, you know, I hate to use the word trick, but like, you know, show the people, show all these skeptical people that this is real pinball. It's just really ahead of its time.
    24:50
    So, yeah, so definitely that is actually where that whole thing came from. But, yeah, to answer the question, though, yeah, I do all this stuff in my free time, and it's easy.
    25:03
    So the short answer is it really hasn't changed much because you're still working at Pinball Life and you still do pinball design part-time. That's what I do. I don't have any plans to leave Pinball Life. I do really enjoy my job. Actually, to tell you the truth, I make more of an impact on the pinball community doing my 9-to-5 job than I do building games like this and doing audio for games. just because of all those flipper rebuild kits that you guys get if you need a star post for your game or something, I've most likely drawn that up in 3D went through manufacturing processes, QA processes all sorts of DFMs which are designed for manufacturer processes all this crazy stuff to get these parts in just so that we can sell them as brand new things Like, it's, you know, that's crazy. You could probably look at all your machines here, and there's just parts all over these things that we've done at Pinball Life. Yeah, I just got that Mata Hari I've been working on, and I needed a new lockdown bar and new legs for it, and I just went to Pinball Life, and they were all there, brand new. And I'm like, I bet Scott designed these. Yeah, it's like, you know, I probably drew, I think I did draw that undercarriage, but it's on that lockdown bar. but uh yeah there's uh definitely crazy stuff i did not actually draw the legs though the legs are the legs are legit like we we have the tooling that is that used the or that actually was used in the 1990s with williams oh that's insane yeah it's totally crazy uh got another question in chat for you scott how would you classify the rule set very deep like modern pins or not as deep but easy to understand but difficult to master like attack from mars medieval madness and his family etc yeah we're we're going for uh a little blend of each like i would not call cna's rules deep but it's very hard to get to the end of it um it's going to be very similar with this this is going to have more things like wizard like traditional things like more like wizard modes and stuff like that in it um so it's you know there's going to be harder things to get to but we're not going crazy crazy crazy with this because i personally really i like more simple rule sets that are really easy to understand but just really difficult to get through um instead of just being very very complicated and easy to get through but you just so much of it that you can't really you know i don't know to me it's just it's harder to have a game that's super super deep So it's kind of in the middle. I'm going to throw that as like in the middle, you know. Okay. It's not like TNA, but it's not like a JGP game where it's got this crazy, huge, you know, deep story to it.
    27:52
    Getting lots of love and chat for your work at Pemba Life. So good job over there. Awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
    28:02
    Rules on Rick and Morty come off as both simple to understand and branching to me. So, yeah. Yeah. It would be similar to Rick and Morty. Yeah, it would probably be similar to Rick and Morty. So remember, we've got Bowen on the rules here.
    28:14
    Bowen really, really understands my brain and understands, like, what I'm trying to convey with things. So, yeah, he did the rules for this thing, and they are just – they're really, really good. And I don't know if you guys know a ton about Bowen, but he has done those Papa tutorial videos for years, like many, many years. And he's basically played every pinball machine on the planet and knows all the rules to those, like in depth, which is super cool. Bowen, for the people who kind of got into pinball when I did, Bowen was a big part of it. Those tutorials that kind of opened your eyes to like, oh, this is what's going on. It was a combination of like tutorials from Papa and Pinball Arcade, playing that and having to step you through the things you needed to do to achieve the different goals on the pinball machine. Like, the light bulb moment goes off, and you're like, oh, this is awesome. I need to play all these games and do all these things.
    29:10
    Yeah, it's super cool, though. There's a question in chat, too. Hey, here's a good one in chat. Can you ask Scott if there are any juicy bologna slaps in the game?
    29:23
    In this case, there are not in this game. I saved all those for Weird Al. So those are all in Weird Al.
    29:30
    So if you're on your bologna slap and you've got to get Weird Al to go with your final, Final resistance. Yeah, of course.
    29:38
    Multi-ball is easy to start or difficult? Well, so there are multiple multi-balls in the game. Some are easy and some are difficult. So there's something for everybody.
    29:54
    Let's talk about TPF a little bit. This is where the game is going to make its debut, right? How many are you going to have there? What are your plans for TPF? You know, I'm unsure how many games they're going to have there. So we've got, I know they're building a few production prototypes. So those are most likely going to be there. But, I mean, Multimorphic brings, like, last year they brought, like, 10 games. And I think they had two of them set up as Weird Al. And then the rest were, like, just a sprawling of different other modules and other mini games and stuff set up. So they'll probably do the same thing again. I just don't know for sure. Yeah, no worries. Yeah. I would imagine so, too. They haven't officially announced their plans. But, you know, I remember seeing those massive lines because everybody wanted to play Weird Al. And it was such a huge hit at the last one. You got to imagine with TPF being their home show, they're going to bring a lot and represent the company, especially with these new games coming out. Absolutely. Yeah. So hopefully this one, it's a bit of an ass kicker. So I'm thinking hopefully the lines won't be as bad. But I'm hoping people like it enough to get back in line. So maybe the lines will be bad. I don't know. I mean, that's what we come to expect from a Scotsman Easy design, just an amazing sound package that keeps you coming back, even though it's kicking you in the butt every time. Yeah, see, that's fun to me, though. That's what I personally like in games. And I think that's what – there's a lot of people that also personally like that but just don't realize it yet, I think. It's just kind of strange to say. It's like when TNA first came out, it really was difficult. And people were like, this is really hard. They're like, I need to try that again. I'm like, all right, there you go. Like, this is hard. Maybe I could probably do better next time. You know, they kept, you know, it's just, it did something. Like, people wanted, at that point, they just wanted deeper and deeper and deeper games. And I'm like, you know, I kind of don't. I want to see, let me do this, you know. Yeah. The harder games keep you coming back. They give you that one more game feel versus like if I sit down and I play a really long game of Hobbit or something, I'm like, all right, that's enough. I've played enough Hobbit for a while. I'll come back to that in a couple of weeks. Right. But if you're playing TNA or, for example, I was on location playing a couple of games. They had a Spider-Man next to a Kiss and Spider-Man. I stepped up to and I played it for like 15 minutes on one game and I was like, all right, I'm going to go over and play Kiss. and it just kicked my butt, and I played it again, and I played it again, and then played it again until I had a good score, right? So it's that different approach. I think there's room for both, and I'm glad you're bringing the kind of ass-kicker,
    32:38
    tougher-to-play, easy-to-figure-out, tough-to-master kind of gameplay. Yeah, I mean, there's tons and tons of games that are just longer-playing games, and there's nothing wrong with that at all, but there's a lot of stuff on the market for that. So bringing stuff like this is really what I want to, at least me personally, what I want to focus on.
    33:00
    Ethos wants to know if you're going to make pinball forever. No, I'm not going to make pinball forever. No way. I'm actually going to take a break after this game is all done so that I can just kind of focus on some hobbies and writing some music and stuff and, you know, hanging out with friends and family for a while. because it really takes a lot of audio to have to build a pinball machine, and it really, really takes a lot of audio if you're doing it part-time, which is very, very difficult. I can't stress that enough. I want to eventually also do a homebrew one day again, which I think could be really interesting.
    33:38
    But, yeah, I don't know. I've got to take a break after this one for a bit. I don't blame you at all, man, especially doing it part-time, I can't imagine. And, you know, working with the Multimorbic team, you guys are all like distributed all over the place So you got to imagine that brings a little bit more of a challenge Although a lot of the companies I think the smaller companies kind of operate that way right Like Spooky was probably like that in some ways too
    34:03
    Yeah, Spooky has some remote people, but not too many. They like to try to keep everything in-house as much as they can.
    34:13
    Yeah, no worries. Steven wants to know if he can leave his edit cave now. I don't know. It depends what he's working on.
    34:22
    Yeah, well, we talked about the egg off kicker a little bit earlier, but is there anything else physical on the play field that we haven't talked about that would be pretty cool? Absolutely. So there's the inner loop shots that are on this game actually cross over each other. I thought this was a really cool thing when I drew this.
    34:44
    So the inner loop shot that's on the left side that is to the right side is the spinner shot, right? That one loops around and comes out the right orbit. And then the shot that is in the right inner loop position, that will loop around and come out the left. And actually, if you look at the geometry of the thing, they cross over each other, which is super cool. I mean, if you shot two balls in there at the same time, the balls would actually hit each other and probably come out the opposite way. Oh, that's crazy. Yeah. Yeah, but the actual ship mech itself has two shots. I mentioned there's two shots that are blocked by that. There's a ramp that goes up and through the ship and then comes out the right wing of the ship and back to your right flipper. And then there's also a scoop shot that grabs the ball and locks it and launches like a vertical up, kicks it into the locking mechanism in front of the ship so you can stack three balls in there and have that rapid-fire mechanism fire those out.
    35:48
    But, yeah, other than that, it's super standard with, you know, spinners and drop targets and posts and magnets, you know, and I put a very standard left ramp on it just to make it, like, kind of System 11-y. If you look at the game and look at the layout, you'll see little inspirations of System 11 stuff spread throughout it, which is kind of fun, like the alphanumerics and stuff like that.
    36:14
    They do everything from, you know, they blink like the old Bally, you know, whoever's up, just like TNA does, where it blinks the current player score type of stuff. Nice.
    36:25
    Yeah. A lot of fun. Awesome. Yeah, it's great. I mean, yeah, I think that's basically most of it, but all of it together as a package is super fun.
    36:38
    Yeah, it looks incredible. and like I said, it looks like you've got a great team put together there from art to sound and design and mechanics and all that fun stuff. So I can't wait to get my hands on this game next week. The programmer, I don't know if you guys know this, but the programmer on this game is the guy that invented Skeleton Game, which is the programming framework that TNA and Rick and Morty run on.
    37:03
    So this is the guy that actually made that thing, And he's like an amazing person. He's got, he's like a professor at a college and stuff. I don't know. He's a super great dude. Give his name. I don't think we've said his name. Michael Ocean. Oh, okay. Michael. All right. Yes. Yeah. So he, he's been working so hard on this thing, doing just insane things with the software. And he's been so patient with me going like, hey, we got to fix light shows and do it this way. He's actually really good at writing light shows that emulate the style of light show that I used in my previous work.
    37:43
    So that's really cool. So I'm like, oh, hey. You're kind of bringing that light show style to the LCD screen and the inserts all at the same time. Yeah, did you see that? Yeah, it's probably not super apparent in the video because the video is kind of all over the place. but if you just had like a top-down view of just watching someone play, there's like the light shows in this game are doing exactly what like, you know, Rick and Morty and TNA did with the lights going like through the playfield and everything. And it goes through the LCD and through the physical playfield like butter. Like it's just all one thing, you know? Yeah. I can't wait. Yeah. It's super, super cool.
    38:23
    Yeah. And he, oh yeah. So, yeah, Michael's also worked on Weird Al as well. And just, you know, he does a lot of cool stuff in the background. I've got to get him out and have him and I, like, talk back and forth on a podcast sometime because he's a really interesting and very, very smart guy.
    38:43
    Yeah. And also the guy who did Sorcerer's Apprentice, all the video, like, little video animations and stuff on Sorcerer's Apprentice did the LCD work for Final Resistance as well. There's some really cool, like, really neat particle effects going on and stuff. It's super neat. Yeah. When the screen first came up, I was like, oh, this looks a little Sorcerer's Apprentice-ish. So it's like the art style and the animation. Like, Johnny's art style kind of reminded me of that, and then the animation, too.
    39:16
    Yeah, it's really neat. I'm excited to see, also, this is going to sound stupid, but I'm excited to see what the homebrew community does with this module. I want to see someone build another completely different game on this module and see what happens, you know? That sounds like a challenge for Bingo Podcast to me. Totally. I think he's even in there. Yeah, there he is. He's in there.
    39:41
    So, yeah, I'm very excited about that. I'm surprised more homebrew people don't do this. I mean, if I was building a homebrew machine and I just didn't want to build everything crazy, like I would just take Cannon Lagoon or something, teach myself the framework, right, build something in Cannon Lagoon and then move on to something more difficult.
    40:03
    It's super neat. It's a really great platform for homebrewers because the module drivers are open source.
    40:10
    Yeah, that's totally right. You can see Nick Baldridge, that's kind of the path he took. He started out making mini games and making them slightly more complex and things like that. Now he's building his own modules with Drain. So it's definitely, it looks like, you know, I'm not nearly skilled enough to do any of this. But from, you know, seeing Nick, you know, rise up through the ranks of pinball designer, you know, the P3 seems like a great place to make it happen. Oh, that's very, very cool. Also, that Drain module is really fun. That's actually still in my game right now. I've been swapping back and forth between Weird Al and Drained recently. Nice.
    40:49
    Yeah, Drained is really fun. It's really addictive for some reason. He's nailed that whole, like, addictive thing.
    40:59
    Oh, yeah. You talk about the ass-kicker games that keep you coming back. That's definitely one of them. Yeah, Nick's more brutal than I am, though, man. I'll tell you, Nick is, like, he's mean. Like, no ball savers on stuff. like Ranger in the Ruins, like one ball, no ball saver, deal with it. Yep. Till the end of your game, even if you got 10 balls, you watch them all die. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then he's like, you know what, I got a great idea. Nick's like, I'm going to put a gobble hole right in the middle of my module that kills you every time. And guess what? You have to hit that to progress in the game. Yeah.
    41:36
    Nick, you're awesome. I love you. Yeah, that's what I love so much about the P3 is that you can have all these crazy different designs. And, you know, I might not necessarily want a play field that's just a single level like that in a traditional game. But if it's just taking up space underneath my P3, I was like, oh, I can throw in a classic game whenever I want. It's great. Yeah, it's awesome. What's really fun is at parties when you, like, pop that open real quick and slam a new module in it real fast. And people are like, what the heck? you know like or if you like if you break something right like so i've had a i had a um we were at this is a great story this is we were um doing that pinball life open house thing and we had the p3 there and someone had launched a ball playing um ccr and they they launched a ball at one of the plastic rings and the plastic ring broke off and it just got in the way and it was like trapping balls and stuff so i was like oh crap so i went over there and i'm like well i can't fix this because i can't there's wires and leds in it and stuff i'm like well i can't fix this so i just looked at the machine i went all right so i just pulled the module out put lexi light speed in it was seriously like a minute and a half game back up and running full percent like 100 good to go yeah people never believe me when it's yeah people never believe you when you're like they're like how long does it take to switch a game you're like uh 30 seconds like no it's over and then you do it and they're like that's it yeah that's it that was a good like it's really not a big deal to swap a game out of it i mean think about like think about this for a second think about your nintendo right when we were kids right so to swap a game out of the nintendo you would turn the game off you pop it open you pull the game out you're like great you got to find the box for it where's the box crap okay yeah there it is all right slide it in there take the new game out stick the new game in the nintendo doesn't work you got to pull it out you got to blow in it, stick the game back in there again. Maybe it works a little bit, but it's not quite working. Got to pull it out again. You know, like, by that time, like, if I would erase my 13-year-old self against, you know, putting a new module in the P3 and having him try to get, you know, Tetris working in the Nintendo, it'd probably be like a draw.
    43:51
    100%. It'd be blinking, flashing the screen at you, a little light coming on and off. Yeah. You know, and I'm swearing, and then my older self is yelling at my younger self to stop swearing so much. And then, you know. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, that's what you do when you're a kid. You've got to swear at these things because that's what makes it work. It does make it work, yeah. You're, like, hitting it to try and make sure it's going to – you ever, like, gotten it to work and you're like, well, I want to make – like, just in case I have a good game, you kind of tap on it a little bit just to make sure it's not going to just start blinking in the middle while you're playing?
    44:23
    I never did that, but I would do the trick where you, like, pull it out a tiny little bit. like oh maybe yeah you push it in and then just pull it out a little bit yep yep and then when you get to we have to be older and they're like no you're supposed to actually like clean this with isopropyl alcohol and you're like well i've been spitting on it all these years i guess that makes sense so the spit works fine fine conductive sort of exactly all right scott well i appreciate you taking the time on the on launch day and making this happen i'll let you get back to doing what you got to do. I'm sure everybody in chat appreciates you having on the stream. And, dude, in less than two weeks, I'll be hanging out with you and we'll be playing this thing. Absolutely. I'm really excited for it. Thank you, everybody, for all the great questions as well. And thanks for having me on, man. I appreciate it. All right. Enjoy the rest of your night. Yeah, you too. Thanks, Kevin. See you guys. Take care. All right, bye. See you, mate.