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Home Brew Developers Panel - 2025

Pintastic New England·video·1h 4m·analyzed·Dec 2, 2025
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.037

TL;DR

Homebrew pinball panel showcases five developers discussing build processes, inspiration, and design philosophy.

Summary

Homebrew pinball developer panel at Pintastic New England 2025 featuring five custom machine creators (Brad Ledutko, Brian Dowdy, Mike Testa, Aaron Richard) discussing their design and build processes. Panel covers who/what/when/where/why/how of homebrew development, including inspiration sources (Mark Seiden's Metroid, Ryan McQuaid's Sonic), build locations (basements, garages, maker spaces), sourcing parts (Marco Specialties, eBay, salvage), and design philosophy balancing IP integration with mechanical innovation. Key themes include the non-rewarding nature of homebrew work, importance of deadlines for completion, and iterative design refinement.

Key Claims

  • Mark Seiden's Metroid and Ryan McQuaid's Sonic the Hedgehog homebrew machines inspired multiple panel participants to build their own games

    high confidence · Multiple developers cite seeing these machines at Pintastic as the direct catalyst for their homebrew projects

  • Homebrew development typically requires 2,500+ hours of work from concept to playable state

    medium confidence · Mike Testa mentions '2 to 2,500 hours on the game at this point in time' including help from collaborators

  • Deadlines are critical for completing homebrew machines; machines without external deadlines often remain unfinished

    high confidence · Panel moderator explicitly states 'Set a deadline on it... because if you don't, you're going to be like me and it's just never going to be done' and notes calling out developers with deadline demands worked

  • Borderlands 2 homebrew playfield design was mechanically conceived first, then themed after sourcing game assets from fan-created YouTube compilations and stripped audio files

    high confidence · Developer explains designing mechanism prototypes (helix, ramp, ball lock) first, then sourcing Borderlands assets to overlay thematic storytelling

  • Borderlands 2 homebrew machine features self-leveling playfield using three linear actuators, described as 'probably the first self-leveling, self-pitching playfield in a pinball machine'

    high confidence · Aaron Richard discusses novel actuator system allowing playfield pitch adjustment without glass removal

Notable Quotes

  • “Rule zero is don't make me make more rules, or I'll name them after you.”

    Panel Moderator@ 0:23 — Sets tone for panel governance; references Fight Club quote about rules

  • “It's a non-rewarding job, that's why I don't do it. So we're here to admire them.”

    Panel Moderator@ 0:36 — Frames homebrew development as thankless labor, establishes respect for participants

  • “I played them at Pintastic, my first year I came. And I had never seen a machine like that... You mean you made it? I made this in my house... You're allowed to do that? Yeah, you're allowed to do that.”

    Brad Ledutko@ 4:30 — Captures the moment of realization that homebrew pinball is possible; shows discovery pathway for new developers

  • “Set a deadline on it... because if you don't, you're going to be like me and it's just never going to get done.”

    Panel Moderator@ 21:55 — Key advice to aspiring builders; identifies deadlines as critical success factor

  • “I'm a big fan of physics and interacting with real toys. So there's a captive ball helix and there's a gravity ramp and a cycling ball lock.”

    Aaron Richard (Borderlands 2)@ 24:58 — Illustrates mechanics-first design approach used in complex homebrew games

  • “Done is when you can go all the way, with the code, you can go all the way to the Wizard mode and start back at the beginning... that's done. That's truly done for me.”

    Aaron Richard@ 30:16 — Defines completion criteria for homebrew as full code progression, exceeding commercial game standards

Entities

Brad LedutkopersonBrian DowdypersonMike TestapersonAaron RichardpersonMark SeidenpersonRyan McQuaidpersonJohn Manuel Linperson

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: Homebrew panel format at Pintastic demonstrates structured community support for custom machine developers; moderator actively encourages aspiring builders to bring incomplete machines next year, signaling commitment to nurturing pipeline

    high · Panel moderator states: 'So next year, I want you to bring a flipping machine... bring me flipping machines and come join our custom game room'

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Strong positive reception to homebrew machines at Pintastic; audience includes both participants and observers indicating healthy spectator interest in custom machines

    medium · Panel shows 'more than half' of audience has attended homebrew seminar previously; machines displayed as show attractions with public play access

  • ?

    community_signal: Maker space infrastructure (Lynn's warehouse, Glenside Machine Shop) emerging as critical enabler for homebrew development; shared resources reduce barrier to entry

    medium · Multiple developers cite using shared workspace; moderator notes Lynn hosts seminar and brings six machines, indicating significant community role

  • ?

    community_signal: Mentorship model demonstrates how accomplished homebrew developers (Mark Seiden, Ryan McQuaid) inspire next generation through visibility at shows like Pintastic

    high · Multiple developers cite seeing Metroid and Sonic at Pintastic as direct inspiration; moderator acknowledges calling out developers with deadlines as successful motivation tactic

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Emerging homebrew design trend: mechanics-first approach followed by thematic overlay, contrasting with traditional IP-driven design; developers prototype mechanisms before selecting IP

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.194

0:00
Here we are. So, show of hands, let's do some audience participation. Who's been to the homebrew seminar before? Oh, good, more than half of you. So, who in the room can tell me what rule zero is? Nobody? You don't talk about Fight Club. Rule zero is don't make me make more rules, or I'll name them after you. So the purpose of this panel is to showcase these wonderful individuals who did something really hard, which is spend a lot of money building themselves a pinball machine, that will never be done and never be perfect. It's a non-rewarding job, that's why I don't do it. So we're here to admire them, and we're going to take some Q&A stuff, but the purpose of this is to get the who, what, when, where, and how and why of doing whole group pinball. And so that's what we're going to talk about. If you want to go on a tangent and talk about something else, I invite you to talk to a friend Dave here. He'll set you up with your own system.
1:01
So just wait until 3.30. Let's see how it works. You want to talk about the third code for 40 minutes? Exactly. So that's not a mythical agenda here that you want to drive forward. You go do that somewhere else. That's not what we're here for. So now with that out of the way, this is what we're going to do. We're going to share the development process. We're going to share the failures. I mean the successes and the failures. And how we got here. Everyone who brought a custom pin to this event is invited to be at this pin. Whether they choose to come up here and humiliate themselves with me or not is entirely up to them. But who in here is thinking of making their own machine? You don't count. So next year, I want you to bring a flipping machine. It does not even have to be close to finished. Bring me flipping machines and come talk about them and come join our custom game room. And that includes re-themes. It is not custom from scratch. We are not discriminating against that. All of it is hard. So if everybody here consensually agrees to rule, I don't need to use the saw gun on anyone. All right. So let's see if I don't break this. It's okay, I'll just reprint another one. All right, so we are going to start with a quick round of introductions. If we were more prepared and I had less things to do, there'd be slides with pictures, but none of us got to finish that in the last 24 hours. So here we are. We got some live props to show, and we're gonna start with the introductions. So I want everyone to introduce themselves

  • “It fits in the back of my Ford Flex if I take the head off... My dream is to sell the house and travel around the world in a giant million-dollar motorhome bus with slide-outs underneath for my pinball machine.”

    Developer (specific name not attributed clearly)@ 13:12 — Humorous illustration of obsessive dedication to homebrew machines

  • “You should never, ever put them [tools] away because the second you put it away, you're going to need it again.”

    Developer discussing basement setup@ 12:11 — Practical advice on homebrew workspace management and time investment

    • John Craig
    person
    Marco Specialtiescompany
    Pinball Lifecompany
    Glenside Machine Shopcompany
    Delaware Pinball Collectiveorganization
    Southern New Hampshire Pinball Cluborganization
    Hometown Arcadecompany
    Pintastic New Englandevent
    The Adventures of Sinbadgame
    Skate or Diegame
    The King of the Arcadegame
    Borderlands 2game
    Warhammer 40,000game
    Pinball Expoevent
    Arcade Room (EMP)venue
    Lynn's Garage/Warehousevenue

    high · Aaron Richard describes designing captive ball helix, gravity ramp, cycling ball lock mechanics first, then selecting Borderlands as thematic fit after sourcing assets

  • ?

    product_strategy: Novel self-leveling playfield technology demonstrated on Borderlands 2 homebrew using linear actuators; described as first of its kind implementation in pinball

    high · Aaron Richard: 'probably the first self-leveling, self-pitching playfield in a pinball machine has ever been made' with stated capability for self-leveling code feature

  • ?

    business_signal: Pintastic event structure deliberately drives homebrew completion through deadline pressure and public showcase; moderator explicitly uses social/community accountability as development tool

    high · Moderator: 'Set a deadline on it... because if you don't, you're going to be like me and it's just never going to get done' and admits calling developers with demands

  • ?

    technology_signal: CAD and laser-cutting adoption in homebrew scene enabling iterative playfield design; evolution from hand-cut cardboard/plywood prototypes to precision digital manufacturing

    medium · Brad Ledutko describes progression from 'quarter sheet of plywood and hot glue gun' to 'laser cut pieces of acrylic' to CAD-based design

    • 2:40
    and which machine you brought. You can start. Sure. Brad Ledutko, I brought The Adventures of Sinbad and Skate or Die.
    2:51
    Brian Dowdy, I brought Borderlands 2 pinball. Mike Testa, King of the Arcade pinball. Aaron Richard, Warhammer 40,000. All right, go to the next slide, please. All right, so here are the who, what, when, where, why, and how questions that we're going to use this year. As far as the front of your face. So far away. Oh, Jesus. Do you need my glasses? Yeah.
    3:30
    And so, I don't know if we should let the audience pick or let you as individuals pick. What do you want? How do you guys? I want to know what they want to know. I think I'm going to get the clam strip played.
    3:45
    Why? Let me go back and check the question in the Y. We can ask everybody the questions we'd like. Or I can pick. Why? So let's go with the Y question. Why'd you decide to build this machine instead of buying something brand new? Why did you pick this specific theme, which is good for a couple of you? And what do you think in pinball still captures your excitement? Who wants to go? I'll start. Pick your why. Okay. The why is the two people that inspired me to do this are sitting in this room right now. Okay, who are they? That's Mark Seaton and Ryan McQuade. So Ryan made Sonic and Mark made Metroid. And I played them at Pintastic, my first year I came. And I had never seen a machine like that, so of course I got interested in asking questions like, what is this? And they're like, oh, I made it. I'm like, okay, what do you mean you made it? And they're like, I made this in my house. built this thing. And it seemed really hard. You're allowed to do that? Yeah, you're allowed to do that. What? And it seemed like a fun thing to do. It's a lot of a challenge. It's a ton of challenge. And I like challenge. And I like mechanical things. I like programming. I like pinball. And lo and behold, now there's a machine sitting here. It's basically the whole thing in a nutshell. That's where it comes from. Sounds like a good way to meet. In the corporate world, you know, you're supposed to... My why was exactly the same. It's about Mark. This is all about Mark. Mark, this is your fault. It's all your fault. Why is Mark not hosting this panel? I don't know. And Mark was about you back there.
    5:22
    All right. That's the why. For me, I started hanging out with Lin. We all know him as Lin, John Manuel Lin. About a decade ago, I had seen Haunted Cruise and a couple other things in his mad garage, mad scientist garage. And then helped him out on a video game that he put on Steam. And after that, we sat down. He was like, Mike, you help me out. Let's make a game together. And I'm like, okay. And he's like, I want you to design it. And I'm like, all right. And then he's like, you can have one off. And I'm like, I don't want that. Like, I want to make something that can be produced. So that's really what, a little bit more than just making one thing and just being like, oh, I'm proud of this. I want to do this. Like, this is a cool industry. So, you know, why not? Get a chance. Take it.
    6:20
    Sound like a good one. All right. I don't have favorite children, everybody, but sorry, Aaron. Borderlands 2 is my favorite game.
    6:31
    So I've been coming to Pintastic for many years now. and every time I come, I play the games like, oh man, wouldn't it be cool if it could just do this? Or wouldn't it be cool if it could do that? And so the idea is just sort of built and built and built. You know, seeing Metroid, seeing Sonic come together is like, wow, like you can, like a human being is capable of doing this. Like maybe we could do it. And so the sort of culminating idea was this idea for a video game that had increasing difficulty levels. And so I wanted a play field that could get steeper or shallower. and starting to think that through. It's like, well, for one actuator, I can do one, but if I have three actuators, I can do more stuff for three times as much cost and complexity. And that weekend that I was at Pentastic, I'm a dork, so I had three actuators in my house already, and we bolted them to a piece of plywood, we stuck a piece of cardboard on top, I got an RC plane controller, and in like two hours, we had a thing moving. We put a ball on top, and I was like, is it fun? It's fun. And from there started the journey, three years. It was here last year. It wasn't tilting the first two days because we had a game glitch code. It was looking for Wi-Fi, and it didn't have Wi-Fi, and we didn't know there was a bug in the Arduino. So it's a little smoother this year. There's a new mech that's supposed to be working perfectly, and as is Murphy's Law and as is Pinball, it will never work perfectly, especially when you think it will. So after this show, we'll go and figure out how to get that working so it works the rest of the show. Just like last year, we got it fixed and got it working for the rest of the show. And the side benefit of these linear actuators, this is what fascinates me, is you don't have to take the glass off to get a stuck ball out anymore. Right. The play field moves, and it's kind of like almost on springs when you wiggle it when it's sitting there. And also, as far as I know, probably the first self-leveling, self-pitching play field in a pinball machine has ever been made. Sure. If one were to write that code for you. Well, it has the capability. It could. It's a feature that you need to charge for and want. It's got potential, ladies and gentlemen. It's on the back of our... Yeah. You'll get to it. Anyone want to take a Jira ticket? You shouldn't do that.
    8:48
    How many points is that Jira ticket? Yeah. All right. Why? You've got two pins with us this year. Yes, I do. Why? Well, I guess to back up, I've had electronics as a hobby since a real young age, like 10 years old. My uncle was an electronics tech in the Navy. And, yeah, I decided at an early age I wanted to know how to build video game hardware. That was what was the most interesting thing. So I kind of went in that direction of digital logic and all that. I realized, hey, I know how these pinball machines work. All I have to do is fire a coil or read a switch or turn a light on, and there you go. But I also realized it's a lot cheaper to build electronics than to buy something. When I was a kid, I had no money, so, you know, build it all myself. You can find some junk VCRs, take them apart, use them apart, make something new, make guitar pedals and things like that. So I found out that you can buy junk playfields for very, very cheap compared to the actual game. A lot of games that, hey, that's great, but I wouldn't really want taking up space in my house forever. But, oh, if I can swap four playfields in, sure. So that's kind of how I got there. I think there was a show, I went to the York there was a game that was a Bally Knight Rider cabinet with a Stern Nugent play field and a blackjack back glass. And I looked at that and I said, oh, these parts are all interchangeable. So I just went wild from there. Excellent. Excellent. All right. Did we get the why from everybody? Does anybody have any follow-up why questions?
    10:33
    You can't ask anything. No? You guys covered your whys. Checkmark. I should have printed bingo cards. We have stickers. Gold stars. Yep. Gold stars. All right. So where do we want to go from here? Why not where? Let's go to where. And the examples of where questions. They just took off my screen while I was trying to read my screen.
    10:52
    Where did you build it? Did you do it at home? Did you do it at a makerspace? Someone please say they did it at a makerspace. Actually, well, I already know that. We can pretend.
    11:01
    You know, did you buy local? Did you buy online? Did you salvage parts, as you were just saying? And, you know, where can people see this other than here? Do you guys have any social media presence? Do you stick it on location anywhere? Go to any other shows. So those are our where examples. You can feel free to expand it. No, you're going last. We're going to make him go first. All right. The where, I built it in my garage. Now, did you already have a workshop in your garage? Well, yeah, I kind of put a corner in there when I put it together. So I started it at my apartment, and I moved it in my garage I don't even own a house. My games are on location sometimes. They are either at the Glenside Machine Shop in Center City, Glenside, PA, or at the Delaware Pinball Collective. Excellent. All right. Hold on one. Where? So my game was built in my basement. If you get into pinball, you'll find that it just consumes all flat surfaces, all space you have, you should buy every tool you can think of or borrow them. You should never, ever put them away because the second you put it away, you're going to need it again. So I have like four desks in my basement that are all covered in pinball things. And the ceremony is at the end of a show, I then get to clean my basement and my wife is really happy until the next show. Mine has not been on location yet, so you can come visit it in my basement, or it went to Chicago Expo last year. It's planning to go again this year. And at some point in time, I'll get it to be reliable enough and happy enough that I'd love to stick it somewhere for a little while, maybe down at EMP or one of these other little places. People can go and get their hands on it.
    12:53
    I'll just build it into the back of a car and just pull up at Target and let people play. I will love. I'll tell you about my retirement idea later. Okay. I mean, it fits in the back of my Ford Flex if I take the head off. So we're just like, you know, roving pinball. My dream is to sell the house and travel around the world in a giant million-dollar motorhome bus with slide-outs underneath for my pinball machine. And then I'd never have to level them again because I just level the rig. We'll work on the IP for the...
    13:27
    That's good. Where? Well, I think we can kind of piggyback from what I said before. Lynn's garage. Garage. Lynn's warehouse, which is essentially a pinballer maker's space. Well, no, no. Oh, this was actually after the garage. I started his garage with paper, plastic, wood, parts lying around. I found some at the – actually, I found a good amount of parts at this – one of the early flea markets for Pentastic, one of the first Pentastics. just in and around, ripping them off other play fields where not really working and whatnot, kind of similar to finding stuff that's junk. In fact, if you see my game, it's got an EM score reel that's made it look like you're getting tickets, right?
    14:19
    And I ripped that off. I bought a fucking junked back of an EM with a bunch of score reels on it, and then there you go. be resourceful, you know. Where else? I mean, now it's being worked on at Lynn's warehouse, just some sort of a maker space. It's a pinball maker space. Now, Lynn has got his own seminar. Lynn, you brought six machines? Five? Six? Six. Oh, yes, because of circus. And they are doing a seminar that starts immediately after this one. I would say it's 3.30, but, you know, we'll see what schedule looks like. And where can you find King of the Arcade? Well, it travels around a little bit. A lot of times I'll be working at it with Lynn, helping him out. You can find it disassembled in my shop usually.
    15:07
    Sometimes. No, but then I've had it over at the Southern New Hampshire Pinball Club in Nashville, New Hampshire, which you definitely can check that out at some point. I'll definitely have that back there.
    15:19
    Then, yeah, you can come over to my place when I'm testing it. There you go. It's pretty much where.
    15:25
    All right. So because this is a Warhammer machine, this machine was built in a dark, dingy basement, just like Warhammer, if you're familiar with it. So two locations, the basement of my house and also a bit at Lynn's place as well, because Lynn helps everyone. He's a fantastic soul. That's the source we have. Can I see the where? Where did you get your parts? Yeah, can you push my slide up the full screen? Where did you get parts at? Yeah, can you push my slide up the full screen please? So those two locations, I source components both from Marco Pinball and Pinball Life. Those are like my main two sources Sometimes the internet sometimes eBay has deals You can find stuff weird stuff like kicking targets and unique assemblies that you can normally find anywhere else So do scour the net There tons of different salespeople out there You just gotta dig for it Keep it where, C. Okay.
    16:20
    And then where you can play this. If you want to play this, this is eventually going to be in Hometown Arcade in Norwood, Massachusetts.
    16:30
    I'll have this machine for play. We're going to sneak it somewhere in the lineup. They've got like 16 games, so they're pretty much jammed in there. But we'll work it out. So that's it. Excellent. So my next question, following up on this, is coin doors. Okay. Did all of you put coin doors in your machines?
    16:49
    Yes. Why? It was there when I bought the cabinet. That's the number one answer. It's because you buy a cabinet that already has it in there. Yeah. But if you're never going to put the machine on location, why do you need the coin door? So you can get it. Well, you could put something else there. It's so satisfying to open and fiddle with. Or is it the nostalgia of wanting Coinmex on it?
    17:07
    Mine doesn't have Coinmex because the playfield will smash them. So I have a door, and I have a slot, and there are no Coinmex, so they just fall on the bottom now. Right, because you don't need the Coinmex because you're never going to put it on location. But it's such a nice door. So it's one of these things where I've seen people spend hundreds of dollars on CoinDoors with CoinMex for a homebrew machine. I can also, there's one more reason mine has one. My controller has magnets in it, and I can stick it to the coin door when I'm servicing the game. So that's why it'll stay there forever. That's a good point.
    17:35
    Okay. Where were we? Where? Did everybody get a good where? Can we answer the where question? Can I answer one more part of the where?
    17:42
    Eventually, I don't know. Yes. Yes? Can I? What? Stick it to the EMP. Where? Okay, yeah, EMP. They're going to have a home room eventually, and that will be there, too. Huh?
    17:57
    A home room? Did I say a home room? It's just a closet. You can find it. All right, so when? This is the when did you start question. But also, when do you feel this thing's ever going to be truly finished? And when did you first get into pinball and tinkering with these damn things and to actually want to do this besides getting inspired? Now, who wants to go first? Someone in the middle this time.
    18:26
    I'll go. Put it back up for one more second. I've got to read them again. So when I got into pinball when I was in high school... You don't have to answer all the questions. You can just pick one. I had a flash that I had in high school. I didn't have pinball for a long time. And then maybe 15 years ago or something, my wife found a game on the side of the road that someone was getting rid of and convinced them to help her get it in the car, brought it home. home and I was told it didn't work and I was an old, what's the ski game, the home version ski game, I forget who it's by. Anyway, all I needed to have was a reset button done and so we had our first game back in the house and then it's kind of gone from there. When for timing, I'm somewhere in like the 2 to 2,500 hours on the game at this point in time. I'd say if you want to get into it and you've got people that are excited to help you, then by all means take their help. A lot of the game I did myself. Aaron here helped, John helped, I've got some people doing coding for me. My motion control system was done by my buddy Craig, but the mechanics, the art, the graphics, like all that stuff, it sort of all adds up. It's fun, it's challenging, but to kind of see it come together is exciting. It's exciting to bring it to the shows. And as far as being done, I wanted, the next big thing to do is to do playfield art and then get a new playfield cut and do and then swap everything to the new playfield that will hopefully signify that i'm like done with it uh but it's a big step and it's going to cost a decent amount of money so i wanted to get uh get it to a few shows get people playing it see the challenges figure out how i want to improve the game uh add new mechs i don't mind taking a whole saw to this playfield uh like i did four weeks ago and then putting a feature in, but once I get it printed and clear-coated, I'm pretty sure I won't want to do that again. So that will mark my kind of done moment. Out of white wood to the final print. We're doing the wanking for the... Yeah. Do you need to see the slide? Yeah. Okay, so Synbad was originally a Cleopatra that I had restored. It had a melted transformer, so I converted it all the switching power supplies and only three voltages, all that kind of stuff. Then, so I spent about two months doing that in 2022.
    20:59
    2023, sometime in the winter, I came across a Sinbad with a really rusty cabinet for like 200 bucks. So I just took the playfield out and dropped it in there, put the stuff in the back of it, reprogrammed it. and I think I spent about two or three months doing that. And then Skate or Die, I spent about two months, off and on two months, putting the play field back together because it was pretty much not populated.
    21:31
    But the rest of it, I put it together over a month. I got it flipping the Tuesday before last Pentastic.
    21:41
    So I've just been working on mainly code for the past year on that. Deadlines. Deadlines often make it happen. And this is what I'm going to say to you people that I said bring me a flippin' pin. Set a deadline on it. You know, like, you're going to bring it here next year and do this. Because if you don't, you're going to be like me and it's just never going to get done. That's what I did two years ago. Yeah. Well, and for a couple of you, I've called you out and go, no, you're bringing me a pin next year. Is that how I got here? That's actually how you got here. I'm sorry. I've apologized to your wife a dozen times here, which is lovely. Aaron, you were already on the fence. You needed a deadline. So deadlines are kind of important to drive the win. I needed a kick in the ass is what I needed. You need to be reminded how hard this is. Yes. And it's okay to fail because you're going to because that's pinball. You always drain. All right. Emily, you got a question? Go ahead. Just more for the game, like the IP, when you're designing, how much does the IP take for your design process versus I just want this shot, I like this, or I like this, and screw the IP to that point? What do you consider higher? That's a great question. Can I answer that? Because you actually specifically don't have a defined IP. These two guys have a defined IP. But in your case, yes, you should take those questions. I'm interested to hear what you have to say about this. So a lot of times people will just start drilling into a play field and hope that something comes from it. And it usually does. It's like, oh, you know, this looks good for Goonies or this and that. You never know what it could be. For me, I've always been into making your own thing, right? So I had the idea of King of the Arcade like a table that's in an arcade and you're playing in an arcade, like within the whole thing, very meta. I was very hip at that time playing around with that. But then those type of things, for me, when I had that little peak of inspiration, I'm like, well, I'm really a huge fan of theme integration. So if I'm in an arcade, then why am I shooting this? Why am I going to here? Oh, this is fun. I want to make the game fun, but I still have some sort of like, I want it to make sense too. There's, you know, we see games out there where it's just kind of like, okay, maybe a design, like a theme was just kind of plopped on.
    24:17
    There's a mixture of both, I would say. I don't think everybody has that definitive saying like, yep, I want to have everything all together, put artwork into it, make sure it's 100% theme integration. Some people don't work that way. That's how I work.
    24:35
    So for you guys who followed a very – I worked in video games for a while. And when you're dealing with a brand asset, you really focus on that. Now you two, Borderlands 2, you had all sorts of beautiful assets and things to choose from. For me, part of the thing with all these building ideas in my head over the years was these cute little mechanisms. I'm a big fan of physics and interacting with real toys. So there's a captive ball helix and there's a gravity ramp and there's a cycling ball lock. And so all these little mechanisms were ideas. It was like, let me build these little versions and make sure they work. and then how do I fit them in the game and then Borderlands was chosen as a theme. I wanted a video game it was going to be Final Fantasy 7 Borderlands or Bioshock was the other one. That would be cool.
    25:30
    Next game. Borderlands was chosen because in sleuthing the internet I found someone who had done a YouTube video with every single scene in the game in one shot in high depth. And I was able to download it, and then I found another person that stripped every audio asset, put it in a zip file that was in a folder structure by character and level. And I was like, wow, that's it. We're doing Borderlands. So it was a lot of mechanism design first, laying out the play field, and then going through the story mode and trying to get the assets and the theme to sort of lay over top in making the most sense. So, like, you find Tiny Tina in the game. You're running around for her to get stuff, so you do the orbits. And then she gives you two bombs to bring to the train track, so you do the two ramp shots.
    26:20
    You have to take the things back to her garage, so you shoot the scoops. So in mine it works in some cases. In others it's just, like, you hit the thing, the stuff happens because it kind of works, it kind of doesn't. Yeah, and in your integration, if you were here last year, you can also see the video on the YouTube channel from last year. We had one of the ball lock mechanism that you 3D printed and all of that. And you don't get to see the detail from a foot away, even under glass, where it's on the playbook, unless you really look at it. If you're curious, come find me. We'll take the glass off. There's a person who's a Borderlands super nut for a while there. I look at that and I go, oh, exactly. I know exactly where that is in the game. I know where you got the inspiration from that. So the theme integration there is just wonderful. And same with yours.
    27:03
    I'm not a miniature model painter. I don't know if anybody else in here is. So I never got into actually playing Warhammer and those things. But your integration is true to life as well. Yeah, and you don't have to really play the game. Like, I'm a painter, but I don't play tabletop. I paint and I read. I like the story.
    27:21
    And so that's kind of where the whole thing came from. So I was like, oh, I could really go, like, ham on this whole thing and just pull whatever I want and shove it into the game. And it'll work. See, like, I went with designing stuff first. before I kind of started applying actual integration or IP to my shots and my layout. Great question. Especially to the people that are up here today. Really applicable on the whole place. Did everybody get to answer their when? No, you did not. We skipped you. We got an answer from you. You started yours eight years ago. Your? Yeah, I did. Aaron, when did you start? I'd say officially I started two years ago. 2022, 2020. Yeah, I brought it to, this is like my third Pintastic, but my first show, it just flipped. It flipped! It just flipped. It flipped! He made the deadline and it flipped! Yes! Achievement unlocked, my friend! Yes. You've got a flipping pin! And I built my own cabinet, which is incredibly hard to do, but it's far easier to just buy one.
    28:24
    So that's why I have this. But like, my, I guess you could say my when of when I got bit by the pinball bug? Yeah. I was seven. And I think I was seven. My mom bought me this little tiny plastic Jurassic Park Lost World pinball machine that was spring-powered. And you click it, and it had four or five pop bumpers in it and a couple rollover lanes. I loved that toy. I played it until it broke. And then she bought me another one to replace it. Because I loved that thing. And pinball has always been kind of part of my life. and I remember we went down to the Poconos for a break and we went to an actual arcade and I had never seen a legitimate pinball machine before and there was a South Park pinball machine and I knew about South Park because mom did not like South Park but I was with my dad and we got in front of that game and I lost my mind. It was a pinball machine that blipped and made bark noises and it was awesome. And ever since then, I have loved pinball, truly to my soul. So that's where I started. There we go. So my when was two years ago, and it's been a hell of a progress. If you guys were here last year, this game was different. This layout was not the same. So I ripped my entire layout and I redid it to what it is today. I took everything I didn't like in the game and redesigned, and now I actually like it. Okay, so last when question that I've always wanted to get out of everybody is, when is it finished, right? When is yours going to be finished? When are you going to start superglueing self-painted miniatures on this thing and stop worrying about geometry and other stuff? When is that point going to happen? And when is done? When is done? Done is when you can go all the way, with the code, you can go all the way to the wizard mode and start back at the beginning. You've done a wizard mode. Once that is fully progressible where you can go through each mode, do the entire thing, see all the features of the game, and get back to the start, that's done. That's truly done for me. Okay, so you have higher standards than the pinball manufacturers in the world.
    30:43
    Sorry, I had to. Bing, bing. Just fired. Okay, so we've done who, what, when, where, why, how. You have a question. Can we get you to a microphone? all the way back there and I'm never going to hear you on the... Well, we need it for the stream and for the recording as well, if you don't mind. So he's going to hand you a microphone and point a camera in your face. So just give it one second. So my question is, are any of you guys designing your playfield layout by hand and cutting it by hand or are you all using CAD and software to do that? Okay, great. And if you're doing it by hand, how are you doing it from version to version? All right, so a nuts and bolts question about, you know, how are you guys... You know, are you sitting here with a pen and paper and marking out the play field and hitting it with a big forester bit, or are you sticking it on a machine? The answer is yes.
    31:34
    I started with a quarter sheet of plywood I got from Home Depot. I got some cardboard and a hot glue gun, and I just started going to town. That eventually evolved into some laser cut pieces of acrylic to make it a little more robust. and then at some point in time I started doing CAD and I was getting really pissed off that the CAD didn't match the thing on my table anymore and so it got to the point that was like okay clean slate cut rep two and then so it started as A and then it converted to B for me.
    32:07
    I guess for me it very similar I mean that kind of how you start when it comes to homebrew you have to make something like that Frankenstein a piece of plywood just to see like oh I like this I like that like this Well now let hook it up to get it flipping This is fun Let's change this. Let's do that. I guess it's just in progression Really, it wasn't until you had a limb had a you made it your own CNC router when we were able to get what? I bought her off the Craigslist. Oh.
    32:38
    Which means he rebuilt the CNC rabbit. Rebuilt a CNC rabbit. Anyways, so then we're able to move on to the next step. Really, for me, it was in my, what is it, exploration of this field, it was really a matter of waiting, having that right moment, taking that moment, and then moving forward.
    33:03
    Aaron? When I started, I had an initial design in mind. And once you start actually drilling and making holes in your play field, you realize that certain things might not truly work for you from the organic standpoint. Because we have dreams and wishes of what we want to try and make a ball do, and sometimes the ball don't do it.
    33:26
    So you will iterate on your process. and a good thing to do is draw stuff out. I've been here and just had an idea and I just started drawing. Just start drawing and doing different shapes and different designs. Like the crossing shots, that was by happenstance, I was like, maybe I could make it do that. And it kind of evolves on its own. You will snowball. You will suffer and things will fail, but it's part of the process. So I would say start organically. before you go to CAD because CAD's, it's not a bad place to start. CAD can be awesome because you can iterate really quickly. You can move stuff over and shift things around. But sometimes you don't want to put everything in CAD. Sometimes you just need to make it quick and dirty and just like duct tape something to the play field. So try what feels best for you. But for me, I would say duct tape, cardboard, and go to town. And that's basically the sentiment that we've heard from everybody who's been on the panel for the last, I don't know, five, six years. I mean, you started in VPX, you know, getting a fun shooter, as you like to say, something that was fun to flip on on a computer before you went to physical media. I know you've done both. Yeah, these days I go straight CAD. Well, now, yeah. Yeah, that way, if a shot doesn't work quite right, I don't need to figure out how to make it later on. I can just say, oh, I need to move it over a quarter of an inch for this thing, and then the caddy just shifts the dimple, and poof, it's ready for the next thing. And Mark, you, I know, ended up caddying out of play, you know, CNCing out of play fold over at the Worcester Makerspace for the one that's in Metro right now, but how did you start with Metro? I just bought a piece of plywood. And just marked drilling and cutting? I put an orbit in first, and then flipped it, and just put the orbit for like an hour and a half. This is fun. I remember just walking into your basement and you're just like, Mike, look what I did. Did everybody get a chance to answer this? I'll add one more to that. Just to say, you can go to Home Depot tomorrow and you can buy a sheet of plywood and get some cardboard. And those really skinny one-meter rulers are fantastic for doing orbits. You don't even need flippers. You can just sling a ball around and it's super fun. And that could happen tomorrow for like $50. So if you think it's going to be fun, let's go do it. But keep in mind, paper and more solid things like metal and plastic, they do a little differently. They move around a little bit. Keep that in mind. That's a very good little tip. Great question. Did everything get answered there? Okay, wonderful. Yeah, go ahead. What is the plywood that you're using exactly?
    36:16
    What's the thickness of plywood that we're using? We're going to moderate this one. It is half inch sanded Baltic birch. That is the only thing you should buy, seven or nine ply. That's it. I'm leaving. Done. If you buy three quarter ply and then you get a bunch of standard mechanisms from the internet, you will find that you need to pocket rub the back of all of them to get the thickness to be correct. Don't do that. So that's it. That's it. Make it thick. Just get that.
    36:38
    Half inch. That's it. Excellent. Okay. I'm sorry. It's cheaper than three quarters too. Yes.
    36:45
    Emily, you had a question? I used some aluminum L channel and strapped it to the bottom line to get it to be stiff while I was in the debug mode. Cool.
    36:54
    Once you guys put it in CAD and get an output, just say like a play field like this. Yes. What you said, are you afraid to go in there, like a CAD, you don't CAD everything to the next CAD. You find you have to move something. Yes. Really, I need to shop work now. Yeah. I put stuff in here. This morning, I put a peg near the rollover lanes because it kept getting stuck. I was like, all right, cool. Just put it in. No problem. The show is great for that. It does not matter. Just do it. Do you have a list to go back and add to your CAD later?
    37:29
    No. Did you have any answers to those questions? Yes. Because we did skip you on one of them. Oh, sorry about that. That's my job. That's why I did it this way this time, is to make sure that everybody gets their bingo cards. So on a similar route, boards. I'm an electronics guy. I've got a bunch of custom designs. I'll do my prototypes on perp board, point-to-point wiring. My first game, Rock Lives, the lamp driver board in that, it's like 56 discrete outputs. I did it all by hand. I said, I'm never going to do that again. That's why Skate or Die doesn't have a lamp board in it, because I didn't learn the CAD to make the board.
    38:07
    So that's a great question. This is the problem with the homebrew panels, is because we feed off of the community that's here, and I've talked to most of you before. So those who haven't been here, why don't we do the quick question of what hardware platforms you're using. Go ahead, Aaron. Fast. Yeah, Fast Pinball. Fast is on the screen. Fast Pinball. And Mission Pinball Framework are the two software that I use.
    38:31
    Fast. And? And, well, Code... Code of... You use Linball, right? Code of... Oh, God, Linity. I almost said... Linity. Unity. as well as, yeah, the pinball augmented reality system.
    38:46
    Yeah, LIN system. So, Lin, is your augmented reality system your LIN ball to Unity, right? Yeah. So Unity is the game engine that I use. LIN ball is the framework. I have it in that, control everything. So you don't have to worry about players or balls or auto updates or score bit or anything like that. It's just magic. Mine's on Cobra Pin with Mission Pinball Framework. So, Sinbad is running a Lizzy 1 board in slave mode. Skate or Die has an APC board. APC's a Williams board, and I'm running a Bally playfield on it. To do that, I had to plug the switch matrix in backwards, and I made some adapter harnesses for the Solenoids. So yeah, that exact board was running in my millionaire for a time. Oh, wow. I remember that game. But not everyone who builds a homebrew pinball needs to be an electrical engineer, is the point, right? You don't have to make your own PCBs. You don't have to solder your own boards. You can buy all of this stuff. You don't have to wrestle... You can, by the way, wrestle with Raspberry Pis and SP chips and everything else under the sun, which I do for other hobbies. But for this, you can buy off-the-shelf hardware that other people know that there's a community, there are forums, there are great Facebook groups. Lynn's gonna, you know, talk about his hardware a little bit, I think. Sure? Let's play some pinball. Let's go through your machine. Any other questions? while we get that moving. Oh, all right, we can schedule. Well, thank you. Now let me get you a microphone.
    40:35
    This is supposed to be the distraction, so we look prepared. For the back. All right, what's your bonding set? Right there, the guy, black shirt.
    40:47
    For starting off, should I, Or should I start with having another machine and just updating a certain part in it? You can do that. Some people do start with an already machine. Some people unscrew things, move it around to choose things. You can pick pieces from other games to do that. Or you can start from scratch. It's really up to how you want to do it. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. So where are you from? San Diego. Oh, California. Well, I was hoping I could find someone who lived in your area. Your arm's tired? Having a parent talk to this person to help you out. But I'm going to have to leverage other people. I don't know anyone in San Diego. Move to Nashua. Move to Nashua? No one wants to move to Nashua. You want to buy my house, you can move to Nashua. Moving to Nashua is a tough sell. All right, you can switch off that camera. Thank you. Great questions. Yeah, yeah, just try to break something. Jump in it and make sure your parents are fine.
    41:49
    Jump into it, try to break it. I saw another question somewhere. Where was that one? It wasn't you guys. It was somebody else. There he is. Oh, Derek. Yeah. You want to run a mic to Derek? Derek, do you want to scream? It's your choice.
    42:04
    Both. It's a question for Aaron. For Aaron? Those 3D prints are pretty incredible. is it one print or is it multiple prints that lock into each other which one specifically we'll say the topper oh the topper so the topper is not made by me this is an STL file by a dude named Alex Geek Workshop and he makes Warhammer STLs in full size so you can get an STL for like 30 bucks and the whole thing is motorized He's done so much work for you. You just buy the thing, print it, and I was like, that would look great on top of a Warhammer pinball machine. So I bought one, and I made one, and now it's here. The skull as well was one print? The skull is four different pieces. All glued together. That is actually bolted together with metric bolts. It's just nut and bolt, and they just go right together.
    43:07
    Oh god, I think this is about probably close to 20. Chopped up. And so it's like 20 individual prints. It's about 45 hours to print one of those on a fast printer. And like a good printer, it takes about 45 hours to do that. And also three kilograms of filament. That seems quick. That's quick. Yeah, I mean, for that much. Yeah, right? That's wild.
    43:28
    Any other questions? I'm good. Go ahead. What do you think is the biggest obstacle that you've ever faced? All right, for everybody. Let's start. I gave you back this mic. We'll start with you. What was your biggest obstacle? Oh, God. the biggest obstacle is... Great question. Oh. It's definitely layout. Layout is... Deciding on layout. Making decisions is an incredibly difficult thing. And you have to go with your gut. If you do pick something, just go with it for the time being. Of course, it's not set in stone. Just try.
    44:03
    That's all I can tell you. Just try. Great advice. It's going to be really hard. That's great advice. That's how I got here. Perfection is the enemy of good enough when it comes to this Time Really Because we all have jobs We all have day jobs, we all have families Things happen in life It makes it hard to do this But when you find the time And you're able And you're motivated You get something done Yeah You're pulling together all the different skill sets To do a pinball machine So there's electrical, there's software, there's mechanical, there's video, there's art, there's all sorts of stuff you need to do. And so one option is you go spend a lot of time learning new skills. The other option is you look around and make friends. And so you will definitely find a combination of the two. So I am not a coder, but I can code a new game now. And so I learned from Aaron, I learned from my friend Craig, I learned from Ernie Silverberg who runs Trident. and so there's people in the community that will support you. And eventually, you're like, oh, look, I did a mode, and it just booted? Oh, wow, I don't have to debug it for four hours and call three people? Like, that's exciting. You still call me in the middle of the night sometimes. You would have been a 10. I call Ernie in the middle of the night. So, Brian, what you're saying is it takes a village, and sometimes you're the village idiot. Yeah, and then you go out of that role eventually. Yes. The village idiot can do something pretty good once in a while, right? He's good at being an idiot. Better lucky than good.
    45:40
    Do you want to answer? Yeah, I guess for what I do, the biggest challenge is getting the parts in the first place. I can't just go online and buy a fully populated skateboard play field without paying an arm and a leg for CPR or whatever.
    45:55
    To get these play fields, I have to watch pin side threads for a show by sell like a hawk. You need to make a decision as soon as you see it, do I want to do this? or not. That skateball play field, there was ten people behind me. Ten, like ten people, seriously, ten people reached out for 125 bucks. Wow. That is a great answer to the barrier to engagement and execution on this because that's part of my thing. I know if I jump knee deep into this and start doing this, as people who have been in my home or have lived with me in the past know that there are just sterilite upon sterilite containers all over the house full of parts. And knowing that you have to jump on things that you might eventually need someday that are just going to sit there and not gather dust, but not make any money or get any reward, it makes it difficult. It's a great one. One little thing to the whole parts thing. So Teaser's a whole new thing. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Stop. You will bring me a flipping pinball machine next year. That's fine. Alright, we got one commitment.
    47:07
    Anybody else on the fence that just needs someone to be mean and enforce a deadline in public over the internet? Who wants a nudge? Aaron will yell at me. I'll yell at you. I will. Absolutely. I'll hold you to a deadline.
    47:19
    I'll make Sam do it. What are you building? I have a couple ideas. I mess around with VPNs. I'm game-centered by trade. It's the one that might feel... Taking balls and drawing them. Oh, yes! Yeah! All right, that's happened. And that's one. That's fantastic. You're going to have something for me next year. You're going to sit up here. That's two. And I'm going to hold you to that. You know that. Anyone else? Anyone else want to be voluntold? We're announcing games. What are you going to do? You have a question? It's just a musical. Yeah. So there was one mention of repurposing material using a yardstick as a ball guide. Do each of you have any other ideas?
    48:01
    It certainly can be very helpful to just repurpose something and a lot cheaper in a lot of cases. Paper, painter's tape, pieces of little blocks, whatever you can find. Have a pinball. Throw it. What's the whiteboard? The white.
    48:17
    Oh, foam core. Foam core Yeah foam core Anything that you can put on a plywood and just place glue down nail down all that kind of stuff just get to it If you have access to a 3D printer and you know how to create your own CAD, it's really good. So if you look at Borderlands, almost everything you see in the top play field is 3D printed. It's PLA. It holds up really good. It's shocking. I'm jinxing myself, I'm sure.
    48:44
    There's some tricks I do where I'll embed M4 screws in areas where the ball is going to hit a lot, but I can't believe how well it's holding up. And that opens the door for anything. And then another quick question. Above and beyond what's built in Mission Pinball framework with config files, at what point do you actually have to develop custom code to make this work?
    49:11
    It depends if you want to live outside the box or not. So if you want to have a tilting play field, you're going to live outside the box. But everything else is in Mission Pinball Framework. So most modes that you think of? Yeah, everything. Modes, multivols, light shows.
    49:28
    Machine and game configuration variables are all stored in MPF for you. If you want to do something custom. Video sequences, yeah, like everything's in Mission Pinball Framework. However, there is that door. If you want to step through it, there is a way to do custom code and get down to, like, lower level programming to do it. You can do it. Don't touch the third rail. But it's fun. It's fun. It tastes good when you do it. All right, start this. We're going to show some pinball. Everybody wants to play pinball. All of these machines that they've talked about are over in the custom game room. And we're great. Well, if you don't want to play because you don't want me calling out how bad your playing skills are, we can always have Ryan do it because he'd show everybody up. No, that's fine. Yeah, why don't you talk about what you did? You did it earlier, right? Shoot around. Get a Stucky in front of everybody. Oh, man. At least it's not making the pot. Are they in my toolbox?
    50:24
    Do you need a magnet? No. Grab it right now. Okay. Well. The first flip. I love it. Woo! Yeah. Best laid plans. We're going to do this to fill some time, take some more questions, and then, you know, he just screws it up. I love you. Another question for you. We got a question. How do you deal with influential property? You're going to be knocking up like an ass. So, you know, I'll answer this partly from past experiences and things. I worked for Warner Brothers for a while. Some companies are perfectly fine with people doing fan art, fan projects, as long as they're never going to be commercially sold. You actually know Sony, for instance, with Sonic. Sony? Sega, sorry. Sony! Didn't it say we owned Sonic for a little while? I owned Sonic for a little while. That's right. Sega has a... Just don't sell it. Don't make any productions. Other companies... Disney. ...are not so nice about, you know, people's passion projects and things. Just don't put the word Disney on it and you should be fine.
    51:42
    I don't know what... 2K Take-Two owns Borderlands, so I don't know what they're... I haven't heard any... So, yeah, I've chosen not to poke the bear. I've thought about reaching out, because they're pretty supportive. There's, like, a ton of people that go to cons that do Borderlands 2. They seem generally receptive to it.
    52:02
    When I was in Chicago, a game developer for Steam heard about the game and came... Not Steam. For 2K Games. Gearbox, rather. Gearbox. Came and played it. He came, he shook my hand, we had talked on Facebook briefly, and he's like, hey, I've got something for you. And it was around some other news of games not being allowed to be showed at the Expo. I was like, oh, is it a cease and desist? And he's like, actually, I kind of thought about making a fake one and handing it to you, but I didn't know you well enough to know if you'd think it was funny. And I was like, if it was fake, it'd be hysterical. So I talked to him a little bit. He's like, yeah, I haven't been here too long, so I don't know how people would really feel about it.
    52:46
    So we'll see. It hasn't shown up on their radar yet. Maybe it has, maybe it hasn't, but I haven't heard about it. But I'm also like, I don't want to poke the bear either, so I'll just keep living under the radar. I don't want to build it and produce or anything like that, so it's fine.
    53:01
    You don't have anything private labeled? You don't have anything private labeled, Aaron? Well, I mean, it's someone else owns Warhammer. Oh, God, yeah, Games Workshop. Right. They're highly litigious. They're incredibly litigious. They're one of the most litigious companies out there. Do I care? No. Because I will change this over to an absolute parody of this game and I do not care. I'm not Space King. Floor Hammer. Hero Armor. So, yeah. It's going to happen no matter what. Love Hammer. Sure, go come out for me. We'll see what happens. War Hamburger. So hopefully it is A-OK by then. And then someone might hit recap. Because he's making a parallel issue. So we'll see. That's kind of cool. Yeah, most of this is not commercial. So they stay away from it. Some companies, little litigies. Warner Brothers is one of those. Yes. And yeah, the Game Workshop did that. There was a gentleman who made a video called Astartes. It's a five-part series. They ceased and desisted him for making such an amazing show. And then they hired him immediately because he was doing a great job.
    54:12
    So, yeah, it's that kind of thing. All right. Let's show the features. What you got? Show us something cool. Okay, so. Do you want someone that actually knows how to play pinball besides us? Oh.
    54:25
    Yeah. You want to play it? We can make him play it. We already did that earlier. He liked it. No, not just this. We make him play pins in here all the time. This is a thing. I'm trying to get him a staff position as the resident seminar pinball player. So, before I actually shoot, I'll just talk about... Yeah, let's go through some of the features of this. We are over time. You can feel free to leave. We will not be offended. Lynn is back here at 3.30, so I have to finish and get this pin out of here by 3.30. The person who runs this room gets really angry. Is it really that much? that much. All right, play. Joey's thing. Go fast. I'll be really quick. So scoops, standard scoops. But we've got 15 minutes. We're fine. Because you're at your face. Yeah, there you go. All right, so I'll just do it. Take a breath. OK, so initially this design game, if you ever played Playfield 1, Playfield 1 did not look like this. You may drop target very much like an attack from Mars and a motor spinner in the back. So when I created this game, I was mad at the spinner after I had put it in because I found it boring. It didn't actually interact with my player in any way. And so in order to change that around, I decided to go with an infinite loop that you can actually shoot. This was a heck of a lot more fun for the player. For me, I enjoyed it more. Oh, so that's it. I think they just keep playing. Oh, keep playing. Keep your glass off. Just for this. I hope that wasn't as . I lost the mic. You lost what? A little clip that holds the mic on. You broke it off for a getting on. You're done. You're really good. Nope. I'm just going to switch it. Good. Wow.
    56:08
    So I created the infinite loop that you shoot multiple times. But I was like, okay, cool. That's great. But where's the payoff? So actually, I think I called Mike in the middle of the night because I didn't know what to do. I was out of ideas. And I had this weird right-hand lane up over here. and Mike goes, why don't you make a player shoot through the pops? I was like, that's a great idea. All right, cool, let's try that. So I threw the whole thing in, and lo and behold, it's a hell of a lot of fun. And so I put it into the game. And it's those kind of iterations that make pinball pinball. We help each other. Exactly. So another thing that came in was, is it Future Spa that's got the crossing shots? What's a game that's got a ton of crossing shots?
    56:54
    Crossfire. Thank you. You'll get caught up in that. So something like that came in with the idea of the inner lane, kind of like also from Turtles, where it's got that feed on the left-hand side. I was like, well, what if I could shoot it both ways for the player? So not only can you shoot the ball around and feed the ball to your flipper, but you can also shoot it the other way and have it feed the inner lane. Shoot. Fast enough. There you go. And feed like that. Yeah. I remember we talked about that. And that was really fun to shoot. And so that kind of thing was really innovative. But I also love games like Deadpool with the SNK target. Because that's really cool because it feeds the ball. And I was like, wait. Maybe I can put that in the game and add more to it. So I put four of them in the game, specifically to feed things like jackpots, to feed your spinner, to feed a buck, and to feed the in-lane. And the in-lane is a cool one because it's actually not off a target. It's off the back of your flipper. So in the left-hand side, you shoot, and it will basically bounce in if you get it right.
    58:16
    But let's see if we can do this on the fly. That's pretty smooth. Dr. Oh, thanks, about! This is fast! Dr. It's so good! It's so cool! Dr. That's pretty fast. It's so cool. It's a great design.
    58:53
    So there's an angled target underneath the buck tube, which will feed your spinner. So that's a really fun thing to do. And of course, you can program it in. I'm going to program it in for extra points, where you actually rip the crap out of the spinner. And if you do it off the SNCC target, it's worth a ton more points. So let's apply some of the questions that the audience has asked before. So the question I want to know is, which revision of Playfield are we on here? Was this a CNC cut? Was this a hand cut? This is CNC cut. This is my first CNC game, when cut it. So this is technically Playfield 2. OK, so we had one white wood, and now this. Is this final except artwork? So the next one gets cut, printed, and repopulated? Apart from small adjustments, yes. OK, so this is almost final game on the board. this is pretty much going to be it. Yeah, this is what I'm happy with. Excellent. Do you have any small adjustments? Some of the small adjustments? Yeah, that's a great question. Like what I'm going to change? Yeah, what's something in here? You said you added a post. Oh yes, I did add a post. Let me get the camera over here. Oh no, go ahead, point at it. Okay, so up here was a bad spot just because it's part where the orbits meet the inlanes. And this essentially was just a little location where the ball would get stuck. And I just took a threaded nut driver, one of the nut drivers, and just drove a post in there in the replay field. And it worked great. It was an easy change. And now balls don't get stuck and I have to pull the glass anymore. So little stuff like that you'll find during the show. One of the things I actually did during the show last night was this feed tube worked in my house but did not work at the show. It was STDMing. And so late last night, when I went home at midnight, I went into my CAD, adjusted the degree of pitch to degrees, reprinted the entire thing, like started the print, went to bed, woke up, pulled the thing out of the printer, and now it's here. And now it works? Now it works. So like that kind of iteration is little things you find at the show. So it's good to bring your game to the show. You won't playtest. Now, Ryan, you had a lot with that with Sonic taking around, taking all that feedback from everybody. It was really hard because I didn't get any feedback or testing because I did the whole thing during COVID. So I couldn't even have anyone play the game for almost like a year and a half. But yeah, that's why I was so happy to finally get to bring it to the shows because someone other than me was playing it and you guys immediately broke it in a thousand different ways, which Which is excellent. That's the most valuable thing.
    61:40
    So, yeah, just keep bringing it to the shows. Let it get beat on. Learn something like that. That's what we're actually here to do. We're here to show off our work, but we're also here to learn and make the games better. And you get ideas sometimes at 12 at night from your buddy. Sometimes you get them from a random person that you've never met at the show. Sometimes you listen to 99 Bad Ideas, and then one of them you're like, wait a minute. That's a good one. I'm glad I listened to the 99 bad ones. So, yeah, we love the shows. Thank you all so much for coming out to support Homebrew in general because it's really hard and it's really great.
    62:20
    Any more questions? Anybody got anything, late lingering things? Now is the time where I plug the next seminar, which starts entirely too soon at 3.30 with Lynn. Lynn is going to go through and basically build. No, I'm not. I didn't get my equipment. You're going to wing it. All right. Well, I can't plug Lynn because I don't know what the hell Lynn's doing in the next... We're going to discover together.
    62:44
    Well, what we were going to do is kind of community source a pinball machine and open source it here, so we will figure something out, which means it will probably end up being a really good hardware tech conversation about stuff that we glossed over. So you should go do that. and I want to thank you guys all for coming. This is the pleasure of my weekend. This is the only reason I'm here is to come here and support these people.
    63:10
    This is a fantastic community that you and you and where's the last one? Shit, it wasn't you, was it? I'm about to get signed up, actually. We'll be on next year. Well, I know. I told you that last year. Are you making one? But you decided to do other stuff. You're making one? Do it. Who? You're going to bring one? San Diego over here, yeah. Yeah? Yeah, we're gonna... Alright. If I... have you and your parent, whoever's with you, come talk to us. Something to look forward to. We will find you a makerspace, we'll find you a mentor to do this with you. We can do that. There's enough. This is the other side of the country. Lynn has enough to do. Children will die on amusement park rides if we take Lynn away. Again, thank you. The 10th anniversary of Pintastic is wonderful how much this convention supports this community. Come grow this with us. Come be with us and work with these people who want to share their knowledge and share everything that they've put entirely too much time into. Thank you, Jillian. When you look at how much this takes, 2,000 hours to put one of these together. That's a full-time job for a year. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Jillian. you