it's time for another pinball profile i'm your host jeff teal us you can find everything on pinballprofile.com we're on instagram and x at pinball profile we have a great facebook group as well you can also email pinball profile at gmail.com if you'd like to show your support don't worry the show will always be free but we do want to thank wonderful supporters like ken g Lua W, Tony V, Derek S, Bart V, and more at patreon.com slash pinball profile. Sorry I've been away for a little bit. I was following the Blue Jays during the World Series run. Congratulations to the Dodgers. Oh, that hurts me to say. But podcasting was on the back burner as I was busy with work and travel. Not anymore. Back at it. And lots of episodes for the remainder of the year here. So while on the road, a little remote recording with a couple of guys that put together a fantastic machine, one you need to play. It is Portal. You can play it, in fact, this weekend at the Houston Arcade Expo. Joining us, co-designer Ian Ian Harrower and artist Brad Brad Albright. Here's that conversation. Welcome, Jeff. Hey, Jeff. Brad, you were just at Expo, so you got to see a lot of people probably playing Portal for the very first time. I know they were probably as excited as I was when I played over at Ian's house. Give me some reactions and some of the feedback you got. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm a vendor at these shows, so unfortunately I wasn't as close as I would have liked to have been to kind of witness everybody. But I was getting a lot of really strong feedback, even across the hallway. People who had played it before, people who had just seen it for the first time, and people that were excited to play it didn't realize that it was at the show, and I was able to point them in the right direction. So it was nice to know that people were actively seeking it out and then going out of their way to come back to me after the fact and tell me how much they enjoyed playing it. Marc Silk, he happened to be there. That was a pleasant surprise. Reggie! Yeah, lovely to meet him for the first time. He's just a ray of shining sunlight, that guy. He's a pro's pro, that's for sure, and he does a wonderful job as Reggie. And, you know, on the other side, too, if you want to get heckled, which I kind of like in pinball, you've got GLaDOS doing that, too, which is fun. I know you liked that, Ian, didn't you? Yeah, it's part of the franchise. You know, this is a balance we were trying to find. There's a bunch of us on the team, myself included, who don't actually want to make fun of players when they play poorly. It's one of the things in my previous games I went out of my way to, like, the sort of insulting call-outs, only play if you've had a good ball. but GLaDOS needs to make fun of you, needs to antagonize you that is the purpose, that is part of the goal, but we also did a lot of work to kind of try to balance it throughout the storytelling within the game so that the degree at which she does that ramps up the further you get into the game, the more you go later test chamber she is meaner and you know, it's the callouts from the game and they remind you of the game because they are the game. That's alright, we all get our revenge too should we make the wizard mode right i mean i'm not gonna spoil the wizard mode but there may be an appearance by gladys in the wizard mode by the way i saw the stream you did with kevin manny from buffalo pinball congratulations to kevin because he is now part of the multimorphic team and what a great guy to have certainly when it comes to communications and social media and everything that kevin brings uh i know you two are excited i'm excited this is like multimorphics a small company everyone wears a lot of hats and i think that having a community and social media presence was always a challenge and there's been people who have come on in the past and done it for periods of time but kevin has been a huge supporter of the p3 and a huge part of the community and has a ton of experience in this space you know it's new for me and weird for me because like i don't do things like instagram but uh you know there's a lot of like presence there I know Brad's been doing a lot of media for the game as well within his own personal channel. Yeah, it's kind of a necessary evil, and it does feel awkward a lot of the time. But yeah, Kevin's great. I had the pleasure of getting to know him when he was down for the initial stream of Portal. And he's perfect for the job because he brings a fan's point of view to the platform. He's not the corporate shill. You know, he's a guy that he's doing this because he loves the P3. He's always done this because he loves the P3. I think the audience can tell. No, you're right, Kevin. It comes from the heart with him, and we've been watching on Buffalo Pinball for years the streams of the different games on the P3 platform, and now 27, by the way. That's pretty incredible. If you've got space for one, there's 27 games to be played, so kudos to Multimorphic for doing that. But I'm glad that Kevin's there, and especially since everyone wears different hats, Now we can get them off that stupid Yankees hat. Anyway, enough of that. The game itself, Portal. I love that Multimorphic said we want a video game license because when you have the P3 platform, that is definitely pinball. It's physical. In this case, even spinners too, ramps and all these kind of good things. It's flippers. It's a steel ball. But there's this wonderful screen that just invites so much. And, Brad, I kind of want to talk to you about this because you got all the assets, certainly, from, would it be Valve? Yes. So the company that started it all and then went on to do Steam and $5 billion worth of revenue, you got all these physical models to kind of create your art around, and you see it a lot in the play field, both 2D and 3D. That had to make it easier for you, but just kind of a world like, holy cow, I can do all of this? Yeah, I mean, on one hand, it's overwhelming having that much content, but it was extremely helpful having quality reference, especially in three dimensions where it can be turned and posed and lit. And for me, I think in a real cinematic way when I'm trying to construct, let's say, cabinet art, I'll have a particular camera angle in mind. But it's hard to come up with that out of your head and have the perspective be all accurate and everything. So I was able to combine original, let's say, environments. You know, if I wanted a room that's shaped this particular way and the camera view is down from the floor, but then you have these iconic elements from the game, I could be super hyper accurate and still expressive with the way that I could illustrate those things. And then likewise, Ian was able to use the development kits that they have that are sort of, would you call them open source? Yeah, well, they released their level editor with the game. So when you purchase Portal 2, you get the Portal 2 authoring tools as part of that. For references for all of the levels, even the ones I built in Unity, I sort of started from the level editor and sort of wanted to make it authentic to how it would look within the game, but also make it work within a play field, which was a really interesting challenge from where to place the camera, how to make things look, because you've got this really long thing. But also the two what we call travel modes within the game, which are actually video screen captures rendered within the Portal 2 engine for the big fling and companion cube levels. So you're certainly talking to people who are experienced playing Portal and Portal 2, and you are talking to somebody who has never played that game until now. And the reason I bring that up is because, first of all, it's very eye-catching. I love the format of P3. I want to play everything that comes out, and I always have a good time. but there's actually a lot of history there and i the reason i bring this up is because i don't know anything about portal but love playing the pinball machine because it's very self-explanatory you put a lot of their intuitive information on the screen but what it makes me want to do is go play portal the video game and see how they kind of sync you don't have to know anything about portal who enjoy playing the portal pinball machine and i think that was probably a nice fine line for you, Ian, to want to certainly be true to the Portal legacy. And also, how do we bring in new people? You did it. Yeah, and I think it was very important for us to not just do a rehashing of the story of Portal 1 or Portal 2. This is a unique story. You are the character in the story. This is a portable testing device that has been brought into your home, and you are testing on it. And Reggie is a new, unique character. And it's yours and Reggie's story, but it's firmly anchored within the Portal universe. It feels like Portal. When we start the development process, we fill out a spreadsheet and we're like, what are the big things that you want to see in the game for this license? What defines the license? What are the things you want to see? And then we sort of rank them and we're like, what can we do physically? What can we do as visual assets? And we sort of put all of that in there. And I think that Portal is just such a rich universe. It was really easy and there was a lot of stuff we just wanted to get in here. But it's one of these interesting things from a pinball perspective where we have themes where people are not really all that familiar with it. Well, that's great. Now you have a new original theme to explore. This world is funny. it's sarcastic it's visually interesting you're going to see mechanical things you've never seen in pinball before so give it a try even if you know nothing about portal and maybe you'll love the characters and love glados and want to seek out more yeah the central conceit of the original portal when you think oh this is so specific this use of physics this thing that like defies the natural world teleporting from one place to another it's like how do you create that in a game that is actually using real world physics and then how can we kind of turn it on its head with the mechanisms and major major kudos to tj for bringing his you know mad scientist wizardry to the table and and actually being able to accomplish these things this is a game co-created by Ian Ian Harrower and Stephen Silver, who we've known and loved and done so much for Multimorphic. There's also Michael Ocean. There's also Rory, too. I heard you say that on the Buffalo Pinball stream, kind of the unsung hero. Tell us about Rory and what he's done with this game. Yeah so Rory is our technical artist and he works on all of the preparation for print assets visual assets both 2D and 3D within the game bringing all of that into the engine preparing the textures Basically almost everything you see from a visual perspective has had Rory's hands on it. And like some of the animations in previous Multimorphic games, there's been a little bit more of a balance between 2D video assets and 3D in-engine stuff, and a lot of the 2D video assets are right up Stephen Silver's alley. That's what he does. But this time we really wanted to lean into doing things in 3D and creating... It's actually really... I get in the weeds on some of this technical stuff, but there's things like when you complete a test chamber, this tube comes up, and a cube and a turret fly through, and there's text that says, chamber complete, and there's confetti. And one of the cool things about doing it in-engine is that those are actual particle systems that will look different every time you see them. It's not just playing the same clip. It's actually going to have a different particle simulation. It's going to be seeded with a different number. And you're not going to notice that you're getting a different experience, but you're going to get a different experience. And I think that's really cool. That is cool. I like the mix between 3D and 2D, especially with Portal. And especially when you've got Brad on hand too, because Brad, I've seen your art at shows and I'm sure you had it at the expo. 3D is kind of your expertise, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. I would say there's like two facets to my work. There's the interactivity and the nostalgia, both of which are obviously really key to pinball, but also in my personal work, it's 3D glasses, it's physically layering things that are popping out of the wall. Any of that kind of stuff to me is always more exciting than just a flat thing slapped on a wall. So bringing that interest in things that are multi-dimensional, bringing that into pinball is, of course, exciting for me. This is like a room-scale world under glass. And I know it's cliche to call it a world under glass, but there's a lot of 3D surfaces and Brad covered, put a decal on every single one of them, except for the hinges, which Jerry told him he wasn't allowed to put a decal on. Yeah, yeah. It is truly, I describe it as a dollhouse. If you get in there and you look at that module, there is no exposed surface. It is not just the play field and plastics like you're used to seeing in a traditional pinball machine. This is the ground surface, the walls. Everything is connected in a watertight way. and I mean it sounds like an extreme statement but I truly think it's the most developed world under glass that that anyone will have seen in a in a game before I have to agree uh and that was the fascinating thing when I was playing it at Ian's house by the way I've known Ian for I don't know 10 years or whatever I played at his house he plays in my house we steal dollars from each other usually he takes it from my house and I find a way to get at his place tight-lipped I had no idea this was coming. I didn't know about Birdwatcher. I didn't know about Portal, but I did know that Ian was working hard on something after years and years of being at his old company, but I'm really proud of Ian and Brad the work you've done on this game, but again back to, I'm just thinking of Ian and how hard he works and you talk about the spreadsheet and what can we put in there and you've got all these Portal assets and okay, we need to have lasers and light bridges and high energy pellets and buttons and cubes and tractor funnels and turrets. It's all there. I've learned this about Portal, and again, when I play the game and I watch the stream and hopefully play it more and more as people are getting these, you've got everything there for the diehard fans and you've got everything for the new fans. And the new fans are me. And what I like about this is what you've done with the coding, with the artwork, is you've made it very clear on the screen what to see. And there's kind of almost a traditional feel of inserts, if you will, that stay on there and tell you where to go. I think that's pretty important, but yet you still get that P3 feel. It was a very deliberate design choice to have mostly persistent inserts within hub. Hub is what we call the sort of main area where you'll play multiball, you'll complete objectos, the not test chamber portions. And we wanted them to have that normal pinball feel of the inserts being grouped together, them pointing in the direction of the shot to help you aim for you to know where to find them and have it always sort of there as a reference and then we twist it a little bit with weird things like when you shoot the right ramp and it lifts the floor opens up and the tiles disappear with the inserts on them because you don't need them anymore until the ramp comes back down so we put our twists on it but they're there and I think I don't know what this was like from Brad's perspective with the art because it's a very different world to develop a playfield art, which Brad was the artist for Hub. He generated the image that we use within the screen. And to sort of have freedom to have these inserts move at any time and exist at any time, it's very different than a physical playfield from that perspective. Yeah, well, I mean, I think everybody did a really great job of collaborating on those things. where nothing really felt like it was entirely on me for the hub mode, and then you guys were able to take it and run with it, and then if you needed something tweaked, I could make a change. It was a nice way of kind of attacking my first production game in a way that was unique to the P3, and then could also be cohesive with what you were doing with the test chambers, which is when we go into those fully three-dimensional rendered environments. And then that was my – other people, this was sort of like a joint decision in that, but I spent the time building those 3D worlds, and my thing was to push the boundary of what we do within those 3D worlds. And I remember the first time I presented my mock-up for encouragement via discouragement, which is the thermal discouragement beam level and i had it on this really wild angle not aligned at all to the cabinet like this like i don't know it's probably like a 26 degree angle and there was really good reason for it because it aligned some of the shots with the physical hardware that was what i was going for in a lot of the 3d rooms it's i want the thing that's represented in the graphic to match with the physical thing that you're doing within the playfield and that was a challenge uh but people loved it they were like all on board with all of the really wild and out there ideas and we kept hub traditional and we pushed the limits on what we could do within the test chambers and we're not talking about the wizard mode but i think the wizard mode has one of the most impressive uh sort of visual experiences i've seen in pinball Well, that's the nice thing about the wizard mode is when you released this, it came out at 1.0 code. It was all there, and now anything that's updated or tweaks and good things there, but you've got all your hub objectives. You've got three multiballs, correct? Yes, there are three multiballs in the game. And they're stackable, correct, with the objectives? Yep, with most of the objectives. Some of the objectives become unusable during multiball to the technical limitations of having multiple balls on the play field. yeah but most of it's all the goal when we sat down for hub we wanted the goal to be to make a kind of system 11 kind of feel where you can just shoot around and everything stacks on top of each other and you keep making progress towards things and it has a very traditional pinball feel and i think we did find something in that sort of system 11 wpc kind of era for how now there's some twists and complicated stuff on top of that. But that was sort of the goal. And then the test chambers were intended to be a separate experience. They were exclusive, so we could do weird things. We could force you into certain situations. And that was the balance we tried to create. And now with the test chambers that have been implemented kind of on the back end and then the wizard mode, it's like yet another level of progression through the hub and the test chambers. It all interconnects in a way that it's giving players essentially a complete experience in the hub. Personally, I would be totally happy with this game if it was only the hub. There's so much to do, and it's so rewarding. And then each of the test chambers are their own full experience, and then how you can leverage the hub against the test chambers and then lead into the wizard mode. It's pretty wild. And for me, it's been just such a ride kind of watching as the pieces come together. First of all, let's talk about the portal standard. I'm impressed with everything that's put in that, you know, one-third section, if you will, of the upper play field with the loft and the pit and certainly everything you've got in there. But then you take it to a whole new level. And for those that haven't seen this, you have to see the portal extended, which really adds so much more to the P3 platform. It has a physical spinner. It has physical targets. It has ramps. There's a kickback, too, isn't there? Yep, there's a second-level kickback, which is kind of on the right-hand side, similar to where the shooter lane would be on a traditional game. And the cross-playfield hard light bridge. That thing is so cool, and I had no idea until I played it. It's like, whoa, it's very, very satisfying. It's a wow moment. Yeah, I think that the hard light bridge is a moment when you get that. The faith plate is an incredible physical experience when that ball flies through the air. The moat jump is incredible. Like, the physical tricks, but they're not just gimmicks. Like, they're core integrated into the game, and they're critical to the theme. I mean, when we were designing the play field, we wanted aerial features, because aerial features are a big part of the game. and the loft is so weird in a sense because there's no way to get to it. Like that was the design goal of the loft was we're going to have a place on the play field that you can't get to and the only way for you to get there is to portal to it. It's rare that we see a completed code that is done when the game is shipped and that's the case and I think that's going to make so many people very, very excited. It's probably a lot more work for you, Ian, to get to that full code and have it all there but now that you kind of come to the finish line what was that process like I mean I probably put more of myself into this project than I should have I think that a lot of people on these small projects tend to do that. A lot of the test chamber things were something I wanted to do. So that 3D work, it's not my forte. It's not my skill set. Could have fooled me. I mean, it was a really great collaboration on stuff. I would come up with something, and then I'd talk to Steven, and Steven has a very good visual eye, and he'd be like, change these angles of these walls, move these things around. And then I'd collaborate with Brad. One of the really interesting things from an art perspective is that Portal, especially Portal 1, is white. It's a sanitary white game. The test chambers are this pretty boring white, although there's a lot of glow and light, and they play with shadow. They play with light and dark, but light and dark don't play well. White and black don't play well as sort of contrast points on a pinball machine. Portal 2 solves this by making it all dilapidated and bringing in greenery and dirt, and things are broken down in that. But if you look at Brad's playfield art, it's not white. It's very much not white. But when we went to the chess chambers, it was like, how do we make this look like Portal? Brad, you definitely did that. It looks like Portal. I think what I was conscious of throughout was how can I use directional light and color to kind of bathe the space. And part of that was also that we were shooting for, even just on the cabinet, telling a color story that played with the half and half, like the blue and the orange that everyone associates with Portal. Like it was important to have those things so that at like a snap glance, you're like, oh, hey, that's Portal. That was a challenge with the license because they know their world. They know what it needs to look like, which is relatively sterile. So, yeah, finding opportunities to cast light and color into that space, that was definitely one of the things that we had to strike a balance with throughout. When games are made, you know, it certainly helps to have a fan, and Ian has been a huge fan of Portal for years and years. Keith Elwin had to convert his archer game into Iron Maiden. He had to research a little bit about Iron Maiden. Brad, were you big into Portal on Steam? I played a little bit of it when it first came out years and years ago, and I watched friends play it back then. And then I had to do a little bit of catch-up when we started on the project, and I played through one and two back-to-back over the course of a weekend, and I then subsequently played through both of them probably three more times during the development. But I was also a huge fan of Half-Life Alyx, which is sort of adjacent in the Valve universe. And that being a VR experience that fully immerses you in a world, I think that was an important point of reference for me also. Meanwhile, they've come out with the RTX portal, which has a lot more of this really striking ray tracing use of light and color. And so looking at some of those things that maybe you wouldn't have experienced in the original iteration of Portal, but now kind of gives it a little bit more flavor. To me, that was a good point of reference. But yeah, I mean, I always loved the tone of the universe. And then being able to dig even further into that and kind of drill down into like, what is it that makes this feel consistent with the tone of the humor, but also kind of the oppressive nature of being sent through these test chambers. What does that mean from a visual standpoint? I talk about being fans, and Ian, going back to years ago at Buffalo Billiards, seeing these P3 games, I'm sure it was just Lexi Lightspeed at the time, in Austin, Texas. You've been a fan since the get-go, and I've always felt that Multimorphic and the P3 platform were way ahead of its time. Now, you have fanboys of other companies, and that's fine and dandy, and people can't accept that different games have different feels. I've always accepted that because whether I play an old game, a new game, a different company, they're all going to feel slightly different. What was it for you that made you say, okay, there's something here with Multimorphic and what they're planning on doing? Because as I mentioned earlier, 27 games now with one unit and just a matter of changing the modules. They said they were going to do this. They've done it now here in 2025 with more titles still to come. What was it for you that you saw the light when it came to Multimorper? So I bought in on the initial launch at Texas Pinball Festival, where they launched the option for Lexi Lightspeed plus Cannon Lagoon when it was ready, and five minigames. So when I got into the P3, I thought Lexi was a lot of fun, but for me there was this desire to want to develop for the platform. They were talking about having their SDK available for third parties right from the get-go, and I don't really have a great electronic or mechanical background, but the thought of being able to create new pinball experiences on my own, I thought was really cool. And whether I ever released anything, even if I was just doing it for me, this process of writing code, putting it on the physical machine, and then experiencing that thing you just wrote in a physical instantiation is just something that always intrigued me. Intriguing is one thing. Yeah, I'm fascinated by a lot of things. I have no idea what to do. But to be hands-on and do it, I guess Birdwatcher was a great test for you to kind of get to know the system and figure out the coding. Yeah, so Birdwatcher was not the first game I wrote. It's the first game I released. Oh, I didn't know that. The other game I'm working on right now, which may never get released, which it's codenamed Arena, I've been working on longer than I've been working on Birdwatcher, but I decided to start doing Birdwatcher because I wanted to finish something. So it was a project that I thought I could actually get over the finish line and get something released. And I wanted to do Birdwatcher Tutorial because I wanted to kind of support developing more third-party devs. I want the ecosystem to grow. Selfishly, it's more value for me on the system with games like Young Martial Artist, Romania, Nezik City, Dungeon Door Defender, all of the games Nicholas Baldridge has been doing. There's a lot of options there, and I want more people creating for the platform because I want to play their games. And you pay a couple hundred bucks for a game, and it's super affordable. In the pinball world, that's like a light. I'd rather pay a few hundred bucks for Blood Bank Billiards than buy a Target Pool EM machine. There's a perfect example. Yeah, I mean, when I did Blood Bank Billiards, it was because I wanted to experience Target Pool on the drained playfield. It's got a lot of throwbacks, so it's inspired a lot by Target Pool. And I'm like, I can implement Target Pool. And then I'm like, well, what can I do to take it further? And Blood Bank Billiards is my take it further. And all of my games, I like to do something like technologically weird. and blood bank billiards, there's a few things, but like the blood trails, as it goes through the blood, leaves a trail. That was one of the sort of visual interest things there. I mean, Portal has a lot of these visual interest things going on within the screen and within the hardware. You talk about inspirations. For the both of you, Brad, who's been the biggest inspiration for the work that you do? Well, traditionally, my inspirations are strongly line art illustrators, which you might not see that necessarily in all of my work. And more and more, I'm deviating from that influence. But like comic book artists like Bernie Wrightson, his Frankenstein is a big influence. And so I look a lot outside of pinball, I think, at technique. I like watching YouTube videos of people that are painting miniatures for things like Warhammer, which I have no involvement in tabletop gaming whatsoever. But the specific techniques that people are using to paint these miniatures, you can learn a lot about how to layer color and how contrast helps you read the forms of a three-dimensional object. But, you know, then within pinball, I try to look at everything and see, you know, how they did it well back in the day, how they're doing it well today. Inspirations for you, Ian? I mean, I like playing pinball. I like all eras of pinball, you know, going back to the EM era where you would have people like Wayne Ians and, you know, Ted Zale. and you have all of these interesting mechanical games back then. And as we go through all of the eras, there's like, I want to gravitate towards all of these things. But I got into Pinball in the sort of Sam era of Stern, and I think the most influential games to me and what I sort of feel like are the perfect size from my perspective are games like Metallica, ACDC, Spider-Man, those Lime and Sheets games where it's just the right amount of content. That wizard mode is there, but you're maybe never going to get there, but you're almost going to get there a lot, where you have something like six or seven modes and you don't have 37 modes to get through to do things. and that's sort of the sweet spot. And I think we deviated from it, but in some of the initial rules sketches, I actually compared what we were going for with Hub to Metallica, where it's in Metallica, if you never make it to crank it up, you're going to have a good time playing everything that there is to experience within the main game. And then when you get to crank it up, it's a high scoring potential. It's high risk. It's a unique, isolated experience. And we sort of took some inspiration from that within the game. It seems like you put a lot into this game. It's deep, yet, you know, I think people can achieve everything or different experiences, the different hub objectives, the different multi-balls. Maybe you get to wizard mode. Were there things that you pulled back and went, okay, it's just, it's too much? Definitely. Oh, yeah? There were a lot of things we cut out, largely because they were way too hard or too complicated or too difficult to communicate. You know we had some early play testing where people really didn understand some of our rules And I think that we wanted to lean into the puzzle game aspect of things And I was very much in the camp of no no no let not explain it to the player It's a puzzle. Let's let them, like, make shots and see what those shots do and solve things based on that. And no one understood it. Like, those ideas were not good ideas. The truth is we tell you four different ways what you have to shoot and you don't notice it and it feels like a puzzle because of that. I think it's worth saying that one of the greatest strengths of the P3 is its ability to communicate with the player. You're giving them context, not just thematically, but also for what this particular shot is doing in this particular moment. You're not just lighting an insert saying, like, shoot here. This is a shot that corresponds to this objective that maybe is this far along, and being able to shuffle all of those things while also keeping it puzzling to the player, but just enough to where they feel motivated but not frustrated. That's a really exciting balance that Ian and Steven and Michael were really able to kind of hone in on through the process. I mean, there's a lot of stuff from a perspective of trying to make the game approachable where we went out of our way to try to limit the number of times you only have one shot lit. You know, there's like, I would write these modes where I'm like, okay, you're going to hit this single shot, and it's going to track you all through these cool sequence of shots all over the play field. It's like, well, what if you can't hit that? What if you're stuck on the first shot, and you're just not finding it that day? It's like, we need to have more ways to do things. We need to have more things. And our core is to make a game everyone can enjoy, not just a game that the top skillful players can enjoy. Well, I find any player of any skill, when you're playing a new game, you're finding out where the shots are. You're maybe learning where the locks are. How do you start a mode? How do you start a multiball? That's all fine and dandy. But a lot of times the information is not there on the play field. It's not written in inserts. It's not very intuitive. You almost have to watch somebody else play so that you can look up on the screen. Guess what? You don't have to do that with a P3 format. It's all right there. And that's, again, one of the unsung wow factors of playing Portal and these games on P3. Yeah, I think that things like our status window within the hub, which is like incredibly integrated with the portal universe using the existing hazard icons plus newly created hazard icons to communicate in a non-textual way what's happening. We use the ant trail concept to show you how many shots you have left on each of the objectives. I think that these things are not things people are going to pick up on right away. but once you get over your overwhelming, I don't know what to do, and you start playing the game and you want to make situational choices, all that information is there and it's easily accessible on a quick glance. Brad, I don't want to take away from anything that you've done on the play field, on the cabinet, but Ian knows this. When I was at his place, I was obsessed with the pit. I'm leaning over the machine, taking a look and stuff. That's my favorite thing. What are some of the favorite things that you love that you've been able to put in? Yeah, well, the pit has some of the coolest illusions in the artwork. There's shadows and reflections that cross from one surface to another that at a glance you might think that that's actually just a physical shadow from some of the geometry of the play field, but it's actually baked into the artwork based on the angle that the player is seeing it from. And that's part of my process. big part of my process actually was working in Blender so that I could be previewing these things in three dimensions from a player's perspective. And what is this line of sight? If I'm trying to fake perspective on something that's printed on the flat artwork, but then crosses over onto a different three-dimensional surface, these are some crazy challenges. And I guess the thing that people probably are familiar with that you could relate it to is those chalk paintings where you see the photo from a particular perspective where it creates this illusion like the guy standing on it's going to like fall into a bottomless pit or something like that you know where i just saw it and i was just in italy and in caserta in the royal palace of caserta when you look at the ceilings the way they drew the 2d art to make it shadowy you're like oh that's sculpted no it's not it kind of reminded me like that in portal believe it or not I'm comparing you to the Royal Palace of Portrait. I just did it. Oh, that's all right. I'll take it. Take a look at the front metal surface over the kickback on your machine. Look at it from the player's perspective, and then walk over and look at it straight on. Yeah. And, you know, recently, it had been a few months since I had seen Portal in person, and I was down in Round Rock at Multimorphic headquarters, and I walked up to the game after being away from it, and I was really taken by those physical structures, specifically the side target cover, because it is so close to the glass coming out towards the player in such a confrontational way that it's the total opposite of what, you know, people used to think of the P3, which, oh, it's all in the back. No, this is so much in the front, it's surprising. You can't help but be immersed in this environment. That, to me, was just such an exciting opportunity to create that dollhouse like I described it earlier. Ian, it's obviously something very close to you, and you've had so many hours on this. You know the code like the back of your hand and everything else. But when you see somebody play it for the first time, whether it's myself or anybody, I'm not talking about the play testers. I'm talking about people stepping up to it for the first time. Are they getting the experience you wanted them to have, and are you learning from what they're seeing and playing? Definitely. I would say that the great thing in how we've designed the rule structure is pretty much everyone ends up getting that faith play jump. And even if you know nothing about Portal, if you were to step up to the game, you're probably going to complete one of the objectives like that thing, and you may not even know that there's an aerial feature there. and people are shocked when they see that. I am very critical of my own work. You know, I'm very... The other people on the team did an amazing job on a lot of things and this game's amazing, but I look at, like, every time a player gets confused, I sort of, like, am asking myself, what can I do differently? What should I do differently? How can I get them to notice things more? And I know that, to some degree, it's just as people get familiar with the games, they'll be able to slow down and look at the inserts. I know there's challenges with contrast with how we flash our video inserts where we don't have a high dynamic range. Like we don't have the same bright, bright as you can get from an insert. But I think that we do a lot of tricks within the visuals to make those things stand out. So I think the communication is there. I'm really happy with where we ended up with the 1.0 code. And people seem to be really connecting with it, whether it's at Expo or watching the stream or as it gets into more and more people's homes. You know, a lot of people are going to be seeing this maybe for the first time at the Houston Arcade Expo. Brad, you're going to be there. Stephen Silver will be there. That's coming up November 14th to 16th. Such a great time. Great. Absolutely one of my favorite shows. There'll be a seminar, too, so you'll get to see that firsthand experience when you're not at your other vendor booth there, Brad. No doubt. I will be definitely spending lots of time in the multimorphic space. It's a great show. Yeah, it's good. The feedback you got from Expo and other places, Ian, that you've heard? I mean, the things that make me the happiest have been the stories of parents with their child, not necessarily young child, could be like teenage child or early teens. And the younger generation seemed to connect with Portal in a way that is remarkable. And I've heard lots of people say, my kid doesn't care about pinball. like I take them to the show, but they don't really connect with any of these games. And they lit up when they saw Portal. And they were so excited to it. And at TPF, there was this one young man who, like he just went back in the line for like all of TPF. He just kept looping back. Maybe, I don't know. There you go, it's Henry. Yeah, that is great to see younger people get into pinball, but I got to put my hand up here. Old farts like me also enjoying playing Portal, and you can too. The best place to play it, again, coming up, the Houston Arcade Expo, but where can people find this? Where can people buy this and get their P3 in their homes? Yeah, so you can order a P3 or if you own a P3, you can order the Portal module from multimorphic.com. There are locations that have Portal already. Justin Wise from Wise Trailers has put his demo P3 on location at a local bar, which I don't remember the name of, but I think you can get information on the Multimorphic website about sort of partnered operators. So there is a site. Within the site, there's a place where you can find up-to-date information for well-maintained P3s on location. And we also have ambassadors in various areas who are willing to let people come to their homes and try out P3s, and we can connect people that way. So all of that information through Multimorphic.com. All right, perfect. And check out the Discord channel as well, too. You get a great newsletter. Jerry does a wonderful job. And now you've got Kevin, who's going to be giving us all this information and great content, too, from a fan's perspective. But really, just to help spread the wonderful word of Portal and the P3 format. Brad, have fun in Houston. Ian, I hope to see you soon. And again, congratulations on your work on Portal. Thank you, Jeff. Thanks, Jeff. We hope you enjoyed our pinball profile. You can find everything on pinballprofile.com. We're on Twitter, X, Instagram, at Pinball Profile. You can email pinballprofile at gmail.com. Join our Facebook group as well. If you'd like to show your support, don't worry, the show will always be free, but it certainly helps, and we thank you for that, to great people like Erica's Pinball Journey, GME Law, Colin M., John L., and more. That's patreon.com slash pinballprofile. Go out and play Portal. You'll be glad you did. I'm Jeff Teoles. Thank you.