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Homebrew Seminar 2021

Pintastic New England·video·1h 45m·analyzed·Feb 9, 2022
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.034

TL;DR

Five homebrew designers share design processes, costs, and failures at Pintastic 2021.

Summary

A panel discussion from Pintastic New England 2021 featuring five homebrew pinball designers (Ryan McQuaid/Sonic the Hedgehog, Mark Seiden/Metroid, John Manuelian/Haunted Cruise, Zach Sharpe Fry/Poker Homebrew, Brian Smith/PinCraft) sharing their design processes, tools, costs, and failures. The discussion covers design methodologies ranging from CAD to graph paper to virtual pinball, software frameworks like Mission Pinball and Unity, material sourcing, and hard-won lessons about mistakes in construction, electrical work, and playtesting.

Key Claims

  • Sonic the Hedgehog is 'the most polished homebrew machine I've ever seen'

    high confidence · Moderator's opening assessment of Ryan McQuaid's machine

  • Ryan McQuaid has declined offers of $75,000-$77,000+ for Sonic the Hedgehog and insured it for more than $77,000 when shipping

    high confidence · Panel discussion about machine value; verified by multiple panelists

  • Ryan McQuaid spent approximately 1,000-1,500 hours building Sonic the Hedgehog with ~$5,000-$6,000 in material costs

    high confidence · Ryan's direct statement during cost discussion

  • John Manuelian has been working on Haunted Cruise for 'well over 10 years' and is on at least fifth or sixth playfield iteration

    high confidence · Panelist introduction and later design journey discussion

  • John Manuelian spent approximately $10,000 on Haunted Cruise parts alone (excluding his time investment)

    high confidence · John's direct statement during cost discussion

  • Mission Pinball Framework is available and accessible to non-programmers, supporting both Fast and Multimorphic board sets

    high confidence · Multiple panelists (Brian Smith, John Manuelian) confirming framework accessibility

  • Unity has a free version available for development and prototyping, with paid version (~$150/month) required for commercial production if company revenue exceeds $100,000/year with 10+ employees

    medium confidence · Panel discussion about software options; details somewhat uncertain regarding current Unity licensing terms

  • Mark Seiden's biggest failure was plugging 5-volt light boards into a 12-volt line, requiring complete disassembly and overnight replacement before Pintastic

    high confidence · Mark's direct failure story during discussion

  • Baltic birch cabinet-grade plywood costs approximately $100 per 4x8 sheet ($25 per blank when pre-cut), versus ~$60 from Lowe's birch plywood

Notable Quotes

  • “I have never seen a homebrew machine as good as Sonic the Hedgehog, and that's not just because one of my best friends made it.”

    Moderator@ 2:24 — Sets Sonic the Hedgehog as benchmark for homebrew quality

  • “The current bid is $75,000 for Sonic the Hedgehog, and he still won't sell it. He insured it for more than that when he shipped it to Chicago.”

    Panel discussion@ 28:48 — Demonstrates exceptional value and Ryan's personal attachment to machine

  • “Don't get shitty plywood. It'll save you a bunch of trouble... Don't get particle board. That will disintegrate. MDF does not grab. It crumbles when you try to put something in it.”

    Mark Seiden@ 24:44 — Critical material guidance for builders; directly contradicts new Stern home pin use of MDF

  • “I only knew I wanted lots of drop targets. So I just measured drop targets. Went to CAD and just, how can I fit as many of these as possible on a playfield?”

    Zach Sharpe Fry@ 14:06 — Shows constraint-based design approach

  • “You don't need to have all the skills. There's tools and people that can help you with just about any gap in knowledge that you have.”

    John Manuelian@ 13:40 — Emphasizes accessibility of homebrew building in 2021

  • “Failure, I don't really see failures as failures because it's just a learning experience. So in order to get better, you've got to screw up.”

    John Manuelian@ 27:15 — Philosophy on iterative design and learning

Entities

Ryan McQuaidpersonMark SeidenpersonJohn ManuelianpersonZach Sharpe FrypersonBrian SmithpersonSonic the Hedgehog (homebrew)gameMetroid Pinball (homebrew)gameHaunted Cruise (homebrew)

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Homebrew machines achieving valuations competitive with or exceeding commercial limited editions; raises questions about value proposition of premium commercial models

    medium · Sonic valued $75,000+; compared to Jersey Jack LE at $10,500+; suggests homebrew quality/uniqueness premium

  • ?

    community_signal: Homebrew seminar at Pintastic shows active knowledge-sharing and mentorship; Mark Seiden mentored Ryan McQuaid two years prior in same venue; strong community support structure evident

    high · Ryan McQuaid: 'I got my start two years ago in this very room thanks to this gentleman right here [Mark Seiden]'

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball Life supplier ecosystem expansion critical to homebrew accessibility; homebrew parts section didn't exist when speakers started; community infrastructure enables modern builders

    high · John Manuelian: 'When I started, they didn't have a homebrew section. Most of those mechs that they have now, they didn't exist... You guys don't realize how lucky you have it with Pinball Life these days.'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Constraint-based design emerging as methodology; Zach Sharpe Fry designed entire playfield around maximizing drop targets rather than starting with narrative theme

    medium · Zach Sharpe Fry: 'I only knew I wanted lots of drop targets. So I just measured drop targets... how can I fit as many of these as possible on a playfield?'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Modern homebrew designers emphasize authentic gameplay mechanics over surface theme; Zach Sharpe Fry created Poker-themed machine that 'actually is poker' vs existing poker games that are 'just themed around poker'

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.315

0:00
Good afternoon, everyone. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to tell you that this was church. I need call and response here to keep us awake and keep us moving. Who was out partying late last night? Who had a lot of fun last night? I know my crowd did. No, I'm doing that tonight. You guys were partying without me last night? I went to bed at like 4. I got a lot of energy left in me. I'm good. All right. So, with the chaos of everything else here, I do not have any slides, guys. And what I usually say at work is, you're welcome.
0:39
Because slide decks are boring, and that's not what we're here to talk about. I wanted to start off with a homebrew joke, because I don't know why we call it homebrew, because none of us actually brew any beer. Well, you do. He does, doesn't he? Yeah, he does a lot.
0:53
Let's put that story all together. So, why don't we go through and introduce everyone. we will let Mr. Ryan McQuaid start. My name's Randy. Randy? I thought it was Brian. Yesterday was Brian. Brian was yesterday. No, Randy's the one I got over. Hi, everybody. I'm Ryan McQuaid. I made Sonic the Hedgehog's pinball. I actually got my start two years ago in this very room thanks to this gentleman right here who will now introduce himself. Hi, I'm Mark Seiden. I created Metroid Pinball, which, if you were at the last Pintastic, was here.
1:26
Now it works for JJP. Let's go Hi I'm John Manuelian everybody knows me as Lynn I have been working on Haunted Cruise for well over 10 years and I want it to be done Never gonna happen I'm Zach Fry I'm working on the Poker Homebrew it was started just before the last Fantastic and I was like oh I have to finish it in a year and then we didn't have a Fantastic but I barely finished it for this year but it worked out I'm Brian Smith Pincraft is our game you might see that in the pre-playroom myself and Connor started that project about four years ago now so really excited, the first show has actually been to this large, so it's been fun applause so this New England area has got some shining stars here I've never seen a homebrew machine as good as Sonic and that's not just because one of my best friends made it.

high confidence · Mark Seiden's material sourcing information

  • PinCraft is based on Kings of Steel playfield with extensive modifications, created using Multimorphic P3 board and Mission Pinball Framework

    high confidence · Brian Smith's introduction and design process explanation

  • “This whole playfield is basically one big monument to mistakes and changes.”

    Mark Seiden@ 22:23 — Illustrates reality of design iteration; shows CAD failures (flipper spacing)

  • “I was going to do better than that. Because none of them actually play poker. They're all just themed around poker.”

    Zach Sharpe Fry@ 5:19 — Shows desire for mechanical/rules authenticity in Poker Homebrew

  • “Right now is a great time to make a homebrew. The Multimorphic P3 board set was available. So it just seemed like a great time to make a homebrew.”

    Brian Smith@ 6:02 — Indicates 2021 as inflection point for homebrew accessibility

  • “My time's worth quite a bit. It doesn't count so go ahead.”

    Ryan McQuaid@ 29:20 — Humorous acknowledgment that personal time investment in hobby projects is not recoverable financially

    • game
    Poker Homebrewgame
    PinCraftgame
    Pintastic New Englandevent
    Pinballisticgame
    Mission Pinball Frameworkproduct
    Multimorphic P3product
    Visual Pinballproduct
    Jersey Jack Pinballcompany
    Stern Pinballcompany
    Pinball Lifecompany
    Kings of Steelgame
    Jurassic Park (production pinball)game
    Attack from Marsgame
    Pinball 2000product
    Unityproduct
    Connorperson

    high · Zach Sharpe Fry: 'None of them actually play poker. They're all just themed around poker. I want to make one that actually is poker.'

  • $

    market_signal: 2020-2021 inflection point for homebrew accessibility: pandemic period, hardware availability, software maturity (Mission Pinball, P3 boards), parts ecosystem (Pinball Life), and virtual prototyping tools converging

    medium · Multiple speakers reference recent improvements; Brian Smith emphasizes timing; Multimorphic P3 availability noted as enabling factor

  • ?

    event_signal: Homebrew seminars at regional pinball expos (Pintastic) functioning as educational and mentorship hubs; knowledge transfer from experienced to new builders documented

    high · Structure of seminar itself; Ryan McQuaid origin story tied to Pintastic 2019; John Manuelian notes 'this New England area has some shining stars'

  • $

    market_signal: Sonic the Hedgehog homebrew valued at $75,000+ with insurance coverage exceeding that amount; represents unprecedented homebrew valuation and demonstrates collector market recognition

    high · Panel discussion: '$75,000... $77,000... He insured it for more than that when he shipped it to Chicago'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Mark Seiden transitioned from independent homebrew designer to Jersey Jack Pinball employment; represents talent pipeline from hobby community to commercial manufacturer

    high · Mark Seiden introduction: 'I created Metroid Pinball... Now it works for Jersey Jack Pinball'

  • ?

    product_concern: Stern Pinball using MDF for home pinball playfields contradicts established homebrew best practice of plywood due to MDF inability to hold screws/posts over time

    high · Panel: 'MDF will just crumble as you try to move it... if it's just a screw post, it's just going to kind of pop out. Plywood, you'll at least be able to get it back in.' Note: 'new Stern home pins are done with MDF as playfields'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Multimorphic P3 board availability and Mission Pinball Framework maturity enabling explosive homebrew growth accessibility; enables non-programmers to participate

    high · Brian Smith: 'Right now is a great time to make a homebrew. The Multimorphic P3 board set was available.' John Manuelian: 'You don't need to have all the skills. There's tools and people that can help you.'

    • 2:30
    I have to say it's the most polished homebrew machine I've ever seen. Come on, you want to go? It's also very loud. What?
    2:45
    Who pressed start? Who's idea was that? You're fine. There we go. Did you actually mean to hit start? No. Like I said, it was probably my fat ass hit it. Nice job. Well, you know the house rule at my house. If you accidentally hit start with your ass, you have to play it. I have to play it. But you don't have to because you have a set. They know the drugs. So we're going to do some Sonic playing and show off some of the features of that. But let's talk about how we came up with the concept. And we're going to skip Sonic on this one because I can just sum this up for everybody. Squid is a Super Sonic fan. So it was basically the only choice he had. If he wanted to build a Sonic pinball machine, if he wanted to own one, he was going to have to build one.
    3:33
    Mark, do you want to talk about how you came up with the concept for Metroid? Sure. So I knew I wanted to make a game, and at one of the Pintastics, I had bought a half-populated Jurassic Park play field to use for spare parts and just, like, general reference measurements and stuff like that. so as I'm stripping it my brother was hanging out with me and he said oh you should make a Metroid machine that dinosaur thing could be Kraid and it could eat the ball and I was like yeah I should make a Metroid machine and I didn't obviously didn't use the Mac but that's how I came up with it same question so I'm actually a game developer by trade, and I was working on a PS3 pinball machine or pinball game. It was called Pinballistic. It was a download title. It was a heads-up game. Kind of interesting, but that kind of introduced me to the whole rule set idea and the whole development idea for pinball. Then I had this crazy idea, why don't I just build one? I started building four different machines, and then eventually I went to Haunted Cruise, and that's been one of many projects over the course of many years. Did Tim Ballistic get a retail release? It is PS3 downloadable. So we can still go buy it, like right now? Maybe.
    4:58
    The store's open, yeah. Someone get on their phone, check for us, give us the link. Put it on PS5, right?
    5:09
    Unlike the other themes here where they didn't exist and they wanted them to exist, I played a bunch of poker-themed games because there's a ton, and none of them really satisfied me. so I was like, I'm going to do better than that. Because none of them actually play poker. They're all just themed around poker. I want to make one that actually is poker and just see how that went.
    5:30
    Okay, we're going to stretch the mic out here for everyone. So I've been wanting to build a pinball machine for a while, but the hardware really wasn't mature yet. Not until recently. But we had a Kings of Steel. So raise your hand, who's played Kings of Steel?
    5:46
    Okay. Who thinks Kings of Steel is a great game? Hater. Okay. I don't know who that is back there. I don't know you. But anyway, it seemed like a good idea to take this Kings of Steel and make it into something awesome. And that's what we did at PinCraft. So we added a whole bunch of mechs, and it was a great time. And at the same time, the multi-morphic P3 board set was available. So it just seemed like a great time to make a homebrew.
    6:11
    Right now is a great time to make a homebrew. Oh, yeah. So you now decided to make a homebrew, huh? And you have a title that you had in mind. So how did you guys' individual design journeys go? And this is for anybody. How did you decide what it was going to look like, how you were going to plan it out, the features you wanted to have? So for me, there was a lot of theme integration that I had planned from the beginning. Like there was just, like Mark was saying, like just, oh, that thing could totally be great. thing's not working great and so when I see a whole bunch of different mechanisms from different pinball games that I really like and I say oh that would be perfect for Sonic so like the Attack from Mars similar like boss battle arena it's like perfect like punch Robotnik right in the face and just I kind of designed a few pieces that I knew I wanted and then filled in all the gaps so I streamed my entire build on my Twitch channel.
    7:16
    And basically, the arcade with five R's. Five R's. I have stickers. I should get stickers out. I want stickers. And I basically, I took a piece of plywood. I glued a piece of graph paper on the entire thing. And just like fired up the screen. I was like, we're going to drill some holes today. and just flipped it around. If something didn't work, moved it, and just built a game. I had some ideas of what I wanted in the game, but it was a very organic construction.
    7:53
    So not a lot of planning. You didn't go into CAD and CAD anything out. You just kind of started. No, not at first, but the second version, that was all CAD.
    8:03
    Because, Brian, you did kind of the opposite. You started with building a virtual VDX game. I started it in visual pinball, which is a free pinball simulator that you can design in and you can play it in, which is a stark contrast to Mark, who grabbed a piece of plywood, put graph paper on it, which is brilliant, and then started drilling. I kind of had a chance to flip and see if my ideas would work before I even bothered to build them, and I think that let me skip basically a whole trial and error of Whitewood. So this is version two, but it really feels like even more mature than that. The graph paper served two purposes. One, so when I was going to transfer it to CAD, I would know where everything was without having to really measure in detail. And the other purpose was, since it was all recorded, if the ball did something cool, I could go back and see why it did something cool, where it came from, where exactly on the graph paper that thing happened, and then I could react to that with the design element. And we're going to get into the different programming languages and hardware and everything later. Can you turn my mic down a little bit?
    9:11
    But, Lynn, this isn't your first homebrew. When I'm posing questions here, you can chime in with any of your other games before. But I know you're programming in Unity.
    9:22
    My first games that I wrote a long time ago actually are in C++ because C++ is godly, and I don't care what any of you say. It's godly.
    9:33
    And the only reason I'm using Unity now, or C Sharp now, is because Unity just has everything built in for graphics and sound and everything, so I'm lazy and I don't want to rewrite everything again. And they have like, you know, a multi-million dollar team dealing with this stuff across platforms, so why not utilize that for a little bit of a month?
    9:53
    And not only that, but I was also using Unity at my job, so it was just easier to just use that rather than try to get Unreal or Godot these days, which Godot sounds really good, I might switch to that. Yeah, but I generally use C Sharp for things, but I use a lot of C++ for Arduino code or kernel code or just really high-level, very fast control code.
    10:19
    And what Brian was saying about – or Ryan was saying about – Brian, Ryan, what's your name? Randy. Randy McQuaid. I knew it was a poet. What Randy was saying about Visual Pinball, the PS3 game that I worked on, and we actually made everything in visual pinball, and I created an export of visual pinball to work on PS3. So I was really used to that, and I started making games, or like my custom homebrew things in visual pinball, but very quickly I realized the physics suck.
    10:49
    If you have a ramp like this, the ball needs to be over here. It can't be over here. Physics are fine. The physics suck. When were you using it? They've been constantly upgrading the physics for years. Visual pinball 8 and 9. 10. 10 is good. I started ten years ago, my friend.
    11:06
    Okay, I'm just going to say this. I worked in video games before as well, and every programmer says that everybody else's game engine sucks. I just want you to know that.
    11:16
    Well, they're not wrong. Exactly. Because you and I can do it better, of course. Oh, yeah. We just don't have any time. Right, so that's why we have to use someone else's. Yeah, we do. So if somebody wanted to use something like Unity, how much would that cost them as an option? I don't know. I have it attached to my credit card. I think it's like $150 a month or something. You don't even need the Pro. No, you don't need the Pro additional Unity. You can get the free version to do it. I think they're a little bit... Okay, so there is a free version. Yes, there's a free version of Unity that allows you to do development and prototypes and all of that. It's only if you're going to produce a production game that you have to... Well, no. If your company makes over $100,000 a year, then you have to work... Wait, wait, wait. Ant has to have 10 employees. Yes, something like that. But at one point, there were limitations with how plugins worked. I don't know if they changed that because you had to have Pro in order to use plugins, but now, I guess, with the package manager, I don't know. So that is a viable option for somebody who is comfortable with that kind of stuff already. There's lots of different avenues you can come at this from. Yeah, Unity is great. Unreal is also very, very good. I recommend that.
    12:20
    That has native C++ built into it, I think. And like I said, Godot is really cool. It looks great. and I think the new Sonic Colors that was released was made in Godot. That's not praised.
    12:36
    It's famous for being a buggy mess right now. But the fact that a free engine can do that is pretty amazing. And with the right team, it can do something great. Excuse me, a free engine.
    12:49
    Unity is free. But UE is not free. It is. There are free versions. All right, you guys can have an argument later.
    13:01
    Sorry, I'm not licensed for both of them. If all of this is sounding rather scary and you can't really follow C-sharp, super nerd crap, I can't. I'm not a coder by trade. I am a nerd, but I don't know how to code generally, and yet I somehow managed to code all of this. So we have tools that can help people like me who don't really know how to code. I'm using the Mission Pinball framework, as is Mark. I do know how to code, and I chose to use Mission Pinball. Wow, yeah.
    13:30
    And that helps make everything a lot more accessible. Really, the homebrew community and everything is right now experiencing explosive growth in accessibility. So you don't need to have all the skills.
    13:44
    There's tools and people that can help you with just about any gap in knowledge that you have. Do you guys want to talk about... about your development engine or your process at all?
    14:03
    I only knew I wanted lots of drop targets. So I just measured drop targets. I went to CAD and just, how can I fit as many of these as possible on a play field?
    14:12
    And then I made a play field off that CAD and I realized all my measurements were wrong. So I moved everything and I did not redo that in CAD and then I wish I had graph paper with me.
    14:22
    Okay, so another CAD person. yeah so on pin craft since we're using an existing game uh we kind of just started taping stuff up okay we did it the other way um we removed a bunch of things we didn't like like the right target that does nothing in that game uh made a loop we put cardboard on the game tried the shots honestly you can get really far just using some tag board and some tape and just trying your designs out um from there in terms of software we also use mission pinball framework uh we which is fantastic. You don't really need to know how to code. You can use either the fast or the multimorphic board sets, and it supports both of them. It's got a great user community.
    15:02
    Sometimes I get frustrated because I can't figure something out, but the platform is really great. So our game was mostly software.
    15:10
    The artwork and, like, the cabinet artwork and the play field artwork, that came last. That was the very last thing we did. Up until a few months ago, that was still Kings of Steel.
    15:20
    So we had Sharpies out, and we were writing on the inserts the different things, we figured out what formula worked to make the game fun.
    15:28
    All right, so now we're going to talk about the next topic, which is tools and cost. So, not all of us have $10,500 to go buy a Jersey Jack Limited Edition.
    15:42
    From what I hear, it's not even Jersey Jack has one of those. No, Jack, specifically, does not own one.
    15:49
    That's actually kind of ironic. I didn't know that. how much did it cost and what tooling did you have to buy to build yourself a custom pinball machine what is this going to cost now I have a makerspace that I can go to and I know Mark and you did some of that as well and so there are community workshops that have CNC routers and things but what kind of tooling did you have to buy at home that you weren't expecting and what does all this pinball hardware cost don't ask me so you can get started for free like there's a lot of work that you can that you can do on a homebrew machine for no cost whatsoever like we said you can start with vpx you can start coding with your digital version um and a lot of the stuff that you do to build a pinball machine can be done with tools that you already have i mean there are a few tools that you're going to want to pick up that just make the job easier forstner bits um definitely buy a set of those Buy Forrestner bits. They're amazing and like 30 bucks. But for the most part, with limited access to either a makerspace or somebody else who has access to, say, something like a CNC machine. I don't have my own CNC machine, but I have a Mark. And Mark doesn't have a CNC machine, but he has a makerspace. And so together. Lynn has a CNC machine. Well, now I don't need you anymore. I have two of them. Well, we have the new one at my makerspace, but Lynn told me yesterday that he's building a back-floor machine. That's awesome. So we might become best friends. I have a small one already. I'm building a bigger one because it's too small.
    17:26
    But the rest of your games can be as expensive or as cheap as you want it to be. You can be like Mark, and you can pick yourself up a cheap, fully populated play field. I was kind of hoping we'd have the flea market here so that I could point everybody to the flea market and say, go buy some crappy pinball play fields that have stuff on them. or you can go on to sites like Pinball Life and they have a whole homebrew section that has full mechanisms. So I scavenged what I could. I actually got a few parts from your Jurassic Park including a nice little coil with Sonic's face on it and then I bought the rest from Pinball Life and whatever is unique, you just make yourself using whatever tools you have available. So you guys don't realize how lucky you have it with Pinball Life these days. When I started, they didn't have a homebrew section. Most of those mechs that they have now, they didn't exist. or you couldn't find them or you had to find a pinball machine and take them off of them. And there were many, many mechs. And there's still a bunch of things I need to buy from Spare Pinball Parts Australia because no one has them around.
    18:27
    So everybody who wants to start now, very, very lucky. But if you have that problem, you did it to yourself because that means your game is complicated and has weird parts. So if you don't want to do that, just use everyday parts. Just because Pinball 2000 is rare doesn't mean it's complicated. No, I love it. I'm just kidding. It was too easy.
    18:47
    I deserve this. Sorry, Mark. I'm sorry. Pinball 2000 was the best system that Barreley Williams ever made. It was the culmination of all of their years together of everything. It was P3 before its time. There's one problem with it, though. There's a lot of problems with it. There's one big one that I encountered today. My flipper coil burnt out, right? And I'm trying to replace it. there's no outlet right in the front like a lot of the other machines.
    19:16
    I had to plug in somewhere behind the machine. Alright, I got to do this. How many of you have actually used the power plug inside a pinball machine? Wow, more people than I thought. I never use it. I don't dare plug a soldering iron into it.
    19:35
    Yeah. It is not useful at home, but in the field, it's amazingly useful. I put a full power strip in my home group. See, that makes sense to me. Full power strip right in the bottom. Soldering iron, everything. I think I got two daisy chains and frozen, but don't tell anybody.
    19:57
    It's frozen. It's okay. Where is frozen? At home. Boo. And? The motherboard is in Haunted Cruise right now.
    20:10
    I'll give you a pass. So, next thing in your process. You guys all have very different approaches to this. Some people just started putting cardboard and duct tape on a machine. Other people went into CAD. No offense. There's no shame in that. I'm proud of it, to be honest. I would be, too. I mean, if you get a steel ball not to destroy a cardboard ramp, you're doing something right. Hey, what is this made of? Paper right now? Yeah, all of my ramps are still paper and tape and... Duct tape, yeah. And they work fine. And paint. I painted them so they looked okay. Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, a dark side, and holds the universe together. Actually, I'm not using duct tape on these ramps. It's all blue painter's tape. Really? I knew that.
    20:53
    Painter's tape is great. So, can we talk about the greatest failures? Now, you guys are building a pinball machine for the first time with the exclusion of McQuaid down the end there who just succeeds at everything annoyingly right. Are you kidding me? I'm ready for my failure story. I got it right here.
    21:11
    You're taking on this major undertaking that has code, mechanical stuff, metalworking at times, plastic, fab, everything.
    21:19
    What was the biggest challenges and failures, and how did you overcome them? So I'm going to start right here.
    21:26
    This is where a flipper goes. There is more than one hole there. That's because when I first did my CAD, I screwed up so badly, a ball couldn't fit between my flippers.
    21:39
    So I had to just, I had this one. Yeah, you're happy now, but you'd all be saying something different if it was actually here like that.
    21:50
    So nothing makes you feel more like an amateur than like, I can't even get flipper spacing even kind of correct. So, like, basically, I had to scoot everything over by a quarter inch just with brute force and drills. And then I had to improvise the entire right part of the lower third because that threw everything off. Now the ball couldn't fit in the in lane, and I had to do all kinds of janky crap to get this thing running. And that's something you would assume is really basic. And, yeah, you would assume, like, looking at this that I know what I'm doing. But I also make massive, really stupid mistakes. this whole play field is basically one big monument to mistakes and changes so yeah I put a little bit of concept art on there so it looks kind of pretty but most of it is just X'd out holes that I didn't end up using or were in the wrong place places that I attacked it with a router and some like just hand tools and just destroyed it this entire section was just cut out and moved over like once you have something that works it doesn't mean it's good and your next thing you're going to do is destroy it and make it better and failing is part of that so hang on put that back up there my next question was going to be about materials anyways so let's talk about I know that let's call your first white wood was a virtual one right yeah and so that was your second this is your third yep okay what is this Mark what is this that is half inch Baltic birch cabinet grade with exterior glue I have a mark Get yourself a mark. No, you can get that at Bolter Plywood somewhere near Boston. That's from M-Town near Boston. I don't know. How much?
    23:32
    I bought a 4x8 sheet, had them cut it into 2x4, and it was about $100 a sheet. So $25 a blank. Okay, so $100 a sheet of plywood. So I get my plywood from Lowe's, and it's not as good quality as that, but it's still birch top plywood, and it's $60 for a 4x8. Then I have them cut. So you can go cheaper. If you really want it nice, get his stuff. If you want stuff to just make stuff with, which Haunted Cruise is actually made out of the Lowe's plywood.
    24:02
    Just go to Lowe's. You're probably better off on your first one with the Lowe's plywood. Really? Yeah. The whole reason I got this is because during your seminar two years ago, you said, don't get shitty plywood. It'll save you a bunch of trouble. No. Get shitty plywood for your first stuff. Get the $40 for a four-foot by eight-foot sheet for your first. I've got crappier play than what he described. Okay. I could not find it at my local Lowe's or... You wouldn't be able to trick me. Don't get particle board. That will disintegrate. Let's all just listen to the work level of this play field.
    24:37
    This is the opposite of flat. So I was going to bring up MDF. So you're saying to not do an MDF. No MDF. MDF does not grab. It crumbles when you try to put something in. That's interesting because those of you who don't know, the new Stern home pins are done with MDF as playfields. Yeah, no.
    24:57
    Just observation. Maybe as a production playfield at the time, but if you're moving things around all the time, you need to have plywood because it'll grab. MDF will just crumble as you try to move it. And if you hit the ball hard enough on a post, if it's just a screw post, it's just going to kind of pop out and you won't be able to get it back in. Plywood, you'll at least be able to get it back in. So going back to two years ago when Mark said don't buy cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap plywood, you probably should have said don't buy anything that's made of particles. You want more than three plies. Okay. Why is that? It just shatters when you drill into it.
    25:35
    What about you guys? I know you had a play field that was already there. It was a production play field. What was your play field? I used Lowe's plywood. Lowe's plywood? I found they had two-by-four cabinet-grade plywood in a corner for like $20 a sheet of that, and I was like, cool. Cabinet-grade is the way to go. Don't think I'm letting them get away with not talking about their failures. So, Mark, you're up.
    25:58
    There are many failures, but the one that sticks out the most is I was getting the game ready for Pentastic, and I was hooking up all my light boards. I plugged them into the 12-volt line. They are 5 lights So I had to disassemble all my light boards and replace all of them I had to get stuff overnighted I got it done but it was very stressful
    26:23
    That's the one that sticks out the most. So Haunted Cruise is on its either fifth or sixth play field iteration. The first two were not holographic pinball play fields. The final three, one of which was that foam core board that I put together, and she has to make sure everything fits, or I guess it's Normandium or something people call it. And then the other two were made out of plywood. The first one was a cheap three-ply plywood from Home Depot, not Lowe's, which was even cheaper. And then I started getting the Birch stuff. That's as far as plate fields go but as far as the failures go there's way too many to count um but failure i don't really see failures as failures because it's just a learning experience so in order to get better you've got to screw up and that's why i went through five play field that's why i decided oh i'm switching platforms that's why it's taking me 10 plus years and um i kind of sat away from it for four years and did some other things because you need to think about it you need to figure out where you're going with it and what the right process is based on what you've done in the past. So you don't keep spending money because you can easily spend way too much money on these things. I probably spent close to $10,000 on Haunted Cruise alone, just parts that you'll never see ever again because I got it. No, I don't want to use that. So having a good plan is probably a good lesson to take from that initially. Like lots of either hand drawings or CAD drawings or visual pinball drawings or whatever drawings just to kind of get an idea of what you want so you don't waste way too much money. And then be prepared to waste a lot of money.
    28:17
    It's just – that's just how it is. It's pinball. Well, it's pinball design. No, pinball is a waste of money.
    28:26
    You can give me that machine then. I don't mind buying it from somebody. You ain't the first. I think the current bid is $75,000 for Sonic, and he still won't sell it. Yep.
    28:40
    Not going to happen. He shipped it across the country. $77,000. Did we hear $77,000? Anyone? Last call? Anyone else?
    28:48
    Nope. That wouldn't be enough. He insured it for more than that when he shipped it out to Chicago. I was actually hoping it got lost. If it got dumped in a river on the way back from the show, that would have been fine. It's got to be at the show, though. overall I think we have around honestly just five or six thousand dollars in total material cost in that game however I have around a thousand to fifteen hundred hours of my life into that game it got me through the pandemic so maybe your time's not worth anything my time's worth quite a bit it doesn't count so go ahead I was going to say, your time only counts if you're not enjoying it.
    29:32
    I wasted a lot of time too, but it was all fun. Was it? Was it really? Those sleepless nights? Those 3 a.m. mornings?
    29:41
    Those, why is this not working when it just worked and the show is two days from today? Yes, it's not. Or the show is right now. Yeah. What do you say?
    29:51
    Then I've been there. Yeah. No video card. No. Failure? Failures. This is my first attempt at a homebrew. Last time, I didn't know how to crimp a connector pin, so I did the whole thing by hand crimping them with just pliers. And I got the whole thing flipping, and then all the connectors started falling apart. And then I just gave up on that whole game and just shoved it in the corner of my garage and started a new one.
    30:19
    Roger Cruz is still mostly hand-crimped with pliers. I didn't get a crimping tool until like last year. I was going to say, Christmas is coming up, boys. I'll buy you crimpers. You should buy a crimping tool. Buy a cool, fine-for-ster bit. I agree with that. All right, so we've got to put a web page together here because the ratcheting crimpers. Yeah, those are the best. They're cheap. They're like $22 or something. I found that out way too late. Also, don't be afraid to just buy pre-pinned connectors. I actually saved myself probably two full days of crimping just by buying little three-pin jumper wires that go between the lights. Those work great for small things, but when you're doing long runs of wires, you're going to have to learn how to crimp them. Oh, yeah. You don't have to need to crimp, but it saves yourself some time. For what it takes.
    31:05
    So a couple of the mistakes I made is that we have an old valley. We attempted to reuse parts, like the linear flippers, and let me tell you that was the biggest mistake I ever made. Not only are they wired strangely, which I found out when I blew up one of the boards, but also that they're just terrible mechs. So over time, we replaced every one of them after we learned. We did a trial show before this one. We went to the York show in Pennsylvania.
    31:30
    I found out there that my crimps weren't good enough. I found out my serial cables weren't the correct pinouts. And I also had one of the flippers too strong. So we blew out a coil bracket and overheated that coil. You could burn yourself just by touching it. So honestly, I agree, though. You know, it's perseverance. You just got to keep going. You're going to make lots of mistakes, but really it's just another opportunity to learn. And I also will say you will put either a pile of time, like thousands of hours in the game, or a pile of money. It's the only two way to make it successful.
    32:04
    So I think the common thread I heard there between everybody is this is an iterative process. Absolutely. I mean, Lynn, we know you do software, agile, all of that stuff. So you're used to this. those of you who don't work in software who don't work in kind of an agile software building environment was this a hard task for you guys or was this just something you just got used to a fail and retry I worked in that software I'm a software too I also work in software I don't work in software someone was supposed to say something it was not like that I actually didn't find it too bad of an adjustment mostly because once you have it right, it's right. So you can move on and then suddenly your accomplishments start to snowball. So each one of these things that actually functions was like an afternoon of debugging, fine-tuning it, whatever. But then once it was done, it's done. Unless I go touch something else and screw it up. But then once the first mode is done, I can just make my second one and never worry about the first one again. So eventually, yeah, you do have to do a lot of iteration, but your finished products will snowball over time. And by the time you get to the show, you have 1,000 successes on top of your 2,000 failures.
    33:30
    So in the spirit of asking questions that you don't know the answer to, which I never do, I'm going to spin that last question around. So, all you software people here, how was it to manufacture something? And how many of you had not manufactured something before?
    33:46
    Manufacturing is hard. Not if you pay someone else to do it. So, making things and making a physical thing is amazing.
    34:01
    Being in software, everything is digital now, and it's horrible. When I first started writing games, I was working on Nintendo DS software. I worked with the company on a couple games. I could go right to GameStop and buy it. It was great. There was only two titles. After that, everything was digital. I couldn't buy it, hold it, say, I made this, put it on the wall, or anything like that. It sucks. So pinball being an innate physical thing, yes, there's virtual pinballs and things. It doesn't play right. We all know it doesn't play right. It's a physical thing with how you nudge it, how you shake it, how you play it, all the little nuances, all the physics errors in real life.
    34:44
    It feels really good to make something. And my father had always done some woodworking when I was young, so he taught me a little bit of that. So I kind of knew a little bit of it. But I kind of ran with it and was like, the first bunch of playbills I made, They were all hand CNC cut with 1-8 inch router bits, very carefully, and it took forever. It stunk, but it had to be done to cut all those inserts, cut all those little holes and things. And after I did that three times, it said never again, so I bought a CNC machine.
    35:17
    But it feels really good to have this physical thing that you've made, that you can play, that you can hold, that other people can play, and you can watch them from afar, which is also why I make arcade and redemption machines every once in a while too. Some of you know I made Orbital Approach and I'm making a couple other things. Just watching afar people play it and have a smile on their face or get angry, it's amazing to see people do that. And it's worth it. It's worth all the aggravation and all the figuring out and all the money that you spend into it, at least for me. manufacturing stuff is hard especially like metal working or any sort of stuff like that I don't have that skill set at all but I found the two basic things was one I got a 3D printer and that made stuff way easier and number two I learned to just buy max off pinball life instead of making them and that helped a lot I was going to say just know your strengths if you don't want to build a cabinet you're not a cabinet maker, go buy a cabinet. Go buy a game that's empty. You don't have to build the cabinet. I'd also echo a 3D printer is probably one of the best prototype tools you can have and one of the cheapest because, like my game, you look at all the posts, all the plastics, everything are 3D printed. It gets you a long way in the prototyping phase. But just know your strengths.
    36:39
    Do what you can do. Again, if you don't want to build custom mechs, you don't have to. There's something to buy off-the-shelf mechs and just make your game around that. Know you can't make mechs and play to your strengths. Likewise, if you're a mechanical engineer, go nuts. He's absolutely right. We actually touched on this in Chicago.
    36:56
    Everything is a nail if you have a hammer. So if you have a 3D printer and you're comfortable with it, 3D print everything. If you're a woodworker and you're comfortable with it, make everything out of wood.
    37:09
    If you're a welder, is Derek here? I don't know. I keep calling him out for these. What's up, buddy? If you ever made a homebrew, the whole thing should be made out of metal. why not like if you have a skill lean into it and then but don't be afraid to learn new ones so I didn't know how to weld but a couple YouTube videos and the $60 Harbor Freight spot welder later and I have wire forms and now I know how to weld after ruining a bunch of stock throwing it against the wall until it didn't break I'm like okay now I can make some ramps and I did YouTube is your friend in learning a lot of things absolutely knowledge is no longer a secret knowledge does not need to be paid for. You can find it.
    37:52
    So my next one, Lynn, you don't get to answer this one, I'm sorry. You know, you're a game developer.
    37:59
    Worked with people like you in the past. But you'll know that this question doesn't apply to you. The rest of you aren't game developers. So I know you had a notion of what you wanted. You were talking about you wanted a real poker game, not just cards dropping around everywhere. you wanted to actually play poker, right? And you had a concept. Now, how did you build that concept to be the game? What things did you do to really focus in on that?
    38:29
    So the first thing I'm going to respond to that is, we are now. We weren't game developers. We are now.
    38:38
    Go ahead. Not you. yeah I'm not a professional game developer but I played a lot of like game jams and stuff like weekend long stuff so I had like a basic idea of how to do the game part well if you got all these cards that are poker cards and you hit one that goes in your hand and then it's like it also just went from there and it's pretty straight forward so how the rules go I haven't played your game yet I'm sorry so poker is a I like poker by the way large community of poker players with a lot of different games. So did you do a Texas Hold'em or did you do a more classic five card or a hate Texas Hold'em?
    39:19
    So I did seven card stuff. Seven card stuff. So Texas Hold'em without the random betting. Either way you want to go. I did do some hobbyist game programming in the past. That's how I learned to write software when I was really young. I wrote a bunch of games. So I had some background there, and I played a lot of pinball, so I kind of knew what pinball rules should be like. Yeah, but in your case, you took Metroid, which was an existing game. So you kind of had a wireframe of what the game should be and how it should be. How did you bring that into pinball? Yeah, so sometimes I think the game is more Metroid than pinball, actually, because I made it like an open world rule set. basically you're always in a mode you're exploring a map each room is a mode and there are doors to change your mode as you explore the map and reach the boss so I just took what Metroid was and said how can I map this to pinball rules and I don't know exactly how it came out I think it's cool other people don't now it's been special for a lot of us because we've got to watch McSquids and Mark's builds through. I keep calling you a different name every time I refer to you. I'm loving it. Keep it going. Okay. I answer to all of them. All right, Randy.
    40:51
    You just made me lose my trade-off. What was I saying? You were talking about watching my process. Both of your processes. Watching it unfold is very interesting when you're watching them stream it on Twitch, especially Mark. Mark has been bug hunting that game for two years live on stream. So for your rules, you probably shouldn't shoot for MMO-level pinball rules. That's another one of my mistakes, I think. On your first try. On my first try. On your first try. Go for it on your second try.
    41:23
    Ryan, same question. You had Sonic, which was a game existing already. I know you integrated the sound titles and everything really well with that, but how did you change it to be a pinball game? So I actually set myself up for success there by choosing Sonic as a theme. Sonic already integrates with pinball really well. There is already a Sonic pinball game. There is pinball elements in all of the other games. And the rest of my approach was much like Mark. I just took what I loved about the game, and I would say from all my experience playing pinball machines over the years, how can I make this into pinball? So I had a bonus level. One of my favorite modes in the entire game is the bonus pipe from Sonic 2.
    42:08
    And in the game, you're running down this pipe, and you have three objectives. And if you hit them, you keep going. If you miss them, you're out. So it's just, all right, how do I make that into pinball? All right, multiball. You start with two balls, have an objective. If you hit it, you keep going. Now there's three balls. If you hit it, you keep going. And it fits with the theme. And then say, all right, that's perfect. Let's do it. And then you try it out and, oh, yeah, that's really fun. All right, on to the next thing. How can I make Robotnik work? Stick him in the middle.
    42:40
    Try to fight him. That works too. It really is. It's helpful to go from an existing theme and convert it to what you think would be a fun way to do that in pinball.
    42:52
    Not all your ideas will work, but the ones that do will make you really happy. Awesome. I'm sorry I forgot your name. I'm in fact, Brian.
    43:03
    Hey, Brian. Perfect. I'll remember that. No, I won't. I don't remember any names. I'm sorry, everybody.
    43:09
    So you took an existing play field and an existing game and rethemed it and reengineered it. So what did you do in your process to make it vastly different than what it was originally?
    43:20
    Yeah. So a couple of things. You know, we used Minecraft as a theme. And Minecraft really doesn't translate very well to pinball. and when we looked at it, like, we don't want to make a Minecraft game that's no fun as a pinball machine. We want to make a pinball machine that's just fun to play to begin with, and then we try to incorporate how can we incorporate Minecraft into that. So in our case, we travel through the different biomes when you're playing the game, but we have a bunch of, like, helper multiballs and multipliers, kind of like an older style game that you can collect as well, which is a lot of fun.
    43:51
    But for us, you know, we want to make the game more interactive, more fun to play, So a lot of the stuff we were doing was just adding mechs that added some kinetic energy to the game that really lacks kinetic energy. So, for example, normally on an older game you shoot the ball up top and it kind of gets captured up there, but we added control gates so we can loop the ball around in both directions. We added drop targets, scoops, diverters, all the modern mechs you expect, and then put all RGB lighting in it and a screen.
    44:21
    That was the easy part. Actually, making the mechs was pretty easy, but getting the software to be fun and enjoyable, and complete. That actually took a lot longer than I anticipated, but really happy with the results.
    44:33
    Excellent. So there's one thing I forgot to ask when I was going, I'm going to go backwards. My ADD gets to me sometimes. Sorry, kids.
    44:42
    Wiring. So Gary Stern has said there's more wiring in a pinball machine than there is in a Chevy, or I don't remember what his exact quote was. Does anybody remember what car he said it was? So, I know that none of you had color-coded wires in mass quantities like Gottlieb or any other pinball manufacturer ever did. So how do you keep all this straight? Because I'm guessing you probably had what, seven colors to deal with? We bought the color-coded wire. We bought colored wires. Buy color-coded wire. Okay, so how much color-coded wiring did you need? And did you find cable management to be like a thing you hated?
    45:32
    So I bought from, what is it, West Coast Amusements or whatever. What is it? The California amusement thing, I think. Bay Area. Yeah, Bay Area. Thank you. Because they had every single color that Belly Williams had, and I bought every single color that Belly Williams had because I'm working on a pinball 2000 thing and I wanted every wire to be the same. Partway through that, I got a little lazy with lights, but I spent a lot of money. I spent many hundreds of dollars on wire of the right color, more than I needed just in case I needed to patch things, and I did.
    46:09
    But I created pegboards. I took my CAD drawings, I kind of labeled where things were, and I created pegboards and I strung them around. I have some streamed videos of that and I have some pictures of those. I think on the Pinball Maker's website, the Haunted Cruise pegboards, there are a couple of them are up on that.
    46:24
    So unless I'm, like, hacking something quick to get it working, such as for a show, I generally make a pegboard, and I spend a week stringing it around, and I make a proper wiring harness for each thing, a lighting harness, a switch harness, maybe an auxiliary switch if it's Optos, then, you know, whatever it needs to be. So I use a lot of wire, just traditionally. I don't like node boards. That's not my thing. So I do the traditional style of wiring. We had the eight-color wires on ours. So even though it was Kings of Steel, we redid the entire wiring loom. So we took all the old wires off. But what we did is since we only had the eight-color wires, we ran four coil looms, and those were color-coded as well. So we had like a red, a green, and an orange looms. You always knew what loom you were on and then what color wire went to the coils to help organize it. I actually had that plate field that I got had a full wire harness so I got to take it apart and have all the wire colors that I needed or not all that I needed, enough. One tip that I can give for making wiring harnesses is you buy the two-sided Velcro strips and you don't zip tie them, you just put them and manage it using those and that That way you can just open it and put another wire in pretty easily.
    47:46
    I've got 10 colored wire, which is more than eight. I've got thick ones for the coils and thin ones for the switches, so I could double up all my colors like that.
    47:57
    And then I got ink-based Sharpies from Staples, so I could just manually run it along to stripe them if I had more stuff than that. So that was really helpful. I did the same thing. I just got some copper wire off eBay. It looked like it was going to come in spools. It came in a massive mess.
    48:16
    They did not give me a refund for it, but I dealt with it. So I can't believe the amount of effort you put into doing peg boards and all that. I just ran it and threw a zip tie on it because I didn't think of a Velcro idea. That's brilliant. However, the Sharpie thing was awesome. So buy eight colors, silver Sharpie and a black Sharpie. Now you have 24 colors. That actually worked really well. I also did the thickness, so it's either a coil or a switch. If it's thick, it's a coil. If it's thin, it's a switch. So usually around 16 gauge is the coil and around 18, maybe 20 is the switch. Yeah, both really easy to find on eBay or other suppliers. Yeah, I also, no reels or anything. It was really fun. I think they usually sold them like 250 feet bulk. I think I went through like four or five sets of 250 feet. I probably got like a quarter mile of wiring in my game. So something for all you local folk in the Boston area, you do it is amazing. They're a little more expensive, but you go down there, you can get like spools of 100 feet of all these colored wires that you need. And if you need something in the pinch and you're too impatient to wait a day for Amazon to ship anything, just go down to Udoit and grab it. Okay, Udoit is the only remaining electronics store that has components that are worth anything. I'm taking notes. I've never heard of the place. It's in Needham. It's right off the highway. They have this beautiful neon sign that you can see from like a mile away. It's gorgeous. Right off 128. Yeah.
    49:56
    It is. It's a shack. Imagine Radio. If you haven't been there, imagine Radio Shack times five stuck into one building. And two floors. Well, we don't count the second floor. That's all consumer electronics. Second floor is fun. It's got DJ stuff in it. It's fun. It's just not component fun.
    50:13
    You can't buy spools of wire upstairs. I think they actually have Arduino stuff now, too. They started carrying that a couple years ago. And Pi stuff as well. Yeah. So if you blow something and you don't want to wait a day, you can just go down there. I used to work right down there in Needham, so I would swing through and pick up stuff from my electronics problem all the time. It was fantastic. in the Watertown area for a little while, so it was convenient. I've got to put in a point for Ham Fest also for used parts.
    50:37
    I just went to a Ham Fest, and I got scoops and scoops of used parts. Oh, Ham Radio. Yeah. Ryan's sitting here going, why is he talking about pork?
    50:52
    There's also something at the MIT flea market that they usually have every month. Oh, yeah. Oh, that's an amazing place to go. anymore. Really?
    51:03
    That's not an excuse. No. Quite better. So, any other words of wisdom that you guys have for... Well, we didn't ask the question that I was supposed to start with. Who in here is going to build a homebrew?
    51:19
    That's it? Well, why aren't you up here? Get up here. Go. Restart the questions. Let's go. we now have to have you answer every question that we started with. Rapid fire. Let's go. In order and completely. Come on down. One word answers only. Let's go. One word answers only. First thing that comes to mind.
    51:41
    This is the family feud bonus round. You have 30 seconds to answer all questions. Okay. What's your game? Rock lives. Okay. So everybody saw rock lives. Rock lives. You took a rock play field. Yes. Which is a piece of 86. I didn't say that. 86 Gottlieb. Yes. you ripped the display and all the boards out of it did you rewire it? yes, it's all the playfield is all stock that's a new take your mask off that's a new controller board that I'm working on that's a derivative of the APC that's for Williams games I have a Gottlieb so I pulled it apart and re-engineered it and now it supports Gottlieb So in your case you didn do a lot of play for old work You kept the game I played it You kept the game as it was You didn even change out the flippers which I wish you had They fine They are fine If you like that classic Gottlieb feel, they're great. I have a couple Gottliebs at home. That's why I bumped the power up on them.
    52:47
    But you did a lot of work with the music and trying to kind of bring the game to more of a modern point. Yes. So was that your whole vision? What is your vision for the giant score display? That was originally a virtual pinball that I bought that somebody had already converted. So I didn't do that to Circus. It came like that. Thank you for answering that because I didn't want to call you out. Yeah, that came from somebody who got a brand new cabinet for their high-end restorers. So wait, wait, wait. Someone took a pinball machine, converted it to a virtual, and you took it back? Yes. Okay, but wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Ryan. Ryan, you're missing the point here. they took what looks like a nice, beautiful, square circus cabinet. It had holes in it. It has a few holes. Yeah, exactly.
    53:37
    And they turned it into a virtual pit. He took it back. So he turned it back. Yeah, that virtual pit, I used that loosely. Like nothing was secured. It was literally just like kind of sitting in there. Really?
    53:53
    We piled the stuff in the cabinet and loaded it in my van. Yeah. I was going to drag you over a chair, but we don't have that much time, so we'll let you stand. Any other questions that we asked earlier that you wanted to answer about your build?
    54:09
    My biggest problem, my biggest mistake, anybody familiar with Gauntlet board sets? Who knows what the inherent design flaw is, right? They have bad ground? Ground? Yep. At one point, I didn't have a ground wire attached correct. I don't have a metal back panel. I blew out two mothpets. That was it. That was it? That's it? That was it. You got lucky. That board's been rock solid since I put it together. So when I started restoring pins myself, I went on a little Gottlieb kick there because, you know, five years ago Gottliebs were really cheap, remember? Remember when pinball was really cheap? Petrich Farms remembers. so I went and just ordered like packs of hundreds of the MOSFETs and all the other transistors and I've just got them in the shop because you do you breathe wrong near those system 80 machines and pop them one little ground wire system 3 isn't much better it has big grounding problems too I don't have a system 3 I moved to Valley Williams after I was done messing around with God I started with System 3.
    55:20
    There are some very good System 3 games, but that's a conversation for a different day. Do you want to open up your pin and show the inside of it, or do you want to play it and show some features?
    55:31
    Your streaming rig's in the way for opening it, so no. That can take 30 seconds to move. It's up to you. You're the moderator.
    55:37
    Well, we are at 4.30. If people want us to keep going, I would like to... Let's do it. Open it up? We're not going to open it up. All right. We're just going to play.
    55:48
    All right, so let's talk about some of the features that you put on here. First off, you got the overhead shot up? Yes. We're good. Look at that topper shot. That's pretty. I know. Yeah. Isn't that beautiful? So you 3D printed a lot for in here. So you 3D printed your ramps. You 3D printed your plastics. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Everything I could 3D print, I did 3D print because it's easy and I know how. and if I screw it up and it's bad I throw it in the bin to be ground up and recycled and I just print another one now we have this wonderful see this is why I had my lights up here it's one attract mode slide that won't do that so we have this beautiful spinner ramp here can you talk about the process there because I remember seeing that in cardboard Well, yeah, exactly. So originally I made the loop-to-loop ramp out of cardboard and painter's tape, because painter's tape is awesome.
    56:53
    I went for a proof of concept. I was like, can I get a ball to kick around the loop? And if so, do I need like a ceiling or something to keep it in place, or is it going to fall out? I had no idea what the physics were. So on stream, I just made one of what I thought would be a good shape with some painter's tape and whatever. And then I just started throwing the ball in the kicker. And the first time it went off, I literally screamed like a little girl. And it's on tape and it's on – somebody clipped it and I love it because it scared me. Like it just – I didn't know the timing of when it was going to kick. So the first time this loop ever worked because it worked like proof of concept first try and I couldn't believe it. it's just a clip of a very loud coil noise, me screaming, and then a bunch of hilarious laughter when I realized it would actually work. So then, you know, I tweaked it a little bit with the cardboard and everything, but once I knew that it would function, I'm like, all right, well, let's just make it out of metal from day one. I had 3D printed clips that would hold the rails on to the pieces of metal, because I didn't know how to weld yet. So originally, it was just a strip of one inch stainless steel from McMaster car. I think it was, I don't know, at the time it was like five bucks for the whole thing. And some 3D printed clips on the rails. I bent them by hand to match a little template and cardboard I wrote that I made. And I just kept bending it until it was all the right shape. And then it just, it just worked. I'm still hoping we're going to, we're going to change that a little bit in the future. I want you to be able to shoot it directly, but yeah, it was really fun to make out of. I got a working live play field, and I got some cardboard and Patriot's tape. Let's see what we can do. And if I can injure myself, I tried really hard.
    58:42
    So a lot of the toys in here I know are off-the-shelf toys. Yep. Do you have a vision that if you ever built these, what toys would you put in it? Would you customize the ability? No, why bother? I don't see any reason to reinvent the wheel. These little figurines and everything are already high quality, available. I would rather, if this thing were ever to get mass produced, my recommendation would be call the company. Call Hallmark. This little Knuckles toy that's flying in the background, that is a limited edition Hallmark Christmas ornament that launched last month. So call Hallmark. Can we order 500 of those, please? It's the perfect size. It fits perfectly. Why bother making our own? Also, if you try to make your own, you're going to deal with licensing issues going back and forth. Well, that was just assuming we're already doing that. I know, but I'm just saying, she asked if you were going to make more. Oh, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, that's a huge licensing issue, so you might as well just get something that's already been approved and produced and say, we're going to use that.
    59:42
    Now, are there any toys that you guys would put in your games that aren't available? Is there a particular Metroid thing that you would have liked to have had or something? I actually have a giant, this size Metroid, which I wanted to use for a topper and have lights on it and have it fire and everything. I need to make the back box shorter first. Oh, that is another mistake that he made that he talked about two years ago when he was here. Do not use a Sega cabinet. Or at least don't add the speakers to the top. It was just a bad back box design. It's my fault. He hates his cabinets. I hate it so much. He really wants a new one. Now, you, this was a whitewater. No. No, not a whitewater. I restored a whitewater. So this cabinet was originally made by a cabinet restoration person for a Earthshaker build.
    60:39
    He decided to sell the project as a whole with the cabinet, and the gentleman who bought it was also a cabinet restoration person. So he restored the original cabinet and just put this one up for sale. Sorry, I had to punch my game, not your camera. It's your game. Hit your camera, not my game. Anyway, so yeah, he put it up for sale for a really reasonable price. It was the most modern cabinet I could find, believe it or not. Two years ago, I had a lot of trouble finding any kind of modern cabinet for any kind of reasonable price. I'm pretty sure I've seen a bunch of them go up for sale since then. I just was in a dry spell, I guess. But it was perfect. It was already blue. and I actually just used a bunch of trim that I had from an old System 7 game. It was a – so this is something I like to tell everybody. It looks – the cabinet looks good, right? It's a Frankenstein mess. So we have a System 11 cabinet, System 7 trim, stern playfield mounting, spooky back box, and what – there was one other thing. What is it? I don't remember. Data East coin door? Something like that. but it was, if you can at all help it, kind of keep it together, it will save you some effort, but I saved a lot of money doing that. Now, Lynn, you were telling me that you're making cabinets now, because I know the current build you're doing is a pin 2000. What was the cabinet for Frozen? The cabinet for Frozen is a custom-made thing, because Frozen is way too tall for its own good. It's got an LCD in the back.
    62:09
    And Hunter Cruise started off in a supersonic cabinet, believe it or not, And I somehow got two levels in that. And then when I made it into an augmented reality game, I used Pinball 2000 because it was just convenient at the time.
    62:27
    Writing a driver code was a pain in the butt. But, yeah, I'm making cabinets now. This is the last time you'll ever see Haunted Cruise in a Pinball 2000 cabinet. It's going to be in its own custom thing next time. As long as it's still holographic. We heard this is going to use OLE. Your cabinet.
    62:45
    How about yours? I was at Allentown, and there was an empty Whirlwind cabinet in the flea market for $50. And I bought it. That's jealous. Nice score. Yeah, Whirlwind cabinet for $50. That's awesome. Someone was falling asleep at the switch.
    63:00
    And you just used the existing? I had the original cabinet. We just customized the back box to put the LCD in. Awesome. Mine actually was a fully working Star Wars Episode I, and I sold the kit as a whole elsewhere.
    63:13
    No, you only got a little bit. I got the Prism. Yeah, you got the Prism card. No, I sold the kit kit, the play field and the ROM board elsewhere. So I kind of broke even on that too.
    63:29
    I want to see some time for questions. So does anybody have any questions? So let's pause here for questions. Can we just go up to the mic, please?
    63:42
    You might recognize this guy. So you did VTX, and then you transferred your VTX onto a physical... Check the switch.
    63:58
    Have you tried keeping it open on again? Hey. That's nasty. Okay. Okay, so you did VPX, and then you transferred from VPX onto a physical thing, and then you said you got your geometry wrong horribly. So why did that happen? So the reason for that is because I did not actually transfer my lower third from the VPX. I grabbed a file that I found on the Internet during one of the resources called WPC blank, and it was just a lower third and I would assume that that would mean a WPC blank. It was not. It was something that somebody had made for their own custom project, uploaded it to one of the resource sites and called it WPC blank. So all of the spacing were made for their, like I think they actually used some old dot lead flippers honestly with some of the rounded ones. But they were much closer together than modern flippers would be.
    64:54
    And so that is the reason that it did not transfer well because I didn't transfer that part. The VPX does have a little export blueprint function, but it's not perfect. It mostly just gives you an image that still has to be stretched a little bit to be laid over real life. But once you get that done, you can trace it in CAD, and then it mostly comes out pretty dang close. You can set up in Visual Pinball different playfield sizes. So a long time ago when I was using it, I figured out very quick what the play field width and height was supposed to be to map like one to one to with an actual play field. Please share that number with me because it's not... I'll dig out small things and share it. Yeah and I use that for not very land tales and tell the dragon nightmare before Christmas and one other thing too before I just said screw it I'm doing solid works. So before any more questions before we show some cool features we got one in the back Do you want to come up to the microphone?
    65:57
    Again, while he's walking around, I want to thank everybody on the panel here for coming. Is there contact information that you want to – if people want to come to you and talk to you, I'm sure they can find you here throughout the show. But, you know, if they need resources or something, is there email addresses or anything for people that you guys are going to give out? Is there a Discord group or some sort of group that new home group people can go into? I'm on Pinside. Just look up Haunted Cruise or Frozen or Tower Flight or a couple other things, and you'll find me and just message me and say who you are. Otherwise, I'll ignore you. Yeah, and we're also on Pinside. We have a whole thread on the build. So look in the homebrew section. Look for Pincraft. You'll find us. You can contact us there. We also have some Slack channels. If you guys start your build, you can get invited to them. There's a Pindev Slack channel that most of us, I think all of us are on. Haunted Cruise actually isn't in homebrew. It's in boutique because there was no homebrew when I started it.
    66:55
    You can also find me on Pinside. There's a Metroid pinball thread, so you can find my user ID. It's also TheArcade with five R's.
    67:04
    And there's also a fast pinball Slack channel if you choose to use that more set. Yeah, the fast channel is really good for not just things about fast pinball, but everything.
    67:17
    Are there responsive fasts? Yes. Very fast. Got to go fast. You can also find me on Pinside. I wanted just to remind you that we should mention something about putting art on your play field before we finish. I was actually going to talk to Ryan about the case and the art, the cabinet art and the play field art. Sure, we can do that. Good question.
    67:39
    So I already know Ryan's answer to this because I lived 10 minutes from him. But for the rest of you, did any, or, and Ryan, if he wants to share this with the rest of the crew, during your builds and when you've been sharing it did people latch onto something like disproportionately to what you thought expected like was there one thing in particular that may have been like temporary and then people just latched on and thought that was the coolest thing ever the holographic screen everybody loves it and they still do and they always will love it, I guess. And you didn't expect that? Not as much as people are saying. The very first thing you do in my game is you hit some doors to open up. And I made it so, okay, you hit the target and the door is open. And people go gaga over that. And I'm like, it's just doors doing this.
    68:37
    I can actually comment on this one, Lynn, because I actually pointed out, you know, when we were talking yesterday in front of your game, how well it's done. I mean, you are a professional game developer and that door, when that ball hits it, you actually think the ball's hitting the door. You've got the timing right. You have everything right on that. So I think that's probably where some of it comes. The Pinball 2000.
    68:59
    But it works. But the Pinball 2000 platform didn't get matured as it could have. They only had two games. The problem with the Pinball 2000 platform back in the day, and since they had the patent to it, no one else could do this, is marketing, I guarantee, said, there's a screen there, use it. So everybody was like, hit the screen, hit the screen, hit the screen. And it wasn't until really Wizard Blocks and I think Playboy that it was kind of changing around to just hit this big screen to hit elements on it, but those never came out. And so no one ever got to really see things like that. I don't have to deal with marketing, so I'm like, let's just hit elements on the screen. Yeah, the execution, I think, is what people are probably surprised about because we didn't get to see it. I really believe that platform could have gone someplace if they had kept developing on it. That little lamppost that just came up when you hit it. It's just so great. It really is. You're a pro. You know that.
    70:00
    If I ever start a game company, I'll hire you. It's okay. It's programmer art. It's not real good art yet.
    70:07
    Better than anything we could do. So he knows the answer to mine already, but mine was the little Sonic with the feet on a spinner. That was like maybe a day's work, and everyone loves it more than things that took me days and days and days to build. It's just a tiny little 3D-printed Sonic disembodied head that is perfectly placed such that the player looks like the spinner is his feet. and it was something, an idea I had, like, from the very beginning, I was always like, oh, I'll get around to that, because it was never really high on my priority list. And then when the shows came up and I realized I had prepared, like, and I had a little bit of free time, I'm like, all right, can we, can I make this thing happen?
    70:46
    I posted a really poorly done, like, painter's tape, shout-outs to painter's tape again, version of it, and just posted it online, like, hey, do we like this as an idea? And everyone's like, holy crap, yes, that's amazing. Oh, all right, I better get it done then. so anyone else have the answer want to answer the question about interesting things on Ryan's table I think the signpost is the best thing on it myself see I thought that was awesome that took a lot of work beautifully done too right here yeah there's no one over there to transition the thing he's running back to the plug we can show it when we you play in a second anybody else want to answer that question or I think the surprise people on mine is the outlane gates we have skill based outlane gates so as you get progressed in the game we actually make the game harder so the coolest feature is something you guys are going to hate because you hit it and the ball drains but I think it's pretty cool so check it out when you're over there and definitely check out all these games they're all pretty much on the end of the middle aisle in this side of the free playroom point blank RBA Cruz is on the near wall that's the hybrid oh yeah the cocktail table with the guns oh I gotta check that out why are all the homebrews not next to each other again so these are all homebrews right they're not commercially available are there any instances where you ran into where the intellectual or property was questioned or anything like that.
    72:22
    And on the other side of that is, do you have any features that you've built in that you're afraid are going to get stolen by the manufacturers? So, I mean, Ryan has answered this question before. A lot of companies, Sega in particular, allows for fan projects. So as long as he's not commercially manufacturing these, you know, more power to him. It's a fan machine.
    72:46
    I don't know about Metroid. I've been expecting a cease and desist the entire project and I think I was the first person to use the translucent drop targets as part of the RGB show and that has shown up everywhere now they were doing that in TNA after the fact as a mod you might have beaten them to it though, I'm not sure now Lynn, you've done a Frozen which is a commercially available working on Frozen it's not done perfectionist he's never going to be done no I mean it's literally really not done right now it's half taken apart yes there are quite a few things in some of the games I've made in the past and certainly things in games I have planned that I will not tell anybody for years even things in Haunted Cruise I kind of mention every once in a while but I'm not really advertising them too much because I'm really half proud of them and now that it's kind of out and everybody's complaining it I can talk about them a little bit more when you get to them or when you see me doing something and you're like why did you do that and then I'll tell you why I did that but there's lots of secret little rules and secret little things in it that I'm quite pleased with and I don't want to tell a lot of people unfortunately us as homebrew people we have a little bit of trouble with things like that because we are basically free candy to any professional developer. They can take whatever they want from us, and chances are we don't have the resources to patent our ideas. I have several ideas in this game right here that could have been patented, but I just don't have the time and money or the knowledge. And I have a sister that works in patent law, and even she couldn't get me into a good place to start because it's such a complicated process. So my strategy was to make sure I blasted my ideas everywhere so that if anyone tried to steal it, 50 of you people would be like, y'all stole that from Sonic.
    74:48
    Like I did when a company ripped, I'm not going to say which one or what they ripped off, but when someone ripped something off of Metroid, I was the first one being like, you stole that from Metroid feature for feature, you jerks. Another little trick that I learned years ago that I did with a couple of my play fields is, I don't know how well it holds up in court, but it definitely is something. If you print up a play field schematic, put it in a tube and mail it to yourself, don't open it. Now you have, like, the sealed thing from the Postal Service. And then if there's any issue and you want to go bring someone to court, just bring that thing and let the court open it up. Prior art? Yeah, yeah. Here's the date on it. I have never opened it. So I have that with a couple of my play fields just for funsies.
    75:31
    One thing I did run into with Haunted Cruise, at least, though, is the whole augmented holographic thing. That was patented by Belly Williams back in 1999. The summer of 1999. And I originally wanted to make it as a kit and sell, you know, like 100 or so of them. So I was chatting with Rick for about a year trying to figure out all that stuff, and it just nothing ever happened. It's not a problem anymore.
    75:58
    I actually had a DMCA takedown message for my Van Halen machine where all of my videos got flagged and they sent me a letter. So, at least in that case, I think that's Sony that is a little bit angry for some reason. I don't know why they're angry. It's like, strangely, the videos had, like, I had purchased all of the music, so all of the music I owned on it, but yet I was not allowed to actually strangely put it in a pinball machine. The second thing with prior art, if you want to keep it from other people stealing it and patenting it, throw it on Pinside, right, so that there is a, this is a record of it, this was my idea, don't, you won't get the patent for it, but you will at least make sure that you can use your own idea. Yeah, they can't walk you out with prior art. They can't get the patent for it. Exactly. With a bunch of Haunted Cruise things, I actually have it even before Pinside on KOLV in a couple places. and yeah, Frozen I got a couple of DCMA things on YouTube just because it had some music in it and I'm like, okay so I re-uploaded it just a little quieter and it works I worked for Warner Brothers for a while and I learned how licensing works from them Really? How does it work?
    77:25
    For Warner Brothers it works fantastically for the rest of the world it doesn't work at all for us those licenses are all the company's assets that's all they have and so they protect them a little too aggressively I don't know, has anybody heard of the game Among Us? I had streamed Among Us and I got a takedown notice from the WWE because they do a thing called Among Us and they just send out blanket strikes to everybody Because they have lawyers, don't you think?
    78:02
    You're the one who did it. I saw you walking out of the electric room. No, I'm calling it. No, no, no, it wasn't me. It was him. Get out the airlock, Jillian. Out the airlock. Gone. How did you get into medical from electrical? I followed you down the tunnel, the air shaft. Followed your beautiful wiring job. I love ideas.
    78:23
    We're going to talk later because the pegboard thing was a great idea. To finish that up, if you are going to start a homebrew and you're worried about the actual right owners, do what I did. Do some research ahead of time. I found out ahead of time that Sega has a published policy where fan games are specifically allowed. And so I knew from day one I would have no problems As long as you don sell them As long as I don sell them At which point you call them and you say hey can I license this But before that it's just, you can use whatever you want, which is why my game is 99% first-party assets. So if you've ever had the pleasure of playing Metroid before, you'll notice most of his assets are done by, he has a cover band, he has a lot of fan art in his game, and that was probably done to avoid using a lot of the first-party assets that Nintendo might come after him for. The intention was I could immediately switch the license or the theme to Space Bounty Hunter or something. There you go. Definitely not Metroid. Definitely a good one. But in my case, since I know the policy of that company, I on purpose use all of the art and assets directly from the games, and I use as few community resources as possible just to keep everything in-house. so you want to play some Sonic? sure why not anybody else want to play? yeah you want to play? come on we'll punch a couple people in here come on up we'll play some Sonic he's the first one to raise his hand I'm saying good both of you guys go ahead you can play with Ryan here come on up and meet Ryan McQuaid McSquid Randy McSquid Brian Ryan as he was in a few seminars yesterday there's a couple of you that call me sweetheart honey tall face I'll answer to whatever you want come on in alright so we're going to play a couple games and I'm going to talk about some of the features one of the first things I want to point out and I put a camera on the topper for a reason the topper interacts with the game not well it will work well eventually so you'll notice as these jewels here light up they will on the topper as well which I think is a fantastic feature start Rob let's go All right, cool.
    80:42
    All right, so first thing we start with in my game is game select. You're going to time out here if you don't at least go left and right a little bit. So what this does is like a lot of the music pins, you will be able to choose a favorite Sonic game, and all that does is change your music, levels, and backgrounds to match. It doesn't change the game at all, but if your favorite Sonic game is Sonic 2, you should be able to play Sonic 2. And every player can choose a different one at any time, and you can choose a different one every time you play so the music and levels don't get repetitive. So whatever your favorite Sonic game is, go ahead and give it a shot. Give it a try. Sonic 1, good start. Is that the start button? And then immediately you go into your mode, which are all the zones from the game. They all have different rules, but they are color-coded so that if you were to choose a different Sonic game, you'll hear different music and everything, but each color level is still the same and each color also coincides with one of our Chaos Emeralds up top and on the playfield here. So if you choose the yellow mode, you're going to be going for the yellow Chaos Emerald. The blue will be the water level, etc.
    81:45
    A bold choice starting with the water level. Everyone's favorite part of Sonic games. Although this is actually one of my favorite modes in the game because I put everyone's favorite part about Sonic games in water level. Drowning. You can drown and die. Which happens to me every time I play this. You never drown. You get crunched by playing that. So now we are starting to drown. You breathe by hitting the very center of the play field. You got that.
    82:14
    Can't drown if you're dead. But the drowning works very similar to, say, Star Wars TIE Fighters. Go ahead. What was your name, by the way? David. David did a good first ball one. Everybody give David a hand. Here we go.
    82:31
    All right. Who are you? Chris. You know where I'm going to go, right? No, no, no, I'm never going to remember Chris. I met him at Rhode Island Comic Con and convinced him to come here. And I'm sorry. The lovely wife got dragged along as well, of course.
    82:45
    Quick, pick your mode before you get timed out. No, you already got timed out. You don't get timed out of the zone for us. Oh, you don't get timed out of the zone? Okay, so I learned a lesson this week. It's that all you pinball people don't seem to understand that a start button adds credit.
    83:00
    No matter how seasoned you all are, it's always, oh, I want to play this mode. Start. It's on free play. Start button adds credit. Well, maybe if this was blinking or something. I have to add light. That's a System 7 lock bar with a button. So, be impressed.
    83:17
    So, that's something I'm going to be fixing in my hotel room tonight. I'm going to be disabling the credit button during the zone select because I learned that even though it makes total sense to me, and I thought it would make sense to everybody else, it doesn't. So, that means as a game developer, I adjust. I want to talk about Slippery Flippers. You've got to love those. So Slippery Flippers, you may think you just can't cradle at all. Go ahead. You may think you just can't cradle at all, but really it's just meant to be ice. So this is what we talked about earlier where it's, all right, I have an ice level. How do I make ice in pinball? Okay, the flippers need to be slippery. How does that work? So the way I came up with would be if you're holding up the flippers during the ice level, after like, I don't know, one second, it just drops out once briefly and then comes right back. And after that, it stays forever. But it's just that one little, uh.
    84:11
    But if you're holding it and you try to cradle, it only times out for a short amount of time and when it comes back, it will flip the ball away. So it won't drop all the way down. I'm going to check random.
    84:22
    Or we can, if you get to see it, we're going to get a, we'll get a, all right, let's get us out the copyright, that's DMD, DMCA from Scottsdale. Okay, so. Anybody ever play Total Nuclear Annihilation?
    84:34
    Give me some hands here. TNA, who loves TNA? Everybody loves TNA. Has anybody played... Bootleg Atomic? Bootleg Atomic.
    84:44
    It wasn't in the code last Pintastic, so just a handful of people have played it. And this is called what? This is called Comprehensive Fusion Devastation. If you are building a homebrew pinball machine, I challenge you to build TNA into the game. We're treating it, and Mark came up with this wonderful term, we're treating it as a will-it-run doom of homebrew pinball. And your objective is, with nothing but software, you need to make your game play as close to TNA as possible, but you can't change anything physically. It's the worst thing you already have.
    85:22
    Scott's been great about this. He thinks it's the funniest thing in the world. He actually offered both of us his full asset package, and we both said no. We wanted to sound as bootleg and crappy as possible. I hired a voice actress just for this. So here we go.
    85:39
    Also, we have a nice little free sound effect pack made for people using the free version of Unity, as we were talking about earlier. Now I've got my closest thing I have to a keypad done. See if I can get my favorite light show in this entire game right here, including Sonic. No, I'm not going to get it.
    86:01
    All right, you need that goop? Come on. Way better. I swear I'm good at pinball. That's not true. All right. So, Sonic was coded.
    86:23
    over the course of the entire two years that I was making this game. CFD was made in three hours. I did put a little extra work into it for these shows. We have multiball now. Back to player one. I failed to get the right show, I promise you all. I got two more balls. We're fine.
    86:42
    But because it's my game and because I coded the whole thing, I can add whatever I want whenever, including a whole other game. and because of the way I happen to do my asset system with the game select, it's already there. I already have a game select option. So now I can just stick a whole other game into the game select and the game just does different things I told it to. I think you have a complicated flipper code or something? Yeah, mine's a flipper code. I didn't have the game select. Actually, I definitely have a zone select, but I didn't want that in there for a second thought. Yeah, but yours makes sense. It's not like you put in B-A-W. Yeah, you spell B-A-O.
    87:23
    So I actually, out of, just because it's a fun project that I'm working on, at some point I fully intend to entirely code Are You a God mode from Ghostbusters, because it's all there. I have the ring for ghosts. There we go. Was drowning, is not drowning anymore. And basically whatever other little mini-games I want, I can just add in because I'm either bored and want to code something, or I think it's going to be fun. I think God Mode would be really easy. What? Move your car. The other thing I'm going to do that I actually... You're nailing him right now. I ran out of time for the show, but I want to put on purpose a bunch of Easter eggs in my game. So I already have a system planned out where one out of every hundred times we're going to play a different sound effect for various things. So one out of every hundred times you defeat Robotnik instead of him exploding, it's just going to go, Germany is victorious! You should have hit it harder. One out of every hundred times you hit the loop, it's going to make the cow noise from Medieval Madness. Because the catapult is what inspired the loop mechanism.
    88:29
    Once in a while when you hit a ramp, it's going to go, save my baby! That's another one of my favorites.
    88:34
    If you have any ideas for Easter eggs, let me know. Dingus. What's that? I don't know. Oh, God. No, no. We're not even going there.
    88:50
    There we go. You were on a ramp for a little while. I mean, ramp to ramp to ramp. If you got the ramp, pick the ice bowl.
    89:00
    Cool. I'm fine, by the way. So another thing we're trying to do to be good game developers, we want to try to teach your players as you're going. So that is why the very first mode in the game selection, and everything is very intentionally the green first level, green hill zone, etc. And that mode, the entire objective is to hit the... It happens automatically when you hit the plunger. You just get one for free. And the entire purpose of this is to show the player the speed system, which is the entire, your playfield multiplier system.
    89:41
    But if they can't figure it out, it all happens by accident. All right, we're back to CFD. Let's see if I can actually get this light show. and bootleg crap. There's one function you need to put in your game. No, it's not coming back. Or you will aggravate people like us. Okay. And that is something you forgot.
    89:59
    I hate watching those, especially if you have a bad ball. Oh, yeah. The last thing you want to see is your non-existent bonus counting up zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. And on any normal new pinball machine, you hold down both clippers and it goes past that. Yep. Mine has that. It's by default emission pinball. I think it does it. Oh, no, I totally coded it differently. I didn't know that. If you get zero, you can get a zero bonus.
    90:23
    You have to watch it. I found a nice... You did a lot of D&D for a while, didn't you? No. No? No. So I actually put a lot of thought into that. So there are some shows in my game that you can skip, no problem. bonus count up, level bonus, all that other stuff. And there's some that you can't skip because I work too hard on them. You have to watch it because I spent a whole day on that animation that starts Multiball or Mania Multiball or whatever. I'll give you a ball saver during them, but you're going to watch them.
    91:03
    Again, if I didn't spend that much time on it, keep your bonus count up. Nobody cares. There we are, moving on. But if you accomplish something big and I decided to give you a nice, like, animation, because I'm not an animator, but I became one for a day because I really wanted, I had this idea for an animation and I really wanted to make it happen. So I learned Adobe After Effects and flailed at it for two days in order to make this 30-second animation. Yeah, my player's going to watch that. I don't care. Salute.
    91:34
    So you can skip most things, but not everything. So the bonus you just skipped, It was the person who just won the game, by the way, because I don't think any of us, other of us, are going to get 2.3 million. So once again, I was shown up by a, how old are you?
    91:49
    11-year-old. We're in pinball. That doesn't mean anything. I know. There's no shame in being defeated by an 8-year-old or an 80-year-old or anything in between in pinball. I'm 45. He has better hands than my coordination. I have a problem setting my hands up.
    92:06
    What was that? Currently, I believe the high score for the weekend is something around 50 million. Are you asking what my best score is? Oh, 180.
    92:17
    That was a very, very long game. I finished the code twice. And it's not a short game. Each one of the different Chaos Emerald modes has two acts to it and a boss. So you'll have the initial mode, which I believe we're in act one right now. Yes, we are. So right now, Jillian has both of the orbits lit, and the orbits are where the spinner's speed are. So doing a very good job teaching you how important those are. And then, to balance that out, once she finishes this mode and hits the signpost to move on to the second act of this, it's the same exact goal, but it's a little harder. So in act two, instead of having both orbits, you have to alternate right, left, right, left. Just to make it a little harder. Alright, so, Jillian's now activated something I'm going to make her very happy to hear. This is the Noob Multi-Ball. This multi-ball exists for the express purpose of giving players who are not doing particularly well something to do.
    93:19
    So, every great game, in my opinion, that has ever been really popular has had some kind of either Noob Magnet or Noob Mode or something. so um I just got ball three um you know uh spong in uh Guns N' Roses exactly it's not I made so bad up here that you had to point out that I got a pity vote thanks Ryan I love you too literally now if you want to watch crappy pinball on a regular basis you can watch my twitch channel pinball princess jilligan um where I play this bad all the time can confirm unless he's playing Adam Stanley yeah anybody wants to mention with me on Adam Stanley I can do that with you all day That mode, it doesn't show anything about pity, and it's actually also useful for other players. The only reason it is designed and targeted at newer players is because it is the multiball you can achieve by missing shots. So it's the targets in between shots, kind of like, what are they, drones in Iron Man, will count up as you destroy these little badniks that are there. And once you free enough little animals, you start a miniboss. And so that gets the player playing with the middle toy, the giant Robotnik, you're fighting the boss, you've got a multiball, everything starts blinking, and you don't actually need to be very good to get there. And that is because... He's just dropping it in.
    94:43
    You almost dropped your ball because you were complaining. Keep going. But I didn't. Yes. That's how good I am. However, it's also, it's in a rotation, so players who are hitting their shots are just going to get this multiball a little later on in their game, and so that ends up having a staggered effect with the standard 1-2-3 lock system, so you end up always being like halfway to one or the other over the course of the game.
    95:16
    Sorry, I got a little distracted there. Almost there honey, you can do it, I believe. I know. Two more hits, you got this. Play better. I want to see you get a wizard mode.
    95:29
    Alright, so right now Jillian's in the actual boss fight mode against Dr. Robotnik, but there's going to be two whole modes to get here. And I did not want that to be the only way that you could play with the center toy in the middle of the game. I am not a fan of physical toys being locked behind rules. you should not have to be good at pinball to play with all the mechs on the playthrough. I was actually just playing Halloween for the first time, and I was really enjoying myself. However, I watched five players go through and not be able to get a single ball on the third level. So that might as well have not been there for them. So I'm going to prime this. Ouch. What were you going to say? I was going to say, play anything except the slot machine. Oh, yeah, we have a working slot machine. It's one of my favorite modes in the whole game. And prop the mode that will make everyone call me a liar when I say I don't know how to code. I'm actually really proud of this one.
    96:23
    So has anyone played Gatsbot here? This is basically Casino Run, because I love Casino Run. You spin your thing, you have a cash out and keep going option. Cash out or keep going, come on, quick! No deal! No deal, Howie! No deal! Alright, so much like JetSpot, you have that timer, and when that timer is up, you are out. If you spin three Robotniks like you would in Sonic the Hedgehog 2, that is your bomb, and you're all done. You lose all your rings.
    96:52
    As you go on, the more spins you do of the slot machine, the higher chance you have of getting both.
    97:00
    Of getting real JetSpots and getting bombs. You had an infinite ball saver. What part of Casino Run did you not understand? I didn't see the light blinking. Okay, I want to hear a boom. All right, I got to play better. I got to play way better. I'm going to get the boom. So right before Chicago Expo, Ryan sends an email out to a bunch of friends saying, I need you to record the audio clips of Boom. And that was it. He wasn't telling us what it was used for. So at some point in here, once he blows up this reactor... See if I can blow up the reactor. Once he blows up the reactor.
    97:42
    First date he had his TNA, he finished it. It's not true. It was the second date. It was probably within the first 24 hours. The one game I will not be humble about... I am really good at TNA. That's it. Not good at pinball. I'm good at TNA specifically. because I love it. All right, let's see if I can get this N. If I can hit that N target. TNA is the best $10,000 subwoofer you can have in your house. It is. Boom!
    98:09
    I think that was Mudderfudder's boom. So everybody sent boom files, and it goes through randomly and picks one.
    98:16
    Well, I got one of them done. All right, who won that game? Was it me, or was it... It was me. What? Boom.
    98:23
    Boom. Wow. I guess it'll suck as much as I used to. So, any more questions about anything? We've got a fully working game here that, and I didn't even get to talk about the art package or the topper.
    98:39
    Where did you get those, get the, we're not going to talk about the topper yet. Okay. Art package for the size. Where did you get that printed? How did you do that? Did you design that yourself? So I designed it because I, you know, straight stole it from the cartridge art from that game. I gave it to an artist and I paid them to vectorize the art so that it could be blown up to be four feet long or whatever. And then that was basically all we had to do for that. It was all vector files. And then I have a friend, Lonnie, I'm not sure what his last name is. He did the black and white Twilight Zone.
    99:12
    If anyone's familiar with his work, he knew exactly where to get it printed. He's like, all right, send me the art and we'll get it out there. I think it was like maybe $200 or $300 for all the decals and they went on great. the rest of the art was done by an artist friend of mine named Amber Stryperin together with them we made the concept art which is the line art, the little cute stick figure Sonics because that was the original art style that Sonic the Hedgehog was prototyped in so when they were originally designing all the graphics and everything they drew all these little pictures of him in various upsetting situations like getting burned, drowned or whatever, they really abused stick figure Sonic, and so did we.
    99:53
    But the idea behind it all was that eventually we would take each one of those individual prototype drawings, because the game was a prototype, and we would eventually flesh them out into full-color finished artwork. So this right here is the full-color finished artwork for the centerpiece that originally was a line drawing like the rest of them. So eventually we're going to do that with all the little scenes, and then we'll have a background on it much like a lot of the typical 90s art style was, because that was what I set out. to do when I built this game, I set out to build the 90s game that Sega never did.
    100:27
    So there's the art. Do you want to talk about your art? Topper glass paperweights off eBay. And how long did it take you to put the topper together?
    100:39
    So how long did we work on the topper for? Probably like a couple weeks on and off. And had you always intended to have it? Yes, it was from the design. Almost everything in this game was part of the design from day one. I think the only thing that kind of got stuck on at the last minute was Knuckles here.
    100:59
    Hallmark put out the perfect toy. I'm like, where the heck can I put this? Oh, there he goes. Fits right there. Basically, everything else here was planned from the very beginning. All right. So the last question I have for everybody here, except Mark. Mark doesn't get to answer this question because I don't get to ask you what you're working on next because you are now an employee of Jersey Jack. Congratulations once again.
    101:23
    Mark and I went to high school together. I'm so happy for you and Aaron being out there. So we don't get to hear what he's working on, and it sucks. It's cool, all right. Just whisper it a little bit. No, he won't even do that. It's not Metroid.
    101:38
    Yes, that's the one thing we know. It's not Metroid. It's Space Marine. So I know you have two more games in your back pocket that you're thinking and incubating and starting to work on. Yep. Lynn, we know there's an endless amount of games coming out of you. Is there anything new on the horizon that we might see next year?
    101:55
    Yes. No answer. Come on, Lynn. Absolutely not. I'll tell you mine. Cool. Because it's not a secret. All right. So as many of you may be aware, American Pinball has announced the American Dream competition.
    102:12
    We have one year to make a homebrew pinball machine, and if we are the best one at Expo next year, they will produce it. So I have started on my American Dream homebrew machine, which is one of the designs that I've already done, but I designed that game specifically with no theme, so it's perfect. We're going to have a flipping whitewood, and if it's good enough, maybe it'll get turned into something. More on that tomorrow at 4 o'clock. Oh, good. The Virgin Pinball Seminar. Your mic was on, by the way.
    102:42
    Great, they're going to talk about that tomorrow at 4? Yeah. Wonderful. So I don't have to go into that now. I was thinking of putting one in, but I don't want the stress for the next year. So I might help my sister-in-law do a hacker's machine. But other than that, I am not building a machine in the foreseeable future. Baby Angelina Jolie. What? She was in hackers. She was like 12 years old.
    103:06
    Totally different human being. Any of you guys working on another one? Batman 89. There we go. I think I'm going to try to do a cocktail pin. Oh, awesome. Yes. Revive one of the thousand dead cocktail games. And now we're working on a head-to-head pinball machine right now. Might show up here next year.
    103:27
    Sort of like Joust. Exactly. And then we'll also have another third one in the list. So I'm excited to see everybody's homebrews next year.
    103:38
    Document, document, document as much as possible so that we can have some great slides and some great pictures to share about the build process. for next seminar. Yeah. Pintastic New England, the show that innovates and we just have been bringing innovators in year after year and they keep wanting to do more. This year, an all-time record, nine custom games at the show and looking for more next year, more ideas, whether it's head-to-head or just an art package or some crazy new kind of cabinet that's never been done before. What was the previous record, Dave? Previous record? What's the previous record for homebrews? Three, I think. I think so.
    104:19
    And now we're at nine. Shattered that record. Yeah, we obliterated that record. I don't know. Next year is a really strong word considering it's only six months away. Seven months. Seven months away. June 27th. Seven. You've got one more month.
    104:35
    I want to thank everybody. I want to thank all of my panelists. You guys were great. Thank you so much. Thank you.
    104:43
    For a few of us, we have a dinner to go to. We have a dinner to go to? Yeah, we have barbecue waiting for us. Heck yeah. I'm going to get the heck out of here.
    104:52
    So I'm sorry. I would love to hang out with all of you, but I want to go eat BT Smokehouse. And if you don't know where BT Smokehouse is, you should learn because it's the best barbecue in the state. All right, awesome.
    105:02
    Thank you, everyone. Have a great one.