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Building Custom Pinball Machines with Lin Manuelian

Pintastic New England·video·56m 26s·analyzed·Dec 2, 2025
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.035

TL;DR

Lin Manuelian teaches homebrew pinball design: CAD methodology, ramp physics, and fabrication techniques.

Summary

Lin Manuelian, a professional video game programmer who has created six homebrew pinball machines, delivers a seminar at Pintastic New England's 10th show on playfield design methodology. He discusses his evolution from foam-core prototyping to direct CAD-to-CNC workflows, covering critical design principles including ramp entrance sizing (2.25-2.5 inches straight, 3.5-4 inches on sides), ball path physics and reflection points, and practical fabrication techniques using SolidWorks and SendCutSend. The presentation emphasizes iterative design, tolerance management, and learning from physics simulation in games like Pinballistic and Christmas Countdown.

Key Claims

  • Lin Manuelian has designed six homebrew pinball machines, more than most homebrew designers

    high confidence · You've seen five of his six games. And then yesterday we brought in the sixth one, which had a little IP issue. So all six. I don't know if anyone has made more than six.

  • Ramp entrances should be designed 2.25 to 2.5 inches wide when straight, 3.5 to 4 inches on the side due to visibility and protection requirements

    high confidence · I usually start with two and a quarter, period... When it's on the side, I always kind of start with three and a half inches... I even go four inches

  • Christmas Countdown took approximately two man-months to design and build

    high confidence · That took me about two man-months to make.

  • Ball path tolerances in tight entries can be as narrow as one millimeter without crashing, making manufacturing extremely difficult

    high confidence · I have one where if I'm a millimeter one way, the ball path will cause it to crash on something. If it's a millimeter up the other way, it crashes on something on the other side of the plate.

  • Lin Manuelian evolved from foam-core and hand-cut prototyping to direct Photoshop sketch-to-CAD-to-CNC workflows

    high confidence · Initially, I would start with foam core, or I would start with a piece of wood... Now I go straight from a Photoshop sketch into CAD, and then I only do CNC cuts from now on.

  • Minimum ball trail width should be 1.5 inches (metal to metal or plastic to plastic) to prevent pinching and installation issues

    high confidence · I never go any smaller than about one and a half inches wide from metal to metal or from plastic to plastic.

  • Lin Manuelian initially learned pinball design by programming Pinballistic, a virtual pinball game on PS3 using The Simpsons Pinball Party as a reference

    high confidence · I was working at a company, and they wanted to make a virtual pinball game, and it ended up releasing as Pinballistic... I used The Simpsons Pinball Party, so I learned how to play on that

Notable Quotes

  • “I don't know if anyone has made more than six.”

    Pintastic New England presenter (describing Lin Manuelian)@ 0:58 — Establishes Lin Manuelian's prolific homebrew design record within the community

  • “Now I go straight from a Photoshop sketch into CAD, and then I only do CNC cuts from now on.”

    Lin Manuelian@ 4:43 — Demonstrates evolution in homebrew design workflow from analog to digital-first manufacturing

  • “So you need to take care of the lowest point of the V, so say the impact point down here, as well as the highest point of the V, which is the impact point up here.”

    Lin Manuelian@ 12:32 — Explains fundamental principle of flipper-to-shot geometry requiring attention to dual impact points

  • “And gravity's saying, hold my beer.”

    Lin Manuelian@ 14:21 — Illustrates the unexpected ways gravity disrupts designed ball paths, a critical design challenge

  • “I have one where if I'm a millimeter one way, the ball path will cause it to crash on something. If it's a millimeter up the other way, it crashes on something on the other side of the plate.”

    Lin Manuelian@ 26:29 — Demonstrates extreme precision requirements in pinball manufacturing, highlighting the challenge of physical fabrication

  • “Don't hand cut this stuff. I almost lost my finger on stream hand cutting this stuff.”

    Lin Manuelian@ 25:10 — Safety warning about physical prototyping dangers in homebrew pinball construction

Entities

Lin ManuelianpersonPintastic New EnglandeventChristmas CountdowngameHaunted CruisegameFairyland TalesgamePinballisticgameBattle StationsgameThe Simpsons Pinball Partygame

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: Pintastic New England has hosted homebrew developer seminars for 10 consecutive years, with no other show matching this track record; adding bonus seminars this year

    high · This is our tenth show, and for the 10th time we have something in our seminar program for homebrew developers. No other show has had 10 ever, cumulatively.

  • ?

    event_signal: Pintastic New England serves as primary knowledge-sharing venue for homebrew pinball design with structured seminar programming and playable game showcase

    high · We have more games than just what's in the custom game showcase... for the 10th time we have something in our seminar program for homebrew developers.

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Implicit community skepticism toward tight manufacturing tolerances; audience feedback suggests practical acceptance of 'human-level slop' rather than millimeter precision

    medium · You want human-level slop in there, basically. Yeah. You want human-level slop in there, basically.

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Physics-first design approach emphasizing reflection point calculation, gravity effects, and tolerance management over intuitive layout; reflects engineering rigor in homebrew scene

    high · Add gravity into that and that zigzag instead of going like that, it's going to kind of go more like that... bring it down just a little tickle each time you reflect.

  • ?

    community_signal: Lin Manuelian demonstrates evolution from analog foam-core/hand-cut prototyping to digital-first CAD-to-CNC manufacturing, reflecting maturation in homebrew design sophistication

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.169

0:00
Welcome, Homebrew fans. We have more games than just what's in the custom game showcase, by the way. I was noticing people having a good time on battle stations over in the Bender Hall, down in the Southern New Hampshire club room.
0:21
There's a game with some custom software. So look around all over the show. This is our tenth show. and for the 10th time we have something in our seminar program for homebrew developers. No other show has had 10 ever, cumulatively.
0:40
And now we're adding a bonus one. Lin-Manuel, you've seen five of his six games. And then yesterday we brought in the sixth one, which had a little IP issue. So all six.
0:58
I don't know if anyone has made more than six. Okay. But if you want to start now, if you want to start as young as the kid from San Diego so that you can exceed his lifetime productivity eventually, then you should learn from him what he knows about game development, and we are going to be doing an improv session, right? A little bit. So my original idea was to have my Wacom tablet here and actually design a layout with all of you. I didn't have a chance to go home to get it. So I'm going to kind of shoot from the hip with this and talk about a couple of the other games that I do have and show some of the sketches I've done and how it went from sketch and why I chose some features of the sketch to the CAD drawing and finally to the final thing that you see out there. and take questions along the way. If anyone has questions as we go, just kind of raise your hand and I'll answer them. We'll have the guy run. Yeah, he needs to lose some weight, so just everybody. If someone asks a question here, someone over there needs to ask the question in the back.

  • Reflection point physics in ramp design require accounting for gravity, which changes ball behavior from 2D design expectations

    high confidence · And let's say you have a straight, kind of a straight ramp or a straight something or other... Well, add gravity into that and that zigzag instead of going like that, it's going to kind of go more like that.

  • “You want human-level slop in there, basically.”

    audience member responding to tolerance discussion@ 26:48 — Community consensus that tight tolerances are unrealistic; practical design requires margin for error

  • “Make it work with a pinball machine. Then that friction is gone once it's normal.”

    Lin Manuelian@ 30:45 — Design philosophy that organic/physical prototyping transfers well to final metal/plastic construction

  • “I hate Mission Pinball Framework.”

    Lin Manuelian@ 46:36 — Candid critique of popular homebrew pinball software platform from experienced designer

  • “Get the fuck out of here.”

    Lin Manuelian@ 32:00 — Casual, informal tone emphasizing community engagement and playtesting expectation

    • Frozen
    game
    Pirates of the Caribbeangame
    Iron Mangame
    Taiko Drum Mastergame
    SolidWorksproduct
    Visual Pinballproduct
    SendCutSendcompany
    Mission Pinball Framework (MPF)product
    Pat Lawlorperson
    Eric Minerperson
    3D Studio Maxproduct
    Photoshopproduct
    Circus design (unnamed game)game
    Wacom tabletproduct
    CNC machineproduct
    Russell Speakperson

    high · Initially, I would start with foam core... Now I go straight from a Photoshop sketch into CAD, and then I only do CNC cuts from now on.

  • ?

    product_concern: Lin Manuelian's self-critique of early designs (Fairyland Tales) reveals long iterative development cycles; reflects homebrew tendency toward perfectionism and design regret

    medium · I look at that playfield, and I think, oh, that's neat, but why did I do that now? That's what 15 years of doing this will do.

  • ?

    technology_signal: Lin Manuelian's explicit criticism of Mission Pinball Framework (MPF) suggests potential platform fragmentation in homebrew software ecosystem despite MPF's apparent dominance

    medium · Most of you using Mission Pinball Framework, this will mean nothing to you because I hate Mission Pinball Framework.

  • ?

    technology_signal: Shift in homebrew manufacturing from hand-fabrication tools (shears, nibblers) to SendCutSend outsourcing, reflecting professionalization of homebrew production and safety concerns

    high · I almost lost my finger on stream hand cutting this stuff... I use SendCutSend now.

    • 2:09
    All right, so, yep, my name is John Manuelian. Everybody knows me as Lynn, Linoleum, or some flavor of that. And I'm a professional game programmer, I've been for like 18 years, something or other now.
    2:24
    But those are video games, not pinball games. I do pinball because I enjoy pinball, and why not, right? So, wow, 10, 12 years ago.
    2:38
    Sometime back in the PS3 era, whenever that was. What? The 90s. The PS3, not the 90s. What the hell? So sometime back in the PS3 era, I was working at a company, and they wanted to make a virtual pinball game, and it ended up releasing as Pinballistic. It was a two-player heads-up where you can kind of grief each other. I didn't know anything about pinball at the time, and yet I needed to program pinball. So we had the easiest game possible, local, Simpsons Pinball Party, so I learned how to play on that. and I learned what rules were based on that.
    3:19
    And we actually did all our design in Visual Pinball for all that, and I created a converter to take the Visual Pinball file, convert it to OBJ files to load into 3D Studio Max to then generate all the images. And then I also created a Visual Basic to Lua conversion. So we scripted everything in Visual Pinball, and then it just converted to Lua and loaded into a C++ engine for PS3. So that was my introduction to pinball. And during that, I got the crazy idea to build a real thing, and it snowballed from that, more or less. The very first game I designed, you've never seen. It'll be here eventually. It's called Fairyland Tales. It's kind of an Art Nouveau-y fairy and magic thing. Nothing to do with magic farce. But that I'll get done eventually. I've learned a lot, and I look at that play field, and I think, oh, that's neat, but why did I do that now? That's what 15 years of doing this will do.
    4:22
    So there's that. And then Haunted Cruise was officially started in, like, 2009, and it's still going. But I've changed my design philosophies over the years. Initially, I would start with foam core, or I would start with a piece of wood and kind of stick things around, kind of like the guys we're talking about here. Now I go straight from a Photoshop sketch into CAD, and then I only do CNC cuts from now on. So if my first cut is wrong, I make the adjustments in CAD, and I cut another one until it's right. It just makes life a lot easier, so I'm not trying to measure things and get the measurements right because, you know, whenever you use any kind of measurement tool, you're going to be off by just a little bit, and those little bits count sometimes. But anyways, a year ago I did a game called 12 Days of Christmas, which is now Christmas Countdown, which you can all play. I live streamed all of that, so I'm going to talk about that a little bit. That took me about two man months to make.
    5:27
    And generally I start out with a sketch in Photoshop. So as I said, I have a Wacom tablet I use. So this is all made one-to-one. If I were to print it up, it would be the size of a pinball play field. I have blank pinball playfield starters in CAD that I just print a, or I make a PDF of and I bring it into Photoshop just so I can easily start sketching things. Now you can see at the very top, I have a bunch of guides. So I kind of know what's the size of a ball, what's the size of a jet bumper, like what are some standard ramp and entry points for things, right? So as I go around and draw I can see hey, is this the right size? Will this fit? Will this rattle will or or such? Now what I don't have is I actually don't tend to use two inch anymore I usually start with two and a quarter period because when you create a two and a quarter entrance, let's say
    6:27
    Let's look at this ramp. It's it's a little bigger than two and a quarter But if you have a two and a quarter entrance, you're going to need to protect that entrance in some way. So you're going to have targets or posts kind of blocking it a little bit. So that two and a quarter will end up becoming two inches after you put stuff in front of it. So the bigger you design it, the more stuff is end up covering things to protect the walls, protect edges, protect bouncing. And it'll also give you some extra space. So for instance, I now, if I wanted to in this section here, and you can see the little hand I'm moving around there, right? Yeah. In this section here, I could put a little bumper post or something right in this section, and I now have the space to also add a little piece of sheet metal to even protect this out of the target because I have that extra slack. I don't have it in the game. I didn't make it. I'm lazy. But I could do it on all of these sections, especially this side ramp over here, which you'll see in the CAD when I show you. I went through like four or five designs of this after I made this initial design, which does not work, by the way.
    7:34
    Along this right side, I definitely need a piece of metal to protect against all the sides of the targets and all the entrances of the ramps and everything. So make it bigger. That way you can put stuff next to it and in front of it, so it will work for realsies.
    7:51
    The other thing, too, that I always plan on, So I say use around two and a quarter to two and a half when you're kind of going straight on Well when you're on the side I always kind of start with three and a half inches When it's on the side because you can't see that very well and it's always gonna be a bit of slot Right you're it's gonna be a little bit of guess and take sometimes even go four inches and then as I add things in and Once I make the first cut I can kind of shrink it down because I can see where the ball is gonna kind of go so if you're on the side three and a half inches if you're straight on two and a quarter inches and As you add those those trails and those paths and whatnot You'll realize how little space you actually have on a piece of wood and you're you realize how How high your ramps actually need to be to get up and over the thing to get to go in which This this ramp over here on the right right here. Actually, no this one right here this green ramp When I made the first vacuum form of this, I was expecting, you know, I can kind of flex it down a little bit so I don't have to worry about it. Yeah, that didn't work because I wanted a ball to go behind the ramp right here, and the metal guide that's right back here is one and an eighth inch tall, just so the ball kind of slides along it, which means this ramp just went like this all the way around instead of this. So if you look closely on Christmas Countdown, this ramp that I have there, I snipped a little bit and I kind of bent the ramp and riveted some other little pieces of plastic so you couldn't really tell to make it curve up and around and now it's smooth and it seems to fit. Likewise, this ramp on the right, I made it way too tight for my what my vacuum forming machine can do so this kind of inner section the inner kind of loop around is really chewed up because i just had no plastic down there so i kind of put a little piece of metal or something there i think it's a i had to mickey mouse it a little bit to make it work i also needed to add a gate on it because this ramp when i made it was completely wrong and the ball just wouldn't go up and around it would go around the ramp then all way back around and it's like the hell are you doing ball gravity is this way but no the gravity say no and it went back so there's a lot of those little tweaks you'll find on there um so as also something else i do with ball trails too um and what any kind of ball trail whether it's a ramp or it's a guide uh some kind of orbit or other loop around i never go any smaller than about one and a half inches wide from metal to metal or from plastic to plastic because if it's any shorter than that or in any thinner than that then when you it put the piece on you're going to have a little bit of soft when installing and you it might just pinch too much or your bend might not be quite right if it's metal and it might pinch too much so one and a half inches and also a lot of standard parts for ramps assume one and a half inch wide like little gullies that the ball goes down. When the ball is coming down towards you, you can get as small as one and a quarter, but that's pushing it. You probably need to lower your sidewalls a little bit when you do that so it doesn't pinch. I think a good example of that is the Pirates of the Caribbean stern, how Dennis, I think he made it, the little wavy ramp in the front that's like really, really shallow, but it's also really skinny, so it doesn't take up a lot of space.
    11:37
    Also, you can look at Frozen. Frozen does something like that, too. I have that ramp that goes across. I have very shallow heights on that, so it doesn't block the ball, but it also gets pretty narrow as it goes across.
    11:50
    So as I'm kind of drawing all these things in layers, each one of these colors is a different layer, so I can onion slice it. If you know Iron Man 1, that's how I make these games, or how I designed these games, how we designed that suit in the cave.
    12:04
    So I onion slice it. And as I'm building this, I also look at where the flipper is coming from. And if I had Photoshop on this, I'd be able to show you. But I basically draw not a straight line because a lot of people like to do, they take like a ruler and it's going from this flipper to that shot, right? Where in actuality, it's going to go from that flipper to that shot. So you have like a V type of situation. So you need to take care of the lowest point of the V, so say the impact point down here, as well as the highest point of the V, which is the impact point up here. So what happens in those two situations, once you're past that, then you can do whatever you want as long as the ball ricochets the way you expect. and I've been practicing a lot actually this past year what the reflection points are because that's been kind of an Achilles heel of mine and this game was the first one that I think I got everything right or mostly right if you look at this ramp here notice the left side kind of is a big kind of pot belly coming out whereas the right side is far more straight it's still a little curved to the left but it's still far more straight this pot belly is that way specifically because of what i just described from this flipper it kind of goes diagonal a little bit so you got to catch the ball and have it loop around if you just had it straight it would go up and bounce off you want it to bounce up so whatever the angle of reflection would be if you draw a line a vector from the flipper to the point you know you take the reciprocal of that to go to reflect up you So does it reflect across? If it does, you're probably gonna start going down. If it reflects more up, you're probably gonna start going up, probably. Now let's say you have a straight, kind of a straight ramp or a straight something or other And you say oh this kind of bounces a little bit and zigzags a little bit but it kind of goes where I want right Well add gravity into that and that zigzag instead of going like that, it's going to kind of go more like that. And that's why you see these weird little bounces. And like, oh, this looks cool. Why doesn't this work? Well, it's because you're reflecting just slightly wrong, and then gravity's saying, hold my beer. So that's the biggest challenge the water that's one of the other biggest challenges of ramps to make them work sure it looks like this is gonna work great on paper it's all smooth but then gravity comes into play and kind of changes how your reflection is a little bit so your best or what what I've determined so far when I design if it's honored an angle at any point instead of that reflection point being equal like if you have a mirror bring it down just a little tickle each time you reflect. And if it still makes it where you want, it's probably going to be OK. And the steeper your ramp is, the more it's going to kind of bend back down to your reflection point.
    15:08
    Any questions on that? Any curiosities? Yeah? . CHRIS CARTLAND- The big, yeah. So I noticed on your loops, what would you say to get that smooth, continuous loop? Are you hitting into a curve? And where would you say is the furthest point? Like when you're rolling down that flipper, in order to hit that main loop, you're not designing for the tip of the flipper. You're designing for what is your main shot for that loop? Where does the flipper, I guess, origin point from the flipper to getting into that loop? and then the final destination point, where do you ideally want to hit into that loop so it curves into it? All right, so this is from my own guesses, and I'm using really advanced Microsoft Paint for this, so please bear with us. I want the ball to ride directly perpendicular with the entry of my ramp or whatever it is, the guide, the loop, Because if it goes right on this point, or right parallel, I'm sorry, right parallel to your guide, what is the reflection point of something parallel? There is no reflection point. It's infinite. It will just go around. So if your guide is then really nice and curved, your ball will then, through the curvature and all the other physics, it'll loop around, right? However, if your ball, now you're never going to perfectly get it straight on that. So let's say you hit it kind of more up this way, right? So it's a bit higher. Well, if I hit right here, what's my reflection point? There is no gravity involved except for the steep of the play field, the six and a half degrees or whatever the hell you're doing. The reflection point is generally going to be like that because if you draw a line right at this point, it will then reflect up, reflect up and eventually make it kind of around and this as you can see it this is going to rattle a little bit if you get it really high up there's no question about that but the width of the ball will prevent that because a ball is not that small a ball is more like that that size so the entry point of this is always going to be more down here which will reflect much more up that way and around and just after a couple hits once you're going along with your curve the ball will just roll around it. You don't have to worry about going to infinite bounces. It'll just kind of curve. But the first couple of bounces are always going to be off that reflection point until it gets curved. So again, if your ball kind of goes in right here, well, what's the reflection point at this point? If you draw a straight line, the reflection point is going to be like that. And then it just goes right up and around. So that's how I kind of do it and how I kind of look at it when drawing it and I use SolidWorks so I can make a sketch that attaches to a point and attaches to another point and see where that kind of bounces a little bit and see what the reflection points are. Any other questions on? I'm a little bit of a quick and dirty with that. Yep. The DPX by using fake ramps. So I'll make a ramp that has an entry width of five and an exit of 80 so it makes a nice cone. Yeah. And then I estimate where on the flipper I expect if I'm, if I was playing a game for the first time, I would try around here. I anchor my 5 there, and then I drag my 80 to my shot entrance, and you can see the cone that you're going to have to deal with, and then you can just, like, mark a bunch of points on your rail, do your reflections, and it's nice, quick, dirty, easy to find out if you're just going to immediately rattle out or not. Right. Yeah, with VPX, using a ramp is a great way to do it. With SolidWorks, you can just have a sketch that has a small 1 1⁄2 or one and a quarter inch at the end and two inch at the top, and then you can just kind of drag the thing around. You can even use like spheres and sweeps and tangents and whatnot if you want to be fancy, but that's work.
    19:29
    So that's kind of how I do that. Are there any other questions related to this kind of thing? All right, so as I'm drawing these sketches, my first sketches are going to be really quick and dirty, like somewhat straight or somewhat maybe this angle is right, But then I go back and I kind of refine, and you can see this curve on the ramp or this roundness has a lot of sketch lines around it. And the darker your sketch line is, the closer to probably what you want, kind of like an animation. The darker your line is is what your actual thing is going to be.
    20:02
    As far as where other things go, I tend to use rubber posts a lot, like the little rubber bumper posts in between things. and once I get my shots right, I turn those rubber bumper posts into spot targets.
    20:17
    And now if I want a spot target somewhere, I'll just put it where I want it. But if you have a bumper post, you don't necessarily want to just shoot the damn post up straight up the middle. You want it to do something. You could use a piezo sensor. I don't know. Who knows what a piezo sensor is? You could use one of those to detect an impact. it's going to be very noisy with all the other clicking clacking that a pinball machine can do but it is possible they use those on tato drum master the big drum arcade game so you can do it and there's a couple williams games in the past some prototypes that actually use them too um it would be tricky to get the software right like generally consistently right with that though So, targets are best. Okay, so I would take a sketch like this. I would bring it onto a piece of wood in SolidWorks, and it will eventually turn into the thing over here, which I will load up. Here, here. Yeah. No, I don't want to save. Just load it. it'll turn into this kinda. Again I made this in two months it's not very clean please excuse all the muck but if you if we do a top-down of this and we do a sketch, a see-through sketch, no that's not what I wanted, I wanted to zoom in. yeah a lot of these lines you see except for this ramp because it's clear because of course it is can I make that a little bit nicer yeah there we go you can see a lot of these these guys that I have in this sketch here translated directly into this generally speaking it's a lot cleaner because I can I'm now using CAD I'm now making my legitimate curves and arcs and not just fuzzy little hair balls around these things. But it's stuck closely the same.
    22:31
    I then cut this play field. I usually don't put the inserts in yet. I do have the insert holes here. Let me isolate this for a second.
    22:43
    There we go. Play field. Ignoring the... I think I can hide the insert holes, right? Yeah. Let's hide that.
    22:56
    Really? Can I? Okay, I can't. Never mind. Yeah, so this is what the play field is when I'm ready to cut it.
    23:08
    Every ramp has a... God damn it, I wish I had my mouse. Every ramp has a little footprint on it, so it kind of sinks a little bit low and has a nice curve into it. It also helps me know where the hell to line it up. Every rail has a dimple so I know where to mount the thing when I'm ready to go. All the GI holes are cut through obviously. I have other random holes like this thing or this thing just for through holes and wire holes and access holes and things to this. And yes, goddammit. I zoom one way and it goes this way.
    23:48
    And, yeah, so when I go to CNC this thing, I actually have a couple different passes. I have the regular cut pass, which I use a 2-millimeter half-inch bit for. And then I have a secondary tool pass that I use a ball nose bit, a 1-inch ball nose bit for the plunger wing.
    24:05
    And if I wanted to be ambitious, I could do the backside too. I have to do that with haunted crews and I have to do that with magic bars because I have inlays on there for either magnets or LCDs For this I don't so I just cut the top and say the hell with it the only thing I'm missing is t-nut holes on the other side and some dimples, but It doesn't really matter so to speak
    24:27
    And that's generally it for the playfield then you have a playfield you can start populating Now as far as everything else, it's just a lot of busy work make making the stuff
    24:38
    The ramps start off with a solid. You can then curve it and do whatever you want. I then cut all the bucks out. I think I have pictures of this here somewhere.
    24:51
    Sketches, work in progress. Yeah. Yeah, I do have something. No, I don't have something in here. No, I don't have any pictures of this because why? Oh, wait, maybe?
    25:05
    No. Okay, but I do have pictures of when I hand cut this shit. Don't hand cut this stuff. I almost lost my finger on stream hand cutting this stuff.
    25:16
    Yeah. Oh, and if you do hand cut it, wear gloves. But I use SendCutSend now. But I used to hand cut these things by tracing stuff out. And there's my tools, the shears and the little nibblers.
    25:30
    Yep. And not the Futurama kind of nibbler. and that's kind of what it looks like now okay this I think is this a Sen Cut Sen one no it's not but once I have these flats I use clamps or I use fingers or something and I bend all the little flat pieces and I bend it into shape and it'll eventually fit kind of where I want it to and ultimately break because this is thin metal I'm now using actual 16th inch stainless steel not this Home Depot crap. But it works fine.
    26:07
    That's more or less the sheet metal. It just takes some busy work to do. Any questions of what I'm... Yes.
    26:22
    What is precisely? What is your tolerance percent? I have one where it's, if I'm a millimeter one way, the ball path will cause it to crash on something. If it's a millimeter up the other way, it crashes on something on the other side of the plate. So you have a one millimeter tolerance, basically? Basically, yeah. That's too tight. Yeah.
    26:48
    You want human level slop in there, basically. you can get down so you can get down to millimeter level preciseness when you're not trying to shoot something you're not trying to have the ball kind of flop and guide somewhere but if you expect the exit of something to seamlessly go into something else that's really tight it ain't gonna happen you're gonna your exit usually needs to be like into a v entrance type of thing so it can kind of eat it like a snake um do i i do have an example of that which is probably something you all want to see and are waiting to see if I close this because I did some redesign work on a little-known game that I have out here didn't this thing so if I peel away some of these layers because each one of these is its own assembly hide hide, hide, hide, hop here.
    27:48
    And, oh yeah, I have to hide this. And I should hide this. All right, so this left entrance here, I want the exit of this little spinny ramp to go into the entrance of this And it works sometimes It depends on what people have shook and it depends on what the angle of this ramp is because I can kind of twist it a little bit.
    28:25
    If you notice, though, it's got like a wide-open snake mouth. It's not like a really tight tolerance to get in there. Otherwise, it'll never make it in there. Just like the ramps and everything that we were talking about, making that V-type shape to see where the ball goes. Any time the ball leaves any space, you need to start making that V. And if it's something that you powered, you can make that V more narrow. But if something gravity is going to take, you kind of need to make that V with kind of like a slack jaw coming down because it will dribble out of whatever you want and not do what you want.
    29:00
    So, yeah, that's that thing. And the original version of this game, before my modification, didn't have a target right here. This target was way in the back over here, which I hated because I want full orbits both ways. So I moved the target over here, and this path used to be even bigger. It used to be this gaping thing just to suck anything down into it. But you didn't really need that ultimately. So that's why I shrunk it, but I still made it large enough to try and catch. Something else you may notice, the lower part of this guide is straight and flat. That way any ball kind of coming this way can ricochet in. But this is slightly curved more, curved in. That is specifically for this to catch in an angle and loop around really quickly.
    29:46
    And again, it mostly works, usually, kind of. Yeah? I know you're in the CAD phase now from the Frankenstein. You go right to God. But say you were still in that Frankenstein phase.
    30:03
    Going from paper to rail, it feels different. Do you know of any good, like, other than the hand cutting, you know, sourcing metal? Or just a way of making something to see if it'll work?
    30:17
    I mean, you can buy aluminum strips and kind of cut them down and tape them in. I did that sometimes.
    30:25
    You can get metal strips, do that. really anything I tried always sucked. But another philosophy I take in mind is if you're, if you're doing it more organically with like paper and whatnot, if you're, if your stuff works in paper, it'll work really well in metal and plastic. So make it work with paper. Then that friction is gone once it's normal. And if your ramps can work without a ramp flap, that's even better. We put the ramp flap, forget about just bump the coil down on your flippers because, you won't need the higher coil.
    31:05
    Yeah, all right. So that's kind of design. Now, some people might want me to go on. Does anyone else have any questions on like some play field design? I'm glossing over some of it, but I wanted to do more design work. But I tried to talk a little bit more of some details and things. And I can switch over to some software a little bit at some point. Most of you using MPF, this will mean nothing to you because I hate MPF. But any software engineer or anyone else will recognize, oh, this is a class. These are the things that I do.
    31:37
    And any more questions, comments? No? All right. So, yeah, this is the circus design I did in a month-ish.
    31:50
    Actually, most of this I did in one weekend. So what? Did you have you not played it? What are you doing? Get the fuck out of here. Yeah. It's over there. You can go play. Yeah.
    32:08
    Yeah. The vast majority I got done in one weekend. Then I add the main play field. It took maybe a couple of weeks for me to get because it made all the little changes. The mini play fields. It's just the little detail things like maybe this this this metal form up here. this metal form up here took a little bit for me to kind of figure out from all the pictures that were there it and no i didn't want to do with that no show me i want to hide i want to isolate where's my where's my thank you this thing is a pain in the ass to bend and it just this thing is a pain pain in the ass to bend but i did it
    32:54
    Yeah, none of the other ones are, the biggest problem is how it folds into itself, which in the future, if I redo the play field, I'm going to probably make this in two parts, not a single part. And I'm not going to put this V in. The original one had a V in there and I'm looking at it and I'm like, no, I'm not going to do that. The other play fields, let's undo this.
    33:27
    Exit isolate, that's what I meant. This one down here was, again, based on looking at things, and I do need to not isolate this. Actually, I can isolate this thing, can't I? Ring, can I isolate that? No, but of course I can. All right, no, that was the play field. Can I do the whole, no. All right, anyways, this thing is actually in two parts. It has a standard opto bracket on it and then a piece of folded metal.
    34:03
    This was a lot easier to bend. Again, rotate. You know, it doesn't have all the folds into itself and then I just rivet that other bracket onto the thing. I just need to make sure these two holes line up properly, Otherwise, the opto isn't going to see each other. So I'm going to redo the other one like that at some point. Then it'll be a little bit nicer. I think I have an image of what that actually looks like. It doesn't look nearly as nice as that.
    34:37
    Over here? Maybe. Yeah, here we go. Yeah, look at this. So it's a little curved, but it works. I have fingers that I can put on a clamp, so I can get some of that. But they're not going to fit in this section. So that was pliers and bending and manhandling and swearing and throwing it and whatever it took to get. I tried to put the whole thing on the clamp and just squish it, and then it bent all out of form. And I'm like . And this is Sencut Sen's real stainless steel, so it's not easy to bend.
    35:21
    OK, yeah, here's the other one. It's just simple couple bends and then this thing. I chose not to rivet it. I chose to screw it. So if I need to take something off, I more easily could. And it didn't make any difference. I don't have the nice press rivets. I use the pop rivets. So a screw head and a pop rivet head is very similar to each other. This is the lift mechanism, which is also a bent piece of metal. Do I know that's that? Oh yeah, here's the front of that other one.
    35:49
    This is a bent piece of metal, came all flat. I didn't bend it right, so things bind. Oh well, it kind of works.
    35:58
    But yeah, it all came flat. One, two, three, four, five, six. Six bends need to be on there perfectly. This is why I say don't do millimeter precision because you're never gonna get it.
    36:13
    Any questions on any other questions? No. All right. Software. As I say, my software is different. No, don't.
    36:26
    Please. Thank you. Let's close all this stuff. Wow. So I use Unity. as I kind of mentioned in the past and at the previous homebrew section.
    36:44
    And I've built over the course of these past 10 years a standard engine that I can just take and clock and I automatically, without even trying, have a game that supports four players, three or five balls,
    37:03
    kind of sort of tilts that they're disabled because they break things, score bit and attract mode sequencing and all top 10 lists and all that it's all just natively built into it which is one of the reasons i can make a playfield then poop all of a sudden flip it oh that's the other thing i can talk about my wiring before i'd wire a game a lot of people just kind of willy-nilly wire things and kind of shoot from the hip when they wire i always make a wiring list i always organize what i want to wire what colors they're going to be and where they're going to go. Bigger? What? Oh. Make the screen. Yeah, the screen.
    37:47
    There we go. More? There. Get glasses. So this is Luau's switch wiring. As you can see, I use every single switch I possibly can or the back box, which is essentially, it's a waste of a 48 switch thing. I only use 10 switches in the back box.
    38:12
    The start button, the tilt, which is wired, but again, disabled for now. I want people to shake the hell out of that game and just have fun. And the last bank is all the score reel stuff, the zero and the carries, because I have four score reels. That fits really nicely into an eight bank. yeah so eight got 10 switches out of 32 switches so I have 22 switches left I'm glad I I have that board the the game however the main play field however I use everything I guess no except for these two because the rotor target doesn't have that and if you notice every one of my rows or the column bank I call it a bank every one of my banks has a specific wire type so I have white for the the primary plunger and or well this would have an auto plunger but it has the plunger lane the flippers the standard slings and everything then yellow for the next bank blue for the next bank orange and then and they're all striped so everything is a standard stripe black brown red orange yellow gray blue violet and i i move the gray around so gray is usually the color that it is of so the the yellow one instead of it being orange yellow it's orange white I guess oh I didn't have white well white you can't have white white so white gray makes sense here right so this would be yellow white instead of yellow yellow because what is yellow yellow it's just all yellow yeah this is not a switch made this is using fast it's all direct switches I wish it was a switch matrix I wouldn't have to have 80 different types of wires if it was a switch matrix. But c'est la vie. Blue and orange. And if you ask me to lift up any of my games, you'll see, except for Haunted Cruise and Frozen, because Mickey mouseed that a little bit. But from Magic Forest forward, if I lift it up, you'll be able to see every single color, every single thing has its own line. I also just, from the original switch matrices, usually green was like a return line in a lot of systems, or a common line. I still use that for this. So for instance, if you see green, blue, you know that green is part of the blue bank and all the blue switches. So it just makes it really easy. I mean, in theory, I could say like blue, black is the return line or the ground line. But I like to keep the green so I can just very easily find that and color coordinate it. So I define all of this before I do any wiring. And now that I've done a whole bunch of games, I actually have a standard wiring that I do for all my flippers and all my banks. So I can take Magic Forest and put it in the Christmas countdown cabinet and the flippers will work in the truffle ward because that's just the standard bank that I use. And vice versa with Haunted Cruise and Frozen, I can do the same thing. I can't do Haunted Cruise into Magic Forest because that's my custom driver versus fast. I am planning on converting Frozen and Haunted cruise too fast though. So you eventually can swap any of my playfields into any of the other cabinets because it's all the same. You don't need to do this when you're designing your own game, but if you want maintenance ability, this is vital because now I can just give anyone this and say fix the game and they'll be able to figure out what's not working. Seth even went through Haunted Cruise, so he is now a Haunted Cruise expert. He can fix anything in that.
    41:45
    All right, so with that said, how much time do I have left? Am I being picked out? What's going on? I have half hour? All right, you guys can get another half hour nap.
    41:58
    So let's go to, what is this? Let's go to Lula. Yeah. In my platform also, I have a debug menu that I can bring up with tab. and I can see every switch connected I can see all of my LEDs I can lean back I want it to be right All my LEDs what they doing what the latest switches Yeah so here my little debug view that I can kind of bring up. Eventually, I'm going to clean this up a little bit more and make it in an operator menu so you can see all this stuff. But for now, it's just me. Also, it has a score bit QR codes, both the connect and the register, if I want to, and a little console and things. For Luau, I have another set of four digits. These represent the score wheels.
    42:49
    Before I even hooked up the score wheels, I had them working in code here. Then it just, poof, worked once I connected the switches with real hardware.
    42:59
    So let's turn this on. Let's give this a run. So every one of my games, some of you may have seen it has this boot up screen. This connects to my server or this connects to the Unity servers because I use Unity Cloud for everything. This connects to remote configs. This connects to analytics, all kinds of things. All my games use remote analytics so I can look to see what everybody's playing, what modes they played and all that fun stuff. As I say, if I press tab, you can see on the left here, this is the LED texture. So what MPF does, it makes like slideshows or something for their light shows. I just have a whole bunch of layers in a Unity scene right over here that if you turn it around, you can see they're all kind of layered on top of each other with what I want. And based on the Z, things go in front of other things and override what's behind it. And then I save this to a rendered camera,
    43:59
    which is attached over the control camera. and the texture is here. So this texture right here, which is teeny tiny because I don't need anything bigger than a 64 by 64 pixel texture for the lamps and it's really expensive to sample things back into things.
    44:20
    This isn't updating dynamically, but if I click this a bunch, if I move the mouse around, you can kind of see the texture is updating. So every frame, it takes a snapshot of this texture. And every frame, I sample my lights that I have positioned explicitly in spots So right here, for instance, are my controlled lamps, which are all black right now. But the controlled lamps also render to their own texture, so I can do different effects, maybe on the control lamps versus the GI or the GI or everything and whatnot. So if I take this control lamp and I make it not black,
    44:52
    who is my, this? Oh no, I'm doing it with vertex colors. I can't do that here. But if I made this not black, then you'd see like a little white light, like over here, like wherever that is.
    45:05
    So that's how I'm doing my light shows. Every one of my games does this. This also allows me to just spawn a prefab, which is a Unity game object that has its own set of code and things. So if I want a big sweeping effect during a game when you hit a target, I spawn a prefab and it just goes whoosh across the entire texture and it just covers whatever I want. Now also for switches, if we look at this texture right here, all my switches are attached to keyboard keys. And if I, yeah, so as I'm touching around, you can kind of see some of them are turning green. That's because I'm spoofing key presses. So if I wanted to play this game right now, I need the trough filled in, I need to press a start button. I need then, if I press A, I'm now on the plunger lane. And now typically you would release the plunger, and that's the equivalent of just releasing the plunger. So now my skill shot is lit, which is connected to either the skill shot scoop or a couple other targets. So let's say I hit, well, that didn't matter. So now I missed the skill shot and I got an in lane, so now this light came on. I accidentally hit one of these lights, so if I hit this a few more times, those lights will come on. And I program my games like this. Once I know that the mechanics work and the switches work, I just sit at home and I just play with things and I see how things all work. And then maybe I'll go and I'll push an update every once in a while. And, yeah, you can see the score rules are going up because I pressed a lot of targets. So I mimic it in real time as though it's pulsing.
    46:51
    So whatever the same pulse delay that I would have on that, that's what that's doing the pulse delay of and the counting of both. And then if I drain through the center, well, I get no points, and it switches to the next ball. And I can see I'm now in ball two, which is small for you guys, but it's right up here in ball two.
    47:11
    And if I'm done, left flipper, which is the left arrow key, start button, I hold that for a couple seconds, and the game will end and go back to the attract mode. with everything. So I get all the mechanics working, I get all the lights working,
    47:28
    by just making sure that it's linked properly with the game and with the game code, then I just write C-sharp code, like standard C-sharp object-oriented code, just at home, you know, sitting in a chair, sitting on the toilet, whatever, and it usually works. Yeah?
    47:51
    I don't hate fast. I use fast. What do you do? Oh, I just don't like the Python language, and I don't like YAML.
    48:02
    I'm a snob. I'm C++ in assembly. Any other questions? No, there's only minus minus. I agree. Yeah, yeah. All right, I think that's going to be about it. That's a little bit more, oh, you have a question. What was your work experience before the job 10 years ago that you started designing? I'm a game programmer. I've been writing video games since the third grade. That's what I live, breathe, and eat. East Coast? Yeah, I'm Massachusetts. Yeah, I started off writing DS games, then went PSP, PS3, and I do mobile now.
    49:08
    Yeah, PS3 in the 90s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Aaron. What got me into writing pinball code? Why pinball then? What was the changeover? There's no difference. Both are immediate dynamic game systems.
    49:32
    One just controls something physical. One just controls something digital. Well, when did you swap over from doing, like, DS games and those things to making pinball machines? Oh, when I worked on Pinballistic for PS3. I learned what pinball was, and I learned that there's rules in it, and I'm like, oh, this is pretty cool. I like animatronics. This is animatronics, but fun. So, yeah.
    49:57
    Question. How would your play field design philosophy evolve? all right play field design philosophy evolved over making all these or during making all these games um i don't know i don't like making the same thing twice if i can help it which is really difficult like making a fan layout isn't that bad because it's a fan if you want to deviate from that and and make interesting shots it's it takes a lot of rumination sometimes like i have another 20 odd sketches kind of like what i showed you on of just other layouts that i'm still thinking about and deciding on and some of them will probably never come to light and i might take a couple and mash them together because i like how something works but i don't like how with something else works on it.
    50:55
    So I mean, I don't know. Most of my design philosophy has come from a little bit of trial and error, but also just really hardcore studying how System 11 and WPC era games are composed, the materials that are composed, why they feel solid versus some of the 2000 era games feel a little light. Even though it's the same, but why does it just have that feeling, like the airiness versus the completeness. And why does it feel like something is more of a world under glass than something else? That's the kind of thing I kind of focus on and try to understand. Yeah. Is the Unity thing, have you ever thought about putting that on GitHub? I think that would be useful for a lot of people. If you want to make a game with my platform, you're welcome to. Otherwise, trade secret.
    51:55
    The DLL for fast is on GitHub for everybody, but just my whole system is not. So, Lynn, I think I've asked you this before.
    52:09
    Do you have preferred hardware use for the pop bumpers, for the flipper assemblies, things like that? You typically use Williams. I know what you use for that. Yeah, so I prefer the System 11 flippers that have the capacitor on it because I only need to use one driver instead of two, which is really nice. Also, the first time I brought Haunted Cruise here, I had a hold coil get stuck on, and I didn't know it because the flipper wasn't up, and I could smell it from the other side of the room. So after that, I said, screw that. At least if the flipper was stuck, like if the transistor was stuck with one of those System 11 flippers, it'd be up, and I'd be able to see that, oh, why is this up? But it was literally stuck down, and because it was on for a little longer, it just fused down so it just wouldn't go up. And walking around, you wouldn't know if no one was on it. So that's why I use that. And for the jet bumpers, I used to use the Williams style, but that's a pain in the ass to line up underneath and everything, especially for development. So final versions of layouts, I'll probably switch to that just because it's in wood and it's kind of nice. but for development I use the Stern Data East full plastic assembly. It's just a two-and-a-half-inch hole. You drop it right in, and the little spoon is always perfectly lined up, mostly, and you don't really need to make many adjustments.
    53:27
    As far as anything else, I usually lean more towards the Williams thing. Unless Williams didn't have it, then I'll go to the Stern.
    53:36
    I may replace the coil with a Williams coil, though. Any other questions? Oh, oh wait. Oh, whoa. Audience member 2 in audience member 2 in the audience Alright, I got a I've always wanted to make a wedge head because wedge heads are kind of neat. And I actually designed another wedge head that I want to make as well called The Joint. And the whole point of it is trying to roll. And there's going to be two score reels, a score reel for the main score and a score reel for how many times you've rolled it. And the catch line is, how many times have you rolled The Joint? And I only want to make the game for that joke. And I have a layout for it.
    54:28
    But yeah, I've always wanted to make a wedgehead. They're fun. I played in classics leagues. And the classic games definitely have different feels than modern games or contemporary games where shoot the shot, coming back and all that. Classic games is shoot the shot, uh-oh, now what?
    54:45
    And it's fun. It's definitely a more wild ball type of thing. So I got a Domino from EMP. And my requirement was design a game only using the parts from Domino. And if it wasn't on – I want to put a spinner on it, but Domino didn't have a spinner, so I can't use a spinner. and I rejiggered things around cut a new play field and that's a little I got the play field designed in about a day I then printed it up on paper showed it to folks at EMP just to get opinions you can't make these things in the vacuum it may seem like I make it in the vacuum but I don't I ask people constantly about this stuff and I anyway so I brought the print out to EMP and while I was looking at it in real full sheet, I'm like, oh, this isn't going to work right. It looks great in CAD, but in real life, just looking at it, it just isn't going to work. I was redrawing on that piece of paper all kinds of scribbles, like I need to move this here, I need to move that, and mostly in the upper corner in some of the guides. Then the next one was just the cut, the first cut that you see now.
    55:57
    That's a little help. Oh, also, everybody under the sun makes a Kiki game, so I wanted to make a Kiki thing, but it's instead of Zoolog. So it's kind of different.
    56:10
    Any other questions? Thanks. Thank you.