Journalist Tool

Kineticist

  • HDashboard
  • IItems
  • ↓Ingest
  • SSources
  • KBeats
  • BBriefs
  • RIntel
  • QSearch
  • NName Review
  • +Health

v0.1.0

← Back to items

FNO Pinball Ep 1: Oktoberfest w/ Josh Kugler (Software Designer)

Flip n Out Pinball·video·2h 37m·analyzed·May 15, 2019
View original
Export .md

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.031

TL;DR

Flippin' Out launches with Oktoberfest showcase featuring American Pinball programmers discussing new code and mechanics.

Summary

Ken Cromwell and Bill Webb from Special When Lit Pinball Podcast launched the Flippin' Out Pinball streaming channel with an Oktoberfest gameplay session featuring Josh Kugler and Joe Schober, the two lead programmers at American Pinball. The stream showcased new code updates including revised animations, improved Magna-Save logic, and three of four mini wizard modes, with discussion of game mechanics, scoring philosophy, and design decisions throughout.

Key Claims

  • Oktoberfest has four mini wizard modes planned with one master wizard mode; three of four mini modes will be in the next code release

    high confidence · Josh Kugler stated 'The plan is for four mini wizard modes, as we call it, and then one master wizard mode... When this next code release drops, three of the four will be there.'

  • New code for Oktoberfest will be available for download in a couple of weeks after beta testing

    high confidence · Josh said 'My guess is this code will be available for download in a couple of weeks after we work through any last bugs in it.'

  • Scoring goal for Oktoberfest is that breaking $10 million represents a really good game, with $5 million feeling respectable and $50 million as an attainable high-end score

    high confidence · Josh stated 'When you break $10 million for the first time, that's not an easy thing to do... At $5, you're feeling really good. At $10, you're feeling great.' His personal high score is 47 million.

  • New code includes updates to outlane save targets making them harder to hit because they were easier than intended on paper

    high confidence · Josh said 'We're finding it's getting too many saves and getting game lengths a little long. So this code just makes those a little bit tougher.'

  • Steins in Oktoberfest serve dual purposes: power-ups that boost scoring and also boost specific tent modes when collected

    high confidence · Josh explained 'They give you some power within the game... But each stein also boosts a specific tent.'

  • The beer keg ramp is a challenging but achievable shot; experienced players can typically make it 3 out of games with practice

    high confidence · Josh stated 'once you get a feel for it, I can, in most games, I'm going to be able to get three balls.'

  • American Pinball's next game after Oktoberfest will have higher scoring than Oktoberfest

    medium confidence · Josh said 'I think on our next game, just because of what the theme is, we're actually going to try to go to a little bit of a higher scoring level.'

Notable Quotes

  • “I don't like the term lead programmer. It's very much a collaboration between the two of us. If anything, Joe's probably put more keystrokes into it than I have.”

    Josh Kugler@ 8:02 — Establishes collaborative design approach and downplays individual credit; Joe Schober is co-programmer

  • “My guess is this code will be available for download in a couple of weeks after we work through any last bugs in it.”

    Josh Kugler@ 9:51 — Confirms timeline for next code update release

  • “When you break $10 million for the first time, that's not an easy thing to do... You know you had a really good game.”

    Josh Kugler@ 20:17 — Defines scoring expectations and design philosophy for difficulty/achievement

  • “The key, obviously, if you talk about it, is to first have a sign. And it really becomes your different preferences.”

    Josh Kugler@ 15:44 — Emphasizes strategic importance of stein collection in mode selection

  • “We're finding it's getting too many saves and getting game lengths a little long. So this code just makes those a little bit tougher.”

    Josh Kugler@ 23:20 — Reveals ongoing playtesting and balance adjustments based on real gameplay

  • “We thought we'd get the ball to the upper right flipper... So we went to Balser and said, hey, can we get an extra button put into the cabinet so we can make that controlled.”

    Josh Kugler@ 31:51 — Explains origin of extra button and Steinrad feature development process

Entities

Josh KuglerpersonJoe SchoberpersonKen CromwellpersonBill WebbpersonSteve BeattiepersonFlippin' Out PinballorganizationAmerican PinballcompanyOktoberfestgame

Signals

  • ?

    event_signal: Live code testing with developer commentary and chat interaction model for new pinball content

    high · Josh Kugler stated 'I'm using you guys as guinea pigs tonight. We have put fresh new code on here. Barely tested.' Established format for testing with community

  • ?

    community_signal: American Pinball engaging directly with player community through live-streaming code testing and Q&A with both programmers present

    high · Both Josh Kugler and Joe Schober participated in stream chat answering questions in real-time during gameplay

  • ?

    design_philosophy: American Pinball deliberately constrains scoring expectations (millions vs billions) to create achievable milestones and sustained challenge

    high · Josh stated goal is that breaking $10 million represents 'a really good game' and scoring philosophy aims for 'when you break a million for the first time, you know you've had a really good game'

  • ?

    community_signal: Potential signal regarding Ken Cromwell transition from Jersey Jack Pinball (where he was known as PR/marketing) to Flippin' Out Pinball media

    medium · Ken Cromwell now hosting/co-hosting Flippin' Out Pinball streaming channel and Special When Lit Podcast

  • ?

    announcement: Flippin' Out Pinball launches new Twitch streaming channel with Oktoberfest as premier content

    high · Stream title and entire structure confirms official launch of Flippin' Out Pinball as new streaming platform

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.471

0:00
you Thank you. you Hey, what's going on? Hold on one second here. Let's get this rocking. Pinball land. What's a good word?
6:02
Twitch. There we go. I was going to say, what happened to the chat? You got it. What's going on, everybody? We are kicking off the Flippin' Out Pinball channel, Flippin' Out Pinball streaming channel tonight with an Oktoberfest stream with Josh Kugler, the lead programmer of Oktoberfest. We have Bill Webb with us from Special Windlet Pinball Podcast, and then our trusty partner over there, Steve Beattie, who a lot of you know from the podcast. So let's see. Are we getting any sound here? No sound? No sound. All right. Let me look into that. Give me one second.
6:39
Maybe just be my end. Hard to hear. Hard to hear, says Lord Helmet. Is it hard to hear or no sound at all?
6:49
Zach says maybe just be my end. Hard to hear, Lord Helmet. Yeah, we see nothing. All right. So Ken's adjusting the levels, so let us know if this makes the difference in the world or if there's something else we need to be adjusting.
7:16

  • A one-handed play mode can be enabled by holding both right flipper buttons for a few seconds before starting the game

    high confidence · Josh explained 'if it's turned on, you can just walk up to the game, hold both right buttons for a few seconds before you start the game, and then the entire game is that way.'

  • “I was at like 2 o'clock in the morning, I was watching, and I made him put the game into one-handed play. And he played the game so long in one-handed play... he was playing surprisingly well that you wouldn't have realized the whole thing was one-handed play.”

    Josh Kugler@ 32:51 — Notes one-handed play viability and that Marty from Melbourne Silverball tested the feature

    • Special When Lit Pinball Podcast
    organization
    Martyperson
    Joe Balzerperson
    Kerry Hardyperson
    Scottperson
    Zach Minneyperson
    Houdinigame
    ?

    product_strategy: Oktoberfest roadmap includes three mini wizard modes in next release, fourth mode coming later, plus ongoing animation improvements

    high · Josh confirmed 'three of the four will be there' in next code release with fourth coming after and master wizard mode still in development

  • ?

    product_concern: Oktoberfest undergoing iterative balance adjustments including outlane save difficulty tuning based on real-world playtesting results

    high · Josh noted outlane saves were 'a lot easier to hit than we thought when we first saw it on paper' leading to code adjustments making them 'a little bit tougher'

  • ?

    technology_signal: American Pinball added physical button to cabinet hardware for new Steinrad feature enabling dual-flipper control on one side

    high · Josh explained 'we went to Balser and said, hey, can we get an extra button put into the cabinet so we can make that controlled'

    • Lord Helmet says better. Jeff, you're a pinball. And Zach's in here, too. we're going to get these audio levels done. All right, good, guys. I want to reintroduce everything here. We are, my name's Ken Cromwell and Bill Webb. We are from the Special Wind Lit Pinball Podcast. We are kicking off the Flippin' Out streaming pinball channel, and that's, you're here, right, at Twitch, Flippin' Out Pinball. And to kick off the stream tonight, we're running Oktoberfest, which is like the newest game for American Pinball. And with us today, we have the lead programmer of American Pinball here in Oktoberfest, it's Josh Kugler. So, Josh, welcome to the show, man. Welcome to the show. Happy to be here. And I see that Joe Schober, who's the other programmer working on the game. I don't like the term lead programmer. Yeah, okay. I'm sorry. It's very much a collaboration between the two of us. If anything, Joe's probably put more keystrokes into it than I have. But I see Joe has joined the stream. So he's going to keep me honest all night when I say things wrong about the rule. No, this is good, man. I like it. I say things wrong about the rule. Joe, what's up, buddy? He will be quick to correct me on any mistake I make. And if it was the other way around, I would be quick to correct him on any mistake I make. And so I'm happy that Joe was able to join us to be on the chat. It's an honor to have both you guys here and kind of kick off this machine. And now we're not going to take a ton of time here. We're going to get playing to Oktoberfest.
    8:40
    Lurking in the background again is our buddy Steve Beattie. He's been on our pinball adventures. So Steve is here. We have all the mics live. We have three mics live here at the studio table. We've got one mic live at the pinball machine. So what we want to do tonight is just for the next hour and a half, two hours, get used to Oktoberfest. Hear kind of the stories behind it. Let Josh and Joe kind of interact with chat. And if you have any questions, we encourage you guys to go ahead and ask about because it's not many opportunities or times that you get something like this going down. So we appreciate both of these gentlemen's time. Oh, yeah. Thank you very much. And, yeah, looking forward to this. Well, we should also let everybody know I'm using you guys as guinea pigs tonight. We have put fresh new code on here. Barely tested. Okay, maybe that's not completely true. So we're going to test out some new code. Sounds like the screen will crash any time, right? Exactly.
    9:27
    I'm prefacing all of this to when it crashes. Like I said, I'm going to point the finger at Joe, who's immediately going to point it back at me. No, just joking. That's awesome. But it will give the viewers tonight a chance to see a few of the new animations we've put in, the change in some of the behavior and certain things, and we'll try and highlight some of those things so that when the owners are watching or people who've played the game will pick up on things that are new or different. For sure. And my guess is this code will be available for download in a couple of weeks after we work through any last bugs in it. So we'll see the first of the beta testing here. Exactly. If a duck crash, we'll ask BBD to do some juggling to entertain everybody. Right. These are renowned jugglers under the influence of a beer or two. Which really fits the theme well since we do have a juggling mode. One of the modes is juggling. I really should have just said that this is an intermission to do live juggling to bring the theme to life. The thing I like about juggling is that it's immediately available to you. So for those that like to have a multiball, you can jump right into a multiball in this game fairly quickly. You can. And one of the things we did, and we're looking at potentially tweaking this, was Joe Balzer at one point came into my office right before one of the shows and said, we should just start the game in multiball. I said, Joe, I don't know if we could quite do that. And what we did do is make it so that juggling would come up as one of the first options. So if you didn't know what you were doing, you might pick juggling. And actually what the game does is it will normally offer you a tent mode that you have a stein for, because steins have a big benefit. We can talk more about that. And if you don't have one of those. Steins are kind of like power-ups also, right? They're power-ups, and they actually have two capabilities. They give you some power within the game. It might increase the length of the playfield multiplier or the bonus multiplier or increase value of jackpots. But each stein also boosts a specific tent. And if you have two steins, it boosts that tent scoring even more. I did not know that. So the game will offer you, will suggest to you a tent that you have not yet gone to that you have a stein for. Right. So rule number one when you're playing the game is you want to enter tents that you have a stein for because the scoring is going to be double or triple. Makes sense. So that's sort of the general rule, and, again, it'll kind of always suggest that to you. Okay. We're trying to help you score. Absolutely. And it's nice because I noticed when you are starting a mode, the modes in which you have signs for are first selectable for you, it seems, like they're readily available. So it takes a little bit of the guesswork out of what you have. Right. And it's always going to be pretty clear, too, because when you look on screen, you're going to see the logo for the tent, and you'll see the sign if you're there. I had to laugh. We had an Oktoberfest owner send me an email to report a bug. And he said, you know, I went to go start this tent, and the Engler Pale Ale icon was on the door as well. It shouldn't have been there. And then he commented, and when I was selecting the sign, instead of telling me more time in tents, it said boosts. And I forget which tent it was. And then 20 minutes later, I got an email that said, never mind.
    12:28
    He kind of figured it out. Like with any game, there's some things to figure out there. But, you know, collecting signs is a good thing. collecting ducks is a good thing, collecting calories is a good thing.
    12:41
    Outside the pinball world, people may not think calories are good. Or steins. Potentially harmful. Right. Beer, calories, steins, and this thing, they're all good. Consume them as much as you can. Absolutely. So why don't we go ahead and let's start a four-player game. Let's jump on. And then Josh and Joe, if you guys don't mind, if you can handle some questions in chat, that would be great. a nice opportunity for people to ask questions. Full disclosure on this game, we purposely not put a lot of time on it because we kind of wanted to learn about this game and experience the game at the same time as Josh was here in studio with us to kind of walk us through. So forgive us if the play isn't up to your caliber tonight, but it's a learning experience and we're looking forward to it. So who would like to do the honors of Game 1 of Oktoberfest on the Flippin' Out Pinball Channel? Steve, man, he's right there. All right. Steve, let's go, buddy. Four player? All right. Yeah, four player. They want to see you juggle anyway. So maybe we'll have to make that happen. So Slapsave, who is our buddy Chris, he's wondering if there are any updates on animations coming soon, or if those are pretty locked and loaded at this point. There's a lot of work going on on animations. One change you'll see in this is the animation when you enter a tent, which is probably the most criticized animation in the game. And it was a placeholder all along. It was one of those, yeah, we should have already replaced it. Okay. So that one's been updated, for example. We're constantly changing them and tweaking them. We're doing some work now on the out-of-mode screen, the screen you're seeing during normal game play. We've got a new version of that in the works. Okay. So we're continuing. Our first goal was to get everything to have something, and we've pretty much accomplished that now. We're working through some of the mini-wizard modes and wizard modes. And then we're going to continue to go back and improve the animations that are there. How many wizard modes are in this game currently? So the plan is for four mini wizard modes, as we call it, and then one master wizard mode. Okay. Right now, in the current code out in the wild, one of the mini wizard modes is there. When this next code release drops, three of the four will be there. Okay. The fourth one's pretty close, but we're not going to hold up the release until that one's done. and then we'll finish up the final wizard mode. Okay. The one that's out there in the wild now is duck derby, which you get to if you've collected 50 ducks. Okay. You're able to start duck derby, which is just a really fun mode. It's a two-ball multi-ball. All right. One of the four duck targets becomes your duck, and some of the shots are lit green to help move your duck through the pool. Yep. But if you hit one of the other duck targets at that point, then another duck becomes the duck you're advancing until you shoot your duck target to get back in control. So in that case, you're actually helping another duck advance, which is not a good thing. In your opinion, to kind of get the scoring going, what would you say is a pretty lucrative mode to start?
    15:44
    Well, the key, obviously, if you talk about it, is to first have a sign. Okay. And it really becomes your different preferences. So there's a couple of modes I always want to use in stacking, which is food frenzy and bumper cars. Yep. Those lend themselves well to stacking, so if I don't have balls locked yet, I might go for the looper. There's a magnet there. Because I just like to shoot the roller coaster ramp. Right, okay. I do like duck hunt and target shooting if you have the knocker in the game in particular. Right. I don't know if you have a knocker in this game. Because we actually use the knocker. Not a lot of knockers in the basement, John. No knockers. So, you know, if you're going to put a knocker in the game, we figure let's put it to good use. So those two modes fire the knocker when you make the various shots. Okay. It's sort of kind of that fun sound of the knocker. I do love a knocker. Everyone loves it. Player three, did you want to jump in, or do you want to bring up the rear and back? I'll bring up the rear. All right. But one of the things that Joe's been working on is score balancing. So the reality is our goal is that no mode is really worth outrageously more than another mode.
    16:51
    Obviously, it's tacky with multiple. ball I recently put up. I'll maybe tell you the score of the game because it will scare you guys. But because I really effectively had stacked bows that I had multiple steins with, with multi balls. And that really, you know, it can accelerate the score.
    17:11
    Awesome. What up, Scott? So I'm in chugging, but I collected my stein here, so I should have a little bit of an advantage, correct, Josh? Right. So what you'll see on the bottom of the screen, and my eyes aren't that good, But in the lower left, if you have the sign when you're in the mode, you'll see the sign icon. And if you have more than one, you'll see multiple. Okay. My eyes are not that good. I'm pretty sure there's a sign there. And it also tells you across the bottom what you still need to do to finish the mode. Not that you're looking up at the screen when you're playing, but at least if you're playing with people who are nice, they can tell you what else you might need. Yeah, finish this. Okay. Okay, so in this mode, he just completed the first phase, which was beating Inga.
    17:57
    And he will not be beating Otto tonight. All right, so we're set. So now if I can not embarrass myself. Yeah, don't worry. It's definitely a good game. Of course, this will play differently than the game in my office. Oh, sure. That's the same thing I was thinking. This game played differently at 12 o'clock this afternoon when I wasn't having beers. So good times as we play musical mics here. This is fun times to see what Josh does.
    18:27
    No pressure, huh, Ken? Yeah, no pressure at all. I want to give a shout-out to Scott at Penn Stadium. Penn Stadiums are on this game, and for streaming purposes, it's definitely advantageous. Yeah, it looks great out here. Thanks, Scott. We've got all the all-stars in this chat tonight, it seems like. Scott in chat. We've got Zach. Many. Chris from Slab Save or formerly. I don't know how you'd say that.
    18:53
    Jeff, this week in pinball. We've got Kerry Hardy. What up, Kerry? Kerry, what's up, man? How are you, buddy? How's the music? So, again, for those of you that are just joining in, we've got Josh Kugler, who's one of the programmers here in the studio. He's playing Oktoberfest right now. He's on the mic, so he'll be answering questions today in chat. We've got Joe, the other coder, who's in chat. He'll also be answering questions. So we've got both of the main men here at American Pinball. How'd it go there, Josh? Not good? You all right? All right, here.
    19:29
    So I notice there's like a trend with games at American Pinball, and even like Jersey Jack Pinball, where they're not ridiculously high scoring games. So if you're in the millions, it's a respectable score, whereas you're not in the billions so much. Is this another game that kind of lends itself to what some would consider lower scoring? Well, I think our scoring on this one's a little bit higher. I think on our next game, just because of what the theme is, we're actually going to try to go to a little bit of a higher scoring level. But the same thing, our goal's going to be similar in that when you're playing Houdini and you break a million for the first time, you know you've had a really good game. That's sort of a big milestone. On some games with the scoring, you sort of don't really know. I would say on Oktoberfest, that's $10 million. When you break $10 million for the first time, that's not an easy thing to do. On Oktoberfest? Yeah. You know you had a really good game. Lue it up.
    20:26
    And, you know, if you're in the $5 million range, I think you're going to still feel pretty good. At $5, you're feeling really good. At $10, you're feeling great.
    20:33
    I'm looking forward to someday breaking $50. Is that attainable? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. My high score right now is at 47. Really? And that was... I feel guilty wiping off your 5 million score there, Steve. By the way, that's probably seven times higher than my previous high score. Everybody has one, right? It was a case where I... I've been surprisingly bad on this game in stacking. Okay. Which I look at it and I'm like, why am I this bad? I never seem to effectively stack because it's not that hard. Right. And that was a game where I actually, you know, I think I had four multiballs during the game, stacked every one of them with an appropriate mode and just really put it together. Okay. And, you know, it'll probably be six months before I'll put up a score like that again. I got you. Are you at liberty to discuss kind of some of the design elements of the pen or do you feel more comfortable with the program? Talk about anything you want. So we had a question from Slash Dave. He wants to know if you could explain a little bit about the level of difficulty of that beer keg ramp.
    21:43
    Like any side ramp, it can be a challenging ramp. It's funny because Shobran and I talk about this all the time because neither he or I have a problem making it. Now, Joe's a much better player than I am. He's a ranked player. He's a tournament guy. I'm a recreational enthusiast player. once you get a feel for it, I can, in most games, I'm going to be able to get three balls. Okay. Now, we did make a code change. There is a setting now to leave the balls in the locks between games. Okay, so that's nice. Now, for the coaster, it doesn't really help because you have to still earn your three, but it gets a little more action, and it speeds up restarting. But for the barrel, where you can steal locks, it gets a few more multi-balls in there. Okay. So you can steal multiballs from game to game if they're... Game to game and player to player. Awesome. Okay. Very good.
    22:45
    I feel like I'm blind. I can't read what's on that screen to save my life. I didn't realize my eyesight had gone that bad. Yeah, let's help Josh out with some of the print there. The questions I need to answer will be fine. Zach was saying how fun that right out lane is to nudge when the ball is going down there. to try to get it back either in the shooter lane or back up into play. And in addition, there's the outlane saves. So there's two targets above. We actually, in the latest code, are making those a little harder because it turns out those targets are a lot easier to hit than we thought when we first saw it on paper and even when we started to play it. And we're finding it's getting too many saves and getting game lengths a little long. So this code just makes those a little bit tougher. So this code now has that update. Yeah, so it makes it just a little bit tougher. Now, if you have the Kernenmeister sign, then it's still going to make those a little bit easier because that's one of the benefits of that sign. And then what happens, depending on settings, after you've earned a couple of what we call easy saves, you get a hard save. And that's when you get thrown into a mode where you have to earn the right to continue. And there's two of those modes.
    23:59
    One of them is last call, and the other is re-entry. Re-entry is a plunger skill shot. That's all it is. So you get three tries to skill shot it into the tent scoop. And if you do that, you get to resume your ball, and if after three tries, your ball ends. Last call is an interesting one because you have to spell the word sober via the various stand-up targets around the play field. So for some letters, you have more than one target you can hit. But because it's a test to see if you're sober, the flippers are actually a little delayed. So when you press the flipper button, there's a little bit of a delay before it happens. So it takes a little bit to get the feel for that. There's a pretty good ball stand on it. I think the whole thing is doing that right now for me.
    24:47
    What's the score? I think it's Josh's turn. Yeah, it's Josh's turn. Oh, right. I appreciate the double dip in there, though. Already almost had our first party foul of pinball. Hey, thanks, Terry. I'm trying to keep the ball in play, but I'm trying to be polite and make sure Josh gets his time on the fan. You know how it goes. Yeah, we're not greedy with our time. We're very generous. We're very gracious hosts. Yeah. There's no reason for us to be blowing up a game here on Twitch. I mean, we're ranked players. We can talk. Yeah, we're not even ranked in the house. I'm not even going to try because Ken's probably just going to delete my story. Yeah, yeah. You know that's inevitable. Right, right, right, right. But don't worry. We'll be at your house next week, and he'll light your machine. Yep. I will say this. You have to remember to use your Magna Saves because the first 10 or 15 games, I just forgot about the Magna Saves in general. Okay. So that's a pretty vital part if you're going to hit that barrel lock. You need to use your Magna Saves. Because to come out of that orbit and try to nail down a fly is extremely difficult. Well, the nice thing is the game will do a lot of Magna Saves for you. Yes. So any time you hit an in-lane switch, it'll activate the MagNav for you for a brief period of time. So if you hit that left in-lane and hit the right orbit, it's going to grab it for you. Okay.
    26:04
    And we want you to do that so you didn't have to learn that skill. It's just kind of an acquired skill to remember the buttons there and get the timing down. So it'll do that for you. and this code has some new logic around that. One of the problems in the previous code, sometimes it would do that when it wasn't really a good time to do it, and it would mess you up in a mode. So we revamped the logic around that to make it a little bit smarter about when to grab it by the flipper, when to grab it by the lanes, and when not to grab it at all. Okay, okay. So when you first start playing the game, you don't have to worry about it, but, yeah, if you want to start getting your scores up, Using that to drop into the upper lanes to get the playfield multiplier advanced is a good use. Certainly to get that lock. It's a lot easier off the magna stave to hit that ramp shot. But you'll find when you play, it's going to do it a lot for you. Okay.
    27:02
    And we just, as I said, tweak that to make that a little bit easier. How many magna staves can you bank? As many as you want. Okay. You have to keep earning them, and you earn the space by hitting the right ramp, the 180 ramp, or the captive ball, the Newton captive ball combination. But you have to hit it hard enough to actually hit the ball. We call that the high striker. Okay. You have to be able to hit it hard enough to get it around to actually hit the stand-up target. And those two shots alternate. Okay. So if you make the right, if the right one's lit, after you make that, then it's the captive ball. and then you can accumulate those. And there's a sign that makes it easier. I think you get two for one or three for one, depending on the sign. And Joe will correct me right now if I'm wrong on what that sign does. We've got some interesting chat going on, though. Let's go in that chat, Bill. Why don't you bring us up to speed here? We're going to leave moms out of it, per se. Excuse me, mom's here. That kind of changes some people. Let's not do that. Yeah, being drunk can definitely affect your flipper response time. I know that when I was talking to Zach earlier, I think he said, you know, for those of you that are looking to get into, like, an Oktoberfest, I think flipping out pinball, I believe he said he had two. So, and I think they're readily available. They're ready to rock and roll. So the thing that I appreciate about Oktoberfest, for those of you that like a social game, a lot of people go to the bar, you play some golden tea, and you've got your buddies around, and you're having some beverages with food, and everyone's talking. This is a fun party thing for me. and just kind of the feeling that I get when I'm playing Oktoberfest. I mean, heck, I'm drinking a beer right now and I'm playing Oktoberfest. I'm sitting down with one of the programmers. I've got my buddies here. I love that. That's the kind of stuff I like about pinball. It's fun. Well, certainly one of the things we're going to have to do tonight, maybe the next game, maybe the third game. I know where you're going. We're going to play one-handed. Yes, we will. Some would argue that I'm already doing that. Well, we might as well play that because then we'll at least have an excuse for our bad play. Right? Let's play one-handed all night. There is a new feature on the game that if it's turned on, you can just walk up to the game, hold both right buttons for a few seconds before you start the game, and then the entire game is that way. So rather than having to go into operator settings and do it, which certainly on location wasn't going to be viable for people, when you're home, you go up, you hold it, and you get a message on screen. If you start now, you're in one-handed play.
    29:29
    We've joked about where you could play with your drink, and if you don't finish your drink before you finish your ball, you're eliminated. Hey, there's never a problem with me finishing my drink before I finish the ball. All right, so these machines out of location, is there going to be a way for people to see? Okay, hold these key buttons down. There's nothing right now that will tell that. We are going to add in a feature we have in Houdini, which is Game Tips in a track mode that just rotates. So we haven't dropped it into Oktoberfest yet. We have a few things planned for that, but that'll be one that'll explain that. Beautiful. The tricky part on that is you have to know that if it's enabled, that's going to require some additional code to check. Is that feature turned on on this game to allow what we call player selected? Yep.
    30:16
    Delayed flipper mode. Which is that, drunk mode? Last call. Okay, last call mode. Okay. Yeah, they were talking about it here, and I haven't seen it yet, so I wanted to ask your opinion. What is the delay, by the way? Half a second or something? Oh, it's a lot less than a half second. A half second would be like an eternity. Okay. And it's probably more like a quarter of a second, maybe. And then the delay becomes a little bit less as you complete letters. Okay. So the other part of this is when you're playing is you see these six incredibly five, the silver five on it. I'm already tapped over. You see these five very, very attractive people on the screen. And they're a little blurry, but they're very attractive. And then as you felt sober, well, you can imagine what happens as things come into focus. It's like the morning after when you wake up. Exactly. With all your armor. I get it. Until you realize that you are sober at that point, and it's that situation, we let you continue to play your ball. And if you're not sober, you don't get to continue to play your ball. Tap in the keg.
    31:21
    So where did the idea come from for the Steinrad? You know that multi-ball effect? You know, being able to control both flippers on one side. So to go back, when Shover and I first looked at the layout, we were kind of concerned the way the layout was. We thought we'd get the ball to the upper right flipper. Yeah. And Joe had already put the magic there, but we said, boy, it would be nice if you could have some control over that to get the ball. So we went to Balser and said, hey, can we get an extra button put into the cabinet so we can make that controlled. And, you know, it actually was less of a battle with him to do it than sometimes things are with Joe when we want changes. And he went along with that. So that got us the button. And we're like, okay, great, we've got this button. And we were just brainstorming one day, and I think it was Joe and I. It was a blur for a while. And Joe's in Virginia, so he and I spent a lot of our time on Slack communicating. And we were kind of brainstorming around what else could we do with the button now that we have it. And you know, in that brainstorming came up, well, you know, one hand it plays if you're holding the drink and that's where, you know, Steinrace was already a mode we were working on and it was a natural fit to incorporate it into game play. And then from there came the idea of just letting you play an entire game one hand, which is really fun to do. We did a, there was a stream done by Marty from Head to Head, he streams under Melbourne Silverball. I was at like 2 o'clock in the morning, I was watching, and I made him put the game into one-handed play. And he played the game so long in one-handed play. I had to keep reminding people in the chat that he was playing one-handed. After a minute or two, he got so good at it that he was playing surprisingly well that you wouldn't have realized the whole thing was one-handed play. So once you get the hang of it, it's pretty good. At first, it's a little difficult, but it's a lot of fun.
    33:21
    All right, Josh is up. And, yeah, Ken is good at cradling. It's very clear I was testing the code on that one. And, yeah, I do cradle balls. The best pinball games that I have is when I'm cradling up for a while. Ken does cradle balls. Long balls are a good time. But, I mean, all right, so, again, I'm not the professional pinball player of the year, and I've got maybe 20 or 30 games on that, and I'm able to adequately hit that left tag shot, that side ramp shot from the upper right hand flipper. A lot of it is just knowing your machine and knowing where that needs to be on the flipper, and the Magnus Dave, it does help pretty tremendously. Is it easy? No. But it's absolutely attainable. It's not a shot that's overly frustrating once you kind of get your placement on the flipper. But you know what? You've got to learn the shots. Well, yeah, and honestly, that's the thing, too. Once you get comfortable with the shots because you have the game in a certain spot, somebody comes in and moves the game, or you move the game, or whatever, and suddenly it changes, and you're just like... Is that Corona? Yeah. Hey, there we go. Bad boy Bill's in the house. What do you got there, Steve? I have a Space Camper Cosmic IPA. Did you ever have one of those? I just did right now. You gave one to me. Thank you, man. It was delicious. Thanks, Scott. I did a hammer out a little Deadpool last stream, so I'm not totally horrible. How's it going, Josh? How you doing, bud? That's nice. Bill, you're... What's going on? We've got some scoring going on by Josh. He's lighting it up.
    34:52
    Joe Scovers here is also in chat. Joe, in tandem with Josh, went ahead and coded Oktoberfest. So say hello to him. Feel free to ask these guys some questions. And let's have some fun tonight. Now, if you do have access to a beverage, whether that is of the adult persuasion or of the state persuasion, I encourage you to go ahead and grab it because we're going to be here live for another hour and a half. Yep. Let's just have some fun and let's get a little party atmosphere going. It's a party pin. It is. You know, I have to address this. 50-50s. Honestly, I wake up at 4.30ish for work. So if I start drinking 50-50s now, I'm using a sick day tomorrow. So I can't jump in on that. 50-50s. Do it. No. Do-do-do.
    35:35
    Honestly, I mean, Ken can verify. I mean, how many times have you seen me with a beer in my hand? Flippin' Fargo. Thanks, man. He's saying, very nice stream, guys. We appreciate it. Thank you. I want to thank Zach at Flippin' Out Pinball. Zach and Nicole, the owners of Flippin' Out Pinball, for considering us for this opportunity to kind of stream these games. The way this is going to work, guys, on this channel, when these new games come out, Zach and Nicole are going to make sure that we have them, and we're going to stream them until the next new game comes out, in which that then old game, I guess, would be taken away for the new stuff. Our streaming style is a little bit different. We encourage having guests in. We like to have the mics on. We like to interact. Well, I guess face-to-face, isn't it? Talk about the game. Nice ball, Josh. Pass her back and forth. So it's going to be fun. Just a different kind of... Oh, who's that? Who's that? Oh, it's Josh.
    36:22
    Oh. Oh, well, he'd be grand champion, man. That means our next goal. Food frenzy champ. Oh, food frenzy champ. All right, so we're still good. We're still three, man. All right, player three at high school, 11.
    36:37
    Eternal bliss. Hey, that was me. Nothing like a ninth place ribbon there, Ken. Let's go with a little different. Let's go with a little F-N-O for a little flipping out pinball. Absolutely. Yes, we definitely encourage flipping out pinball for your pinball needs. Let's see.
    37:10
    Nothing says third place like me. Like an 11th place ribbon. All right. Hey, Albert, Pinball Nerds Podcast. What's up, buddy? Thanks for stopping in. I stopped in and I was checking out. Albert was streaming Humpty Dumpty the other night. Nice. The last thing that you expect on a pinball stream is being a little Humpty Dumpty. But that was pretty awesome. Good times on that stream. I wish I could have stayed a little bit longer. For those of you that might not have checked them out, check out his streaming channel. It's got a podcast. Oh, I missed it, though. I'd like to support the community. Sorry, go ahead, Ian. Do the lock balls carry over from one game into another or no? The beer barrel balls are stealable between players and between games. So I'm not sure. I wasn't watching if we have any in there right now. Okay. So as long as you have lock lit when you hit it, and there's already two in there, you put the third one in when lock is lit, you get the multi-ball. Okay. The coaster locks, no. You have to earn your three locks to get that multi-ball. Now, again, it'll leave them in there between game and the settings there. And part of that is just that we don't wait for the balls to drain before you start the game. The balls are always empty when the game gets rebooted or if you go into the game. Oh, my gosh. That's one thing about my interlock getaway is it locks the ball in the supercharger and you don't get the multi-ball. and you have some kind of weight for those drinks. That's kind of irritating.
    38:38
    Okay. Just to bring everybody up to speed again, Josh Kugler, one of the coders of Oktoberfest, is here with us in the studio. His partner in crime, Joe, is also in chat. So feel free to ask these guys any questions here about Oktoberfest or anything else at American Pinball, right, Josh? So is Joe correcting me on anything yet? Am I doing okay, Joe? I think so. Am I doing okay? Yeah, I think you're doing all right. I haven't seen Joe really ridicule me. Of course, more tequila, there's no more likely I'll say the wrong information. And we're going to get a bunch of tequila in you and then talk about your rumored themes that are potentially coming up. Sure we talk about that Nice It took a lot more tequila than that to get me to hit the record button button Hey we got liquor stores pretty close in the area here so don even worry about that Thanks, Slapstave. Thanks, Chris. I appreciate it. And we will be, from this point forward, we will be streaming at least once a week now. Yeah. So this is how it works, too, guys. I mean, if you get an opportunity, if you're here in chat and you haven't followed the channel, we encourage you to follow Flippin' Out Pinballs, because what will happen is as we attain an affiliate status here, which means we've streamed enough hours and we've gone ahead and we have enough followers, we'll be able to offer some fun things to the people that are in chat and all that sort of thing. So follow the channel. That blank box that you're seeing to the left of your screen will be filled up with some extra graphics and fun little goodies as it goes. So it looks like, is that Lloyd?
    40:04
    Yeah, so that is Lloyd. That's a billiard. Hey, Lloyd. Game's being built in the new building. No, we are not in the new building yet. It's been a painful process getting to the new building. We are still crammed in, which is really just a real royal pain because our building is really too small. It's hard for people to work, to get around.
    40:25
    Last I heard, the walls for the offices are going up in the new building. They're starting to get the lines set up. It sounds like we're still at least a month or two away. I'm looking forward to that because it's close to the home for me, which is good. And currently my office is also the conference room.
    40:41
    And because we are so short on space. A lot of meetings in your office. There are other people who just camp out there because we don't have enough space for everybody.
    40:49
    And so Normal, our marketing guy, sometimes camps out there. Dan, our sales guy. And every once in a while I just have to say, all right, guys, no more talking the rest of the day. go someplace else because I can't focus and I can't work. Some of my most productive time starts at 5 o'clock when everybody else leaves. And that's when I can actually really sometimes focus in on work. So I'm really looking forward to getting to the office. And I know the production team is.
    41:18
    They're constantly having to move things around just to be able to get games in and out. Fortunately right now, whatever games get built each day, pretty much the next day, I noticed that when I came in to pick up Oktoberfest, we're flipping off this thing here. I stopped in, and you guys are cranking things up. Like, I wasn't surprised because I knew they were shipping, but I didn't realize in what capacity you guys had the line moving. So that was kind of cool to see. Things are finally moving. We were moving, and then we slowed down because of some parts issues. So they finally got all of that straightened out. You know, the challenge is sometimes parts come in, and they get rejected because they're just not 100% right. You just can't use them. So they finally got that worked through. It's kind of the pain. Fortunately, we'll probably see on each time we start up a line. Yeah, right. Hopefully we'll get better each time and getting ahead of that. So at least now the line's really starting to move. So still pretty good backlog, but at least now the games are going out every day. Right, right. Heads up to Josh Group, Loser Kid. Thanks, man. Thanks for checking in on the chat. But it's an honor to have Lloyd Olson in here. I mean, as somebody that frequents Pinside, I'm going to take my turn in a second to kind of see Lloyd's interaction in the pinball community with, you know, troubleshooting machines for different companies.
    42:39
    Tremendous asset to the community. So I really appreciate that Lloyd is here. At some point, I hope to sit down and meet you and maybe get mugged on one of these pinball conventions. Well, Lloyd and I, you know, we had a falling out years ago. Thanks for coming by. And we made up a few years ago. And Lloyd knows I'm just joking, but back in the rec game pinball days, when I was just first starting collecting, so this is probably 15 years ago, and I had gotten a Twilight Zone and I was shopping it out and redoing it, and I posted on rec games pinball looking for photos because I could tell that the game I had had not been put together right by the last guy. And Lloyd typed in on the thread and said, you should take your own photos. And anybody who was back on rec games pinball back in the day knew that When Lloyd spoke, that was it. And that pretty much killed the thread, because nobody was going to go against Lloyd and give me photos. So I emailed Lloyd, and I'm like, Lloyd! And I explained the situation. He's like, oh, yeah, I never really thought about that. And, you know, so I was able to get photos, and I talked to Lloyd about it a few years ago, and we joked about it. It was pretty funny. We've been good friends ever since. You know, some of the best relationships start that way, though, with some good headaches.
    43:58
    Oh, yeah. Yeah. All right, sorry, I'm catching up on chat now, guys. Yeah. Sorry, guys, I'm a slow reader.
    44:10
    We've got Loser Kid in here. Yep, Loser Kid does the Pinball Nerds podcast. Anyone that hasn't checked it out, give it a listen. Loser Kid does not do the Pinball Nerds podcast. All right, so... Loser kid is Josh Roof. That's half a beer. And his partner, Scott. And then Albert Algar does the Pinball Nerds podcast out of Canada.
    44:34
    That's all right. I can multitask here. Sorry, guys. Oh! I like that. Are we in family-friendly mode or not? Did you see that one? You know how long it took me to practice that? I noticed the Twitch delay is less time. I shortened the delay on Twitch because I didn't think we'd have any controversy here. F-bombers. Well, yeah. Well, what are you going to do?
    45:04
    I guess you can't backhand that left ramp. I've tried. Oh, yeah, you can. It's hard, but I've done it not necessarily off of an arrest, but off of a shot. I've done it off a cradle. It's pretty tough. It depends on the flipper strength. Oh, that's the other thing I forgot to do on this code. That was bad. What's that? All right, you're going to hear it here. Right. Everybody can complain about this on Pintype tomorrow. So we put the new code in. What we should have done is adjust the right flipper strength down. Okay. So the new code is a little bit smarter about the left ramp. So it lets you have the flipper strength a little lower during gameplay. And then when the ramp comes down, we automatically increase the stripper strength. So the advantage there is it's not so hard when you're hitting the scoop or the targets on the left. side. So you can lower back two or three notches for them when you need it strong. And that also helps keep them from overheating. You have them really maxed out and they heat up quicker. It's awesome.
    46:05
    So, yeah. So, Joe, let's remember to make a note for the release notes and caps to tell people, go back now and lower your right flipper setting to typically the same as your left, since we now have this changed. I'm going to have to get production to start doing. Zach says that's pretty damn smart, Josh, and he also wanted to add that that's nicely done. Oh, thank you. You know, we're trying to get the best balance there, and it was sort of like, you know, why don't we just do that? Right, right. For sure. We screw with the flippers enough. I'm the player. We make them slow. There's a mode where we make them a little bit weaker. We haven't talked about that one yet. So if we're doing all that kind of crazy stuff, we at least should do it to help the player. That happens in Food Fight, right? With the calories or something. Now, it is your turn, so I don't want to delay your pinball action. So let's give that. I want to do a quick shout out. I'm sorry, Bill. I just wanted to say love the frick, frick, frick. Yeah, I wonder who that is. Tuna Delight. He says, thanks for streaming YM2D, though. So at one point when we get our three-dimensional camera filming equipment, we'll get it done. But I did want to say I appreciate it, Tuna. I know that you listen to our Special Win Lit Pinball Podcast or you used to because you used to contribute in our threads. So thanks for coming in. And again, I'm Ken Heathbill. We are from the special when lit pinball podcast out of Chicago. And we were given the opportunity to stream the newest games by Zach and Nicole, the owners of Pinball Curious. Tonight's Oktoberfest with Josh Kugler live in studio as he discusses the game and as we play the game and as we kind of have some fun on stream tonight. So this is going to be a good time. A couple of drinks, all good things.
    47:43
    Yeah, Lloyd says anybody that has not played Oktoberfest yet, do it as soon as you can because the game is a heck of a lot of fun. and then get yours from flipping out. So nice little plug. I'll say this. I've been behind the theme since it was introduced. I wasn't sure about the gameplay because we didn't have a lot of time on the machine when it was debuted at Expo in 2018. So you can actually release it, whatever you want. It was tough. I think we had three games on it. Yeah. I made the save. Now, we've had the game in the studio here for a little over a week. But we haven't played it. We haven't played it a lot. there's always a honeymoon phase with a pin, and I realize that. I think I played enough pinball to kind of get a feel if I'm going to want to continue to play a game or not, and this has been a really fun game. Yeah, it truly has. So I was looking forward to playing it, because I purposely haven't been playing it. And to have Josh here playing it with him and kind of learning some of the ins and outs, it's pretty fun.
    48:42
    It's a good time. I'm the guy with the Nugget shirt. Actually, this shirt was a gift from Christian and Sarah Lyon. It'll go green. They had sent me this shirt. What are they hosting? And this is like a brewery out of Pennsylvania. And Sarah's the host with Christian of the Miss Tins Pinball Party. Hey! A little love to the nugget. I like it. How'd it go? Well, I had a mode. I can't see my score from here. I did okay. I didn't hit the ramp. I never ramped. I had a successful mag now as far as grabbing it to go for the side ramp, and then I missed the side ramp. Oh, hey, you know what? What we were just talking about over there is there's the lamp indicators by the flipper, and at the lower you can tell me about the mag now. When it's yellow, it means it's available as a player-controlled mag now. If it's green, it means it's set for auto-grab. Oh, okay. Now that makes a lot of sense. So when you get the in lane, it'll go green briefly. Yes, yes, yes. Because it's only good for a few seconds. Okay. And then it'll go red later. Okay. And then if there's nothing there, it's not available, you don't have any magnums left. And so that does give color to kind of clue you in on what's happening. What is your favorite mode to play in the game?
    50:06
    Because there are how many tents? There are 14 tents. And each tent is associated with a mode. Yes. 13 out of the 14. The 14th tent is then the mini wizard mode. Right. Passes have visited all 13 tents. You don't have to win those tents. You just have to visit them. So every tent does have a way to win it.
    50:26
    So I guess that's a good thing to talk about. When we get to a player that actually has visited the three tents, we'll talk about the coloring of the tent. Hey, we're just warming up. So we'll come back. We're just warming up. Right. Hey, too early in the stream. So we'll explain that a little bit later when we get a few more tents lit up down in the lower portion. At some point soon we'll have some good games. So this is Food Frenzy, which as the name describes Frenzy. I think people are confused about F-U-D. I think people think it's FUD, but it's U with the umlaut. Right, right, right. So it's Food Frenzy. It's sort of a little bit of a play on words. It's not a German word. Makes sense. Something you'd see on a license plate. It's not a German word. That's what that is. It's not bug frenzy. It's food frenzy. No nudge, Bill. As you can see, we have our character on screen consuming large quantities of food.
    51:21
    But what's very different about this frenzy versus many is that each unique switch you hit increases the value. So just going for the spinner, not how you maximize this mode. Okay. sweeping the Oktoberfest stand-ups or the other stand-ups. You actually do want to focus on early, hitting as many distinct switches as you can. Right. And then you go for the spinner or the pot. Okay.
    51:49
    I'll catch up to speed here on chat real quick. Lord Helmet says he really congratulates all of us for great work. He'll be checking out future streams for sure. He said, Josh, game looks great. Beer and friends equals super fun. Super fun theme. He said that he enjoyed it in Texas. Flippin' Out Pinball, which Zach thought that my shirt was pro-cannabis shirt, because I guess there's a nugget on it. It's actually, I would imagine, like a hop for a beer.
    52:14
    Good times. What else? Flippin' Out Pinball also says he likes the looper mode. Pin Stadium, the game really surprised him, and it draws you in, and once you play it, then you're hooked.
    52:28
    Cary Hardy says he got to talk to some local pubs around me, and see if there was interest in getting this on site. Now, that's an excellent question. I'm going to take my player three, but if you don't mind discussing this, how do you think this pinball machine appeals to local bars, pubs, and breweries? To me, it seems like it would be a match made in heaven if you're going to have a pinball machine on location.
    52:49
    There's no doubt that our distributors, the first people they were hearing from were bar games. Yeah. All wanting the game, and microbreweries and all that. And it's obviously a natural fit. And when Joe Balster brought up that he wanted to do Oktoberfest, which has been a dream team for him for 20 years, my first reaction was that, like a lot of people have, which is Oktoberfest is not just about beer and babes. Not that there's anything wrong with beer and babes, but not necessarily a theme you would think of. And so the first thing is I started doing research on it, and I realized it's not just about beer and babes. It's a family festival. I was thinking I should have said that.
    53:30
    But at the same time, when you look at this resurgence in pinball, you know, barcade is a big part of that. So it's certainly going to be a natural fit for that. But I think what's funny is when, you know, the theme leaps, for lack of a better term, and there was a lot of negative reaction. People, oh, it's about beer. That's not a good theme. It's not family. It's not this and that. And then, of course, you have the people who actually knew what Oktoberfest was, who said, no, it is a family thing and all of that. And I said, I didn't know that as an American. I think we just had this, you know. Right. We just, we only pictured it from like, you know, the movie beer fest, whatever it was. Exactly. That's how we all thought of it. And that's not what it was. And I think that actually worked in our favor in a lot of ways because we had five or six months of people, you know, kind of be really down on the theme. And then when we rolled out the game for the first time, I think it really surprised people. Because all of a sudden they realized, oh, this isn't what I was expecting.
    54:29
    And I've come to the conclusion that it's a much better thing to have people have really low expectations for a game and surprise them than have really high expectations for a game. And if you look over the last couple of years, we've had games where the expectations were so incredibly high that no matter how good the game was, it was not going to be able to live up to those expectations. But that's been long. Everybody's a critic. That is the problem. Right. You know, Star Wars. Wonka dialed in. No, let's just be honest. Those were all games that we were like, this is going to be the greatest game ever to the point that the initial reaction was never going to be able to meet the hype. And I think with most of these games, people got to know it. They go, oh, okay, the game is good. But people have this thing in their mind about the game that it gets so high. Yeah, that's natural. You need to play the game, too. And that's the really important thing. You can't judge any game, even from a screen, you can't have a sense of it. Until you put your fingers on the flippers, until you sort of learn the rules a little bit. And, you know, I was on a podcast recently and was giving the host a lot of grief about, you know, his tendency to assess things based on, you know, the first images of a game. You know, you can react a little bit to an art package, but even that you can't really often tell from a photo. To really assess the game, you need to play it. You need to play it more than once. All right. There's a couple of games out there. once is enough, it won't be entitled.
    55:56
    But most games, you know, you've got to get a half dozen or a dozen games on it to really get a feel for the game. I agree there.
    56:06
    None I've been sold to all my competitors, maybe not. No. Is there a headphone jack on the game or no? No, there is not. I'd love to get one. I'm sure at some point we will be able to get one of the guys to make one that's compatible with this, which would also make it compatible with TNA. Yeah, right. Now with Super, they're using the same platform. Okay. So somebody should be motivated enough to do that because they're playing games. Yep. It'll work out for some post-game as well. I'm not sure what they're doing amp-wise, but I'm just excited it'll be similar. Albert from Pinball Nerds Podcast wants to know if it's true that there's going to be an add-on where you can install a urinal inside the coin door on Oktoberfest. That is not true. That is not true, Albert. I am sure there's some models in that, Right, who jumped on that? Stadium Pail. I don't know what you're talking about. The coin bucket, I thought that's what that was. It's like a bedpan for pinball, right? I do also want to recognize that Jason Fowler from Slap State Pinball Podcast is here. He wishes us all a hello, so it's good to have you in chat. It's good to see a lot of you guys active in the pinball community in chat. And it's great to have people that are enthusiastic about pinball checking out these games. And with the Flippin' Out Pinball streaming channel here, you're going to see the newest games. streamed by us and I imagine by Zach throughout the week. So it's awesome that everybody stopped in, man. This is good times. Yeah, good times. Yeah, I think we need to get a trough like at Wrigley Field for anyone that's ever been to Wrigley Field in front of the game. Corey Hardy just recommended that we use a catheter. That's horrible. Like a man. I'd almost rather have open-heart surgery than to be catheterized. Hey, man, nothing like having a mirror above you while they're doing something. Boy. Unless you're pouring the beer into the catheter. I don't know how that would work. Like direct to the bladder? We're not talking about butt chugging. I've heard of butt chug. All right. Hey!
    57:59
    Keep it clean here. Got a little on hand. Sorry about that, Zach. Sorry for moving up him. Hey, we're just quoting movies. It's fine. Good times. Has anybody here got any... Have you seen like an Oktoberfest in the wild yet? Because I know that they're out there and they're starting to ship to homes. Anybody out there?
    58:20
    The beauty's up. Yeah, very nice. So I think where people might be concerned that we're going to blow up the game and see all the modes and the wizard modes, I think it's safe to say that this is just an introduction to the game. That is certainly not happening based on what I've played so far. But we're having a good time. We are having a good time. This is fun.
    58:44
    Butt-chugging for the win. There we go. I like it. So, Lloyd, traveling companion, flash straps your ankle, rubber hose and parts of security your heart runs up your leg. That's like the stadium pail. Or the traveling companion. Yeah, stadium buddy. Yeah, absolutely. That would not be a bad Oktoberfest, Adam, because you can literally play one-handed, have a beer, and urinate all at the same time. I was thinking about that. Somebody could have been outside the theater for Endgame, and Pi could have been selling those for the movie over three hours. I just saw the movie finally just a couple of days ago no spoilers remember people go running for the door it's not because they're running to go home it's because they have to go to the bathroom that's a long movie a couple buckets of popcorn you got some fiber running through you too I imagine you got a couple issues on both especially if you buy one of those huge drinks they're probably not a good strategy no no no no but this is good times What we're going to do here after this game, we're going to take a quick flipping out pinball timeout. And then what I think we should maybe consider doing, Josh, if you're up for it. One-handed. Should we do the one-handed one for everybody? We'll have a little one-hand tournament. And how about the loser has to consume a beverage quickly? Sure. The last place scorer. And the first place scorer.
    60:07
    Bill's like, oh, I'm out of that. I'll be drinking a Pepsi on the past. I'll be drinking a Pepsi. Just saying.
    60:15
    How about that stick, Bill? Oh, uh-oh. I got to save those, man. Butt chugging is trending in chat here right now, so I'm not sure how this happened. Buzz cuts are mandatory. I think that was Albert from Pimbal and Nerds asking a question about the trough-style urinal underneath the coin. The store has now gone into catheterization and butt chugging. Let's move in another direction. Let's go into another direction. Do you have an idea As far as I imagine Oktoberfest will be on the line For as long as it's selling Or is there like an itinerary That you guys have in place as far as rolling out another game Well We're working on game 3 And to some degree game 4 And to some degree game 5 What is this Deep Root? What happened over here? Game 5 is we go to lunch And we chat about stuff That's right. We're working on games now. That's where we're out there. You can start brainstorming on that. Game three is in a whitewood phase at this point. Good, good. So you're looking at all of those things. Can you comment? Because I know that you guys both, and I'm going to jump on my turn in a second, but I think it was kind of shared that there were four kind of themes that you guys were considering. Can you say or not that Game 3 would be one of the four themes that were mentioned? What I'll say is what we've said about the four games is they're certainly not doing all four of those themes. I will tell you that right now. And I think it's very likely we will do at least one, if not two, of those themes. Unbelievable. And I will say that at least one of those is in progress. I'm not going to say whether that's Game 3 or not or Game 4. Understood. But it's out there. And those four themes, just to bring anybody up to speed that might be considering a future pinball purchase, we had Poker Run, we had Robin Hood, we had Sherlock Holmes, and we had Valkyries. Correct? Correct. On that, I'm going to take my player three turn. Legend. We did have fun at Texas. We asked the audience to raise their hands as to which of those themes they most liked.
    62:26
    The clear favorite was Sherlock Holmes. If you were watching on the screen, you would have thought it was Poker Run. Because that's what Joe kept saying. That's a theme he really wants to do is poker run. So he's really pushing hard for that. I'm pushing more for Sherlock Holmes.
    62:46
    So, you know, like I said, there's a couple of those that we're doing some work on. But I don't see us doing all four of those teams. But it was a cheap way to do some market research. Oh, yeah, absolutely. We really got to see the reactions when people see those teams. So don't be surprised if you see us suddenly trademark three or four more names as a way to kind of get that out there.
    63:13
    Somebody just asked Animal House. Anyone thinking about doing that? I think that would be a great thing, dude. Some Sham-a-Lama Ding-Dong multi-ball. Sham-a-Lama Ding-Dong. That would be awesome. You know, Animal House could be a really fun game. I keep the interesting question on that. Obviously the movie itself would never be made today, or at least not in the same way. So that becomes a little bit of a challenge of making it a game.
    63:40
    One of the other challenges when you look at older movies is whether or not there's enough content to make a game with the depth people expect in a game. That's true. Sometimes we'll talk about a theme and you kind of go, yeah, there's a couple of really great voice calls in it, but is there enough to really create a game today? And I think that's a bigger challenge with some teams. I love a center post. As well as, is that game carried over to the next generation? I hate the center post. Yeah. Do 20-something guys know about Animal House? For them, is it, what was the Will Ferrell school? Old school. For some guys, that's their Animal House became that film. So I think that's part of the challenge. Animal House would be a really fun theme to do. Right. I'm not sure how much of John Belushi's like this you could use or not. If you couldn't use him, then to me that's a no-go for the game. But we talk about a lot of license themes now. It's certainly our plan down the road. We're not ready to go that route yet. Well, there's a lot of those movies that, I mean, just because of PC reasons alone, you could never, ever make a game over it. Right, right. You'd have to choose. Obviously, we all know what happened with the monkey on the back glass, which gives you an indication of the sensitivity that exists now even in the world of pinball. And we absolutely respect that. And the monkey thing was sort of an unfortunate mistake that happened. And obviously, right away, we took care of that. But for those who are worried, the monkey is in the game. If you're watching carefully, the monkey has probably already been on screen a couple of times if you've been paying attention. So the monkey does make appearances in the game.
    65:28
    It wasn't his fault what happened, so we did not feel he should be penalized completely. He's been banished from the backlist, although that's not actually completely true either if you look at it. All right, well, we've got some questions when you come back after your turn.
    65:44
    I like Harry's. Yeah, Harry's question. I agree. Those don't take long, Jacques says. I like that about him.
    65:51
    He's a gracious guest. I'm glad we got some good time on the show. What was that cowboy movie from back in the day? Lazy Saddle. Oh, yeah. Pretty controversial these days. Never do that movie. As a football machine. I mean, homebrew, sure, but that's about it, man. You better not bring it to a show. Captain Red Eye can spank the monkey, he says. Interesting.
    66:13
    Hey, Josh, do you have any interest in making a Beetlejuice game? You know, we surely have some people who think it's a great theme. choice.
    66:25
    So I wouldn't say no to it off the top of my head. There you go, you wouldn't say no. So there's still hope. There's an art package for you.
    66:35
    You need one. You need the art sheet for you. But I think that falls into my previous comment about is there enough content in that movie? Ooh, I got robbed on that. You know, Carrie was saying maybe like the world of Beetlejuice rather than just, you know, going up, focusing on the movie. Yeah.
    66:58
    And maybe that's why the theme sort of dropped out of the play. I don't know if that's true. But it wouldn't surprise me. Because again, is there enough content to really make a game?
    67:14
    High score as well. I think we could just get a piece of that. But I do want to pause for a moment and, you know, look at that nice high score screen. You know, we've, on Houdini and now here, we try to, you know, we theme our high score screens to, you know, we call it, why not, to bring it to life. And then what we also did on Houdini was the summary screen, a little hard to see here, you know, to capture, you know, your achievements. You know, early on, people would talk about, you know, they had done this on Houdini or that. And, you know, somebody said it would just be nice to kind of be able to see that. And we implemented it there, and then we brought it to here as well. And it's nice at the end you can see, you know, how many tents did I visit? How many did I win? You know, sort of those key metrics. We had, like, longest ball times. Right. And that was one that, well, we have one that's highest scoring ball is one we had. That was great. And that was something Joe came up with, and he was sort of surprised nobody had ever done that. Because sometimes you have that killer ball. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And it's sort of nice to reward that. A lot of gamers these days are, you know, stat-based. Right. The more stats you can squeeze out, the more entertaining it is. You find something new. When we first put the length of game on Houdini, which we did right from the start. I added that right from the beginning. And it was funny when we showed the game the first time at Texas, and people would be playing. And maybe somebody had the lowest score, but they'd say, but my game was longer. Exactly. You find that rallying point. And part of it to me is people go, I played for 45 minutes. Well, you know what? Now show us the score. Let's see the union chop in. What did you do in that 45 minutes? You know, let's see. And then one of the things we did add is on both games is points per second. So it's not necessarily how long your game was. I saw that one. You know, what did you do with that? So maybe you had a shorter game, but you really, you know, maximized adversity. I played forever, and you didn't really score a lot of points. So lots of different ways. And part of it is to make you feel good at the end of your game. It's one of the reasons why we have 14 high scores, which obviously ties to 14 tenths. 14 high scores. Every tent has a high score value.
    69:22
    It's always good to just enter your name, enter your initials. I did something. When it's your home game, you expect to have a high score. Then somebody comes to your house and puts things up, and that motivates you to get their damn initials off your screen. But if you delete it, then you've got 14 modes. You've now got to put the high score again to beat the default. I'm not sure you want to delete that too quick. I think, if you don't mind, Josh, we're going to take a little 20-second timeout here. And then when we come back, why don't we start a little one-handed tournament mode, if that's cool.
    70:10
    And we're back. Woo! Nice. All right. Was there some other question that you wanted me to answer? Yeah, let's see what's going on here. We're going to set up that one-handed tournament. Are we doing this one-handed? Loser has to drink. There's got to be something going on.
    70:30
    All right, so let's see what we have going on here. I'm starting to realize that at 40-plus, I might need some glasses. Maybe it's your screen because I can't see anything. Okay. We need to get that projector going on. I'm going to stay in my eyes now. No, not at all. People are liking the highest ball score. That's a pretty cool innovation. That's getting some positive feedback.
    70:54
    Let's see. People are liking Ken's God voice. Terry Hardy goes 20 seconds, and that was 20 seconds. And the last time, and a really tough – oh, okay, that was a bad comment.
    71:05
    You'd be surprised about my unit of measurements, too. Of course, it's lines like that that are making their way into the game when you have family-friendly turned off. Well, let's talk about it. Did we talk about adult mode on this game? I mean, is that something that's going to be added? Steve was wondering. I am wondering. Steve likes adult mode. The adjustments are already in the game. There's right now maybe five voice calls that we have flagged as non-family friendly. We actually have a script writer working on lines for us. The problem we have at American Pinball is I'm the funniest person there, and I'm not that funny. and so that's a real issue trying to come up with humor for the game so we actually have brought in a script writer to uh create for us a bunch of funny lines for otto and inga our main characters and most of those will be are geared towards the non-family friendly option in the game and you know obviously it's going to be a lot of sexual innuendo because that's the theme lends itself well. So it's mostly call-outs. Yeah, mostly call-outs. There are a couple animation things that we have planned, and there's one I know Joe's going to cringe because he absolutely hates this, but it's happening anyway, which is in Duck Hunt I have planned that at some point when you shoot the duck, the duck will explode.
    72:27
    We've got a little boy on the binoculars. Lloyd is questioning the script writer when Nermal's in the building. Isn't he funny enough? Normal might be funny looking.
    72:36
    We're going to pick on him. But Normal is not funny at all. He is fun to make fun of. And being a young guy and new to the company. Normal was a great guest on the special one, Lit Pinball Pocket. Yeah, he was pretty funny on your show. I didn't say he was funny. I just said he was a great guest. Right, right. Well, we had a lot of fun making fun of him after he was on your show. and let's see if normal is see a normal new this was happening tonight I think he did and he's not here to defend himself accordingly exactly right he'll watch this later and then he'll I think you can actually probably type messages later so like the next time people watch this defending himself and yeah there was actually pretty new to pinball sales and marketing guy and and he's He's relatively new to pinball and he's really done a tremendous job of immersing himself in the world of pinball. It's really been great to see that. He's trying to learn about a lot of games. He really knows a lot about Oktoberfest and the rules. He knows a lot about Houdini. He's really jumped in with two feet to really try to learn about the culture and the people and the history and the games. That's key that he's been able to do that. It's great to see him start to be able to talk more about games and as we're working on stuff, throw out ideas and suggestions that aren't completely lunatic. Or now he says things where you're like, actually, that might be a good idea. So he's probably thrilled the first time we tell him that. Oh, that's a good idea. It's not encouraging. He's not. Let's be careful. I love it. You want to set a little one-handed motor? Yeah, let's do it. So to do it, all you need to do is hold both of the right buttons. Oh, I can do this without going into setting? Look at this, ladies and gentlemen. So literally, you can't see me, but I've walked up to the pin. I'm right-handed, so I'm going to hold both right buttons. All right. Okay. So now it's telling me to press start. Get out of here. It's that easy, Josh? Wow. That is awesome. I'm buying two October 1st. So can people at home that have this game or out in public, can they do this now? Or is this just on this latest update? This is in the latest code of actually, if people are on the 19-4-11 code, the April 11th code. It might have been in that release as well, but you do then have to enable it in the features. I don't think it's already. So that you can still do the two. Right. So going forward, it'll default to that being on. But I think prior to this code, the existing setting was on or off. Obviously, most people have it set to off. But in the future, this is now the default is to be players selected, being the option to enable it. All right. Am I player one here? Am I player two? This would be the caption of this feature right now. I recommend that you hold a drink. Yeah. I recommend you hold a drink. You have to hold a drink. Well, you don't have to, but I recommend it. You're drinking the left hand. Okay.
    75:42
    Now, see, now I'm mad I don't have a player. It does disable your, of course, you're holding a drink. You can't use MagNav, which the left one becomes MagNav. Right. So in this case, we'll just have to live without MagNav. You can just hit it with your knee or anything else in that waist area. If you do it one-handed, it's probably hard enough if you play one-handed versus you also using that now. Loser plays pantless next game, says Jason Fowler at Classics in La Vaga. I don't know why he would want to see that, actually. That's kind of interesting.
    76:14
    Oh, gosh. Anyways, let's see. All right, so there's questions about the next code update. We are playing on code that has not been released, And for people that are joining chat right now, when will this be public? So actually what's happening is tomorrow I head out of the country for five, six days to go on a fishing trip in Canada, where I'm completely off net.
    76:36
    No Internet, no cell phone, no electricity. So what we're going to do is actually going to try to draw a line in the sand right now. We're going to be testing this code internally. Joe will handle any bugs that come up. assuming nothing major is found while I'm gone, I get back next Monday night. Okay. Next Wednesday of next week, we'll make this available for beta. If you want to download and try it out. Are you going to allow this code to stay on our machine? Yes. Can we be an advanced data party? Yes, we're going to let you have this code. You'll be able to play it and let us know any issues. It doesn't void my warranty.
    77:13
    We'll run an open data for about a week. All right. And if nothing, if substance comes up, any minor things, we'll take care of. Perfect. Then we'll make it an official release. It does have a couple of key bug fixes in it. Yeah. So we do want to get it out there.
    77:27
    No, I can't do that. We're anxious to get this out. It's got a lot in it. Joe, right now, it wouldn't surprise me if while he's watching this, right now he's working on the release notes. Yeah, okay. It would not surprise me if he's working on that.
    77:42
    So, because there's a lot in it. There's a lot of its bug fixes, a lot of improvements. Right. A lot of score balancing. I'm not sure how much of that he'll detail in the release notes. He's been very focused on that. One of the things that happens with Joe and I, Joe likes to work like, you know, 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. kind of stuff. So when I come in in the morning, I'll see all the code he worked on and checked in at like 3 a.m. And I'll be working on stuff. And typically sometime in the afternoon, he'll come online. He's in Virginia. And he'll come online and we'll chat about stuff. So we're kind of working. So he's done more at 3 a.m. than you've done by 4 a.m. Absolutely. He's in our head, right? And so it nice I can come in and see what he did then he can come in and see what I did But he been doing a lot of score balancing of late Now that we gotten to play the game we got games out in the field that we collecting audits from So we're adjusting certain things, certain modes. We said clearly this mode is too hard. Nobody's winning. Okay. And so there's a couple modes we've made easier. Okay. You know, we want a certain win rate. You know, we don't want modes that you're going to win every time you play it. Sure, sure, sure. But we don't want a mode that you're only winning one. Yeah, the modes aren't easy. I'm going to do this. I'm going to take my one-handed play here. And we have to figure out what the loser has to do. But secondly, when I come back, I do want to ask you a question about just your general experience and your feelings after completing Houdini and now wrapping up Oktoberfest, how the two compared as far as your, I mean, these are your first two games of pinball. I'll be right back. Sure.
    79:19
    Well, they are my first two games. They are your first two, man. For both Joe and I, this is our second game. Joe did Alien, which is just, by all accounts, a phenomenal name. In fact, when the highway imploded, I waited a whole 24 hours before I reached out to Joe to see if he wanted to come work with us. And I know I'm not the only company who reached out to him. Somehow I persuaded him, I'm not sure how, to come join us.
    79:54
    And that's been great. Having somebody else to work with on rules who knows rules is great. Because on Houdini, in some ways, I was off on an island. Joe Balzer doesn't get involved in the rules pretty much at all. So it's been great with Joe for us to be able to play off each other, brainstorm, we work on different parts of the game. I wasn't working with Joe. I mean, you guys go out and grab a beer on a personal level, like after work? Or, I mean, are you guys just kind of 9 to 5, tolerating each other? Yeah, Joe and I, you know, Ballster and I occasionally, you know, we'll have a beer. In fact, he owes me a drink right now. You heard it right here. Joe, if you're watching, he still owes me a drink for a wager. It was pretty normal, in fact, because it was the wager. What was the wager?
    80:37
    I'll happily share this because I've had enough drinks, I can blame it on the booze. For anybody who was in Expo, normal was wearing a outfit where he was sort of, you know... He was being carried by a German man. Right. That's a word. And so, which was pretty funny the first day. And Balser said, there's no way he's wearing that tomorrow. I said, I bet you he wears it tomorrow. Yeah. And we bet a drink on that. And Joe still hasn't paid off on that. What was strange is when I went to American Pinball two weeks later and he still had it on. I know. We finally got it off of him and burned it.
    81:13
    Right. So Balser actually still owes me a drink. That's a great costume, though. I like that. But Joe is very much about the layout. He's very focused on that. And you are up when you're ready for your one-handed ball. Yeah, I just want to keep the machine playing.
    81:32
    Yeah, yeah, so I'm going to love this. My brain's not wrapping around those two buttons at all. It's almost like when you're playing another game like a Ghostbusters and then you've got reverse flippers, and it's just your brain doesn't understand it. That's how I felt. No, this one's a little more manageable, I think. Yeah, one-handed mode just destroys me too, Jason.
    81:57
    Hey, and Rordan Osborne is in chat, man. I didn't get a chance to say hi to Rordan, buddy. You're my buddy, man. We love you guys. We love you, Rordan. We love Australians.
    82:06
    We've got a lot of good friends in Australia now. Yeah, we do. That's a place to be, man. I just yawned. That's why I looked at you. I was like, you're crying. Yeah, at this hour, dude. I didn't know this stream was affecting you. Yeah, at this hour. of mode right now. I get awfully emotional. After 9 o'clock. Central Bank. Let's see what he's going for here. He's going for bumper cars. I got this time for bumper cars. Worden's on the expo kit, so. Hopefully we see you down here for that, Worden. I don't know how that's going to work with my wife, because we're actually due to the week of expo, so you know. We'll have to find a Bill look-alike. I'm just going to have to run to the store to go get diapers real quick. Yeah, yeah. I fell asleep in the parking lot for five hours. My bad. But, you know, we'll figure something out. Now, Josh Coogler is currently taking his one-handed turn, so he's playing with only his right hand. Hey, are you holding your drink, Josh? Yep. Alright. Got it. Holding his drink in his lap. Is that the rule? We have to hold the drink? You have to hold the drink. Okay. You didn't do that? I... Did we figure out what we're doing for whoever finishes last? Yeah, Steve called me up on it.
    83:12
    Hey, Showbro, I'm sure you just saw that nice bug there. Where's Showbro? Oh, did Did you expose a little something there under the radar? Yeah, hopefully. So there's no issue with the one-handed mode that we'll have to take a look at. Nice, nice. Hey, cheers for catching it. Well, that's why these things are good. Yeah, thanks, man. Although that's why you've been out in the wild and just haven't paid attention to it. We do want to thank you very much for spending your night, because I know after working a full day and then coming here, for those of you, I mean, we're in central time now, so it's 9 a.m. I need to put my drink down. And I know you've got an hour ride home from here, so you're not getting home until probably, when we end this stream at 10, we do keg stands and stuff until 11.30. So I can get home until like 12.30. And then I'll be unwinding.
    83:57
    But then what time are you going in tomorrow, though? Well, I'll probably get in around 8.30. I guess I'll get in a little later because I don't like to leave the office until typically 8.30. All right, all right. So I'll probably try and get in my normal time, but because I'm heading up to Canada tomorrow, actually first to Michigan and then Canada, Just look at me and see why I'm going to leave work early tomorrow so I can get on the road and avoid rush hour traffic. Right. I've got like a three and a half hour drive tomorrow. Oh. And then a ten hour drive the next day to wherever the hell in the middle of nowhere we're going. You're traveling out of the country a little bit, right? Yeah, somewhere in the middle of Canada, some island on a lake that we're doing fishing. That sounds amazing. I'm not sure I got talked into this, but it's with my brother and a very good friend from my college days. and some bunch of other outdoorsy guys. Right, right, right. As long as there's booze and we're going to have some nice Cuban cigars and your steak, and then I guess, I guess as soon as we catch a lot of fish, you know, I guess the final meal is all the fish we catch. No electricity. So no promote. Oh, oh. I'll have a generator for that. There's no electricity. There's no running water. It's a pump or something. I'd be dead in four hours. I guess we have propane for cooking. I'd be dead in three hours. Beer and propane doesn't mix well for me Right, so we'll see how it goes I'm looking forward to being able to spend time with those guys So it should be fun I did want to take one quick second though For those of you that are watching Oktoberfest If you're a casual pinball player And you want more time on this Or if you have questions Again, this is Josh Kugler He's one of the programmers for Oktoberfest Joe Schober is the other one He, I believe, is in chat So you can type your questions For those of you that are looking at potentially purchasing an Oktoberfest, I would encourage you to go to Flippin' Out Pinball. And Zach and Nicole are the owners there. You can call Zach directly, and that's at 847-788-4876. I believe right now he does have a couple that are in stock, and they're ready to ship. If you want a more passive approach to interacting with Zach, you can email him at Zach at FlippinOutPinball.com.
    86:06
    Who would not want to talk to Zach? I don't know. Why don't you email? I don't know. You could get him on the phone and hear that voice. He's got such a great voice. It's that very soothing, relaxing, friendly voice. He's the man of many voices or faces. Like Game of Thrones. Anytime Zach calls in and Dan or Sales Guy gets him on the phone, I'm always like, put him on speakerphone. Let me hear Zach. There you go. Let me hear his voice.
    86:33
    I'm going in for one-handed. See you, Gordon. So on the one-handed mode, the top button is the right flipper, and the bottom is... And I almost feel like they should be reversed for my mind.
    86:49
    Some people think it should be the other way, but to me, switching both buttons is even more... It's one-handed reverse flippers. It's hard because you're just leaning against the back. There's no nudging, really, either. I mean, try nudging it on that. you're holding the drink. We're doing the holding the drink. But I think if you have your hand there, they'd also use for gambling. If you only flip the right for a while, that's when we're going to want to hit it, then it's not going to do anything, and then that guy could continue to do even more.
    87:18
    The squash-rush-logger. Who's that taking after? And if you ever take a look at the icon on that, you'll notice it's a beer,
    87:25
    and I'm holding a shot at the beer. Is it not? No, it's not. The artist did the first verse. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. You got to have one hand the beer, one hand the shot. So we haven't seen the wiener dog. That's my favorite. It's my favorite. Somebody will have to do that. Oh, gosh. I zigged when I zagged. That's probably my favorite call out of any game in the last two years. It is. And I think we both, we appreciate that. It's like, oh, look at the poor wiener dog. He's too scared to go down the slide. So I helped get this machine in the basement and we played it like three games. And that popped up and we were dying. It was hilarious. It was awesome. It was like nothing I ever expected. No.
    88:13
    All right, all right, all right. Oh, nice. Oh, goodness. Oh, hey. You know what I love is, so I'm a, I'm a, I'm a personal fan of Dennis Creasel of the Eclectic Gamers podcast. Dennis is a good guy. I don't know how long Dennis may or may not have been lurking in here, but to bring him out to speak, it was the mention of Zach in his many voices. And then Dennis chimes in. Zach in pass is interesting. So, uh-oh.
    88:49
    We had a little stream buffering there. So, hey, Dennis, thanks for joining us on stream here. What up, Dennis? And Zach, appropriately or inappropriately, calls Dennis Denden. I'm pretty sure he doesn't like that.
    89:04
    But good times. You know what we don't hear on this kind of stream, right? What's that? Dr. Phil. Why would you even bring it up? I'm sorry, man. My bad. Let me open up some skeletons in your closet there, Bill. Hey, remember that night, that May 4th of 20... Never mind. Try to forget it. Lloyd says when you text Zach at 3 a.m. to order your Oktoberfest, don't forget to order your Escalera, too, if you have stairs. Nice. Now, I did forgot to mention that flipping out pinball is a proud distributor of the Escalera. I would love an Escalera. The Escalera stair climber is pretty impressive. It's on with Mr. Max. He's good. Yep. He's good.
    89:50
    How'd you fare there, Josh? Rocking it out? Who's bringing up the rear? And we haven't figured out who's going to do what for last year.
    89:58
    Steve, player one is slowed down on this stream. Call of five. So we've got about 35 more minutes before we wrap this up. Josh, is there anything that you kind of wanted to share about Oktoberfest? I know that you've been very active in a lot of the streams on Twitch. This may or may not be the first time you're able to speak live on a screen. I think it's certainly the time I've spoken live where it's having to type real fast. Yeah, it's going to be a little easier. It certainly is. It's certainly to answer questions.
    90:35
    Well, one thing, just to hit on a few tips for people playing, the tent icons at the bottom, two things to note about that.
    90:45
    First of all, they're color-coded. So here he shot the barrel and didn't have the lock. He finally makes the upper ramp without having the lock. It just goes right through. That's kind of always a bummer when that happens. Right, right. But the tent icons, they show different colors to give you different information. If it's yellow, as the one on the lower left is, it means that the tent he's visited has not went. All right, so now we're talking, so that makes sense. So he can go back and play that tent again and try and get the win. And getting a win has a lot of point value to you. So the insert colors are very intuitive. So the one on the lower right, which is beer color, tells us he has the sign for that tent, but he hasn't visited it yet. Okay. If you visit a tent and win, you'll see that the tent is green. Oh, yeah. Okay. Makes sense. And the tent you're currently playing is not currently in a tent. Oh, my gosh. It will be blue.
    91:44
    What's blue? I'm sorry. The tent you're currently playing. If you're in a tent. Okay, I got you. So that's sort of the first thing to know about it. The second thing is when you go to select a tent, rather than looking at the screen, you can actually look at the play field and you'll see it move around. You can kind of spot which tent you want. So as you're familiar with those tents. You can very quickly say, oh, I want this tent. You're not looking at the screen. I mean, I'm looking down at the play field. I love that. Much easier and quicker to select your 10. Okay. If your goal is too small, well, no. Once you know the game, you don't want to lose it. Okay.
    92:27
    You will notice when somebody does beat the 10, if you watch the bonus at the end of the ball, it can be incredibly lucrative, the value in completing a 10. Oh, okay. Based on how well you do in the bonus. And if you've gotten the bonus, they'll fire up. That has a lot of value. The way you get the bonus multiplier up is by collecting each of the four ducks on the play field. Ducks are a good thing. Collecting ducks increases the bonus multiplier, and it also lights the mystery award. See, now that's the challenge of trying to condense all of your instructions onto a card on the apron, right? I mean, it's a general overview for on-location play, but as you own a game in your home and you're able to kind of find out its little subtle tricks and nuances, it becomes fun to explore a game. Exactly. If you're a tournament player, then you're going to want to learn about ducks and calories and the benefits of that. But even if you're not a tournament player, but you're a homeowner and you don't want a game to be boring, this game has enough in it to where it's going to keep you finding new things. There's a tremendous amount of that. So if I were to compare Houdini and Oktoberfest, they're both very, very deep games. I'd say Houdini has a little more breadth to it, but Oktoberfest has more layers of strategy. So a slight variation of that. Both will keep you busy and occupied for a long time, but a little bit of a different approach in how we created that depth to the game. With the goal still being that you can step up and have fun and know nothing, but if you own this game, you're going to continue. My strategy around signs constantly is evolving and changing. Over time, I keep changing the approach, which signs I take when, when do I take them. And I think Joe would tell you the same thing. He's continuing to learn, even though we've written the rules, created the rules, written the code, we're still learning different ways to approach the game. Based on who I'm playing against, the situation in the game, it's not like there's one tap through the game that leads to success. I've got to jump in here and respond to that. You have a couple of questions. Okay, what do we got? I can't see the screen, so I'm blind.
    94:48
    Why does the magnet grab the ball without hitting the button sometimes? You described it earlier to me. Right. I don't know if they caught that. So we refer to that as an auto-magnet. and there's a couple of different ways that occurs. Typically, it's triggered off the inlays. And we do that to put those magnets into play and help the player. And this new version of the code has new rules on that.
    95:19
    And so what that does is it looks at the game situation to decide which of the two magnets is going to be most beneficial to you. Is it the lane magnet because you're in a mode where that's the case? or if the lock is lit or the bar is open, then it's going to grab it by the flipper magnet to help you. There's also a special one that after you've collected enough pop hits, when the ball exits from the pops, it'll grab it, and the high striker, which is the Newton captive ball combination, is then worth a lot more points if you can nail it off of that. Obviously, you can still go for the ramp at that point. So, yes, I'm up. You are up. Yeah, 2 to 4 a.m. That's the only time I reach out to Zach as well. And he responds right away. Zach or Scott don't sleep either.
    96:16
    So I don't even know that really. Scott's very quick on the response. Oh, yeah, dude. He's like, okay. Scott was helping me today a little bit. Nice. Because we put the Penn Stadium kit into the Oktoberfest. I assume maybe no instructions online yet. For what? Oktoberfest. It's a new game.
    96:39
    That's a great question. I don't know if it's a PDF. There might be instructions in the coin box. I have no idea. Gotcha. We just set the thing up. What's the deal with the Lanes days? Sometimes I just shake hard. I can't remember. Sometimes I just shake it hard and maybe hit the mag button. Okay. I'll have Josh come back and explain the mag save. Because I guess when you hit the 180 ramp on the right, it gives you a mag save. But there's times that the game will auto mag save for you, and then there's times where you have a mag save. Oh, there's a wiener dog. Everybody quiet. Listen.
    97:13
    Oh, that poor wiener dog. He just took me to fly down. Yeah! Great shot. That's my favorite call out in pinball.
    97:23
    Unfortunately, the only reason we're hearing that is because I haven't hit the shot yet. That's the only time I've heard it, too.
    97:29
    Holger wants to know about lane save. How can you activate lane save on the left, like the auto save? We'll talk to Josh when he gets out of his thing. Yeah, the wiener dog is awesome. But the pin stadiums on this, they look fabulous. And for streaming purposes, it's ridiculous. Again, we wouldn't normally have the pin stadiums up this high on a game like this. But for streaming, it looks really, really outstanding. Josh, can you do us a favor? We had somebody that had asked HoloGazer about how you can activate the lane save on the left.
    98:04
    Okay, so there are these two targets on either side, and based on difficulty settings, it takes one, two, or three hits to then light the save, and then, again, depending on savings, it takes another two or three hits to light it a second time, And then, again, depending on settings, on the third time is when it will light the outlane mode, where you then have to complete the mode in order to actually get the ball saved. Yeah, Joe Shover just kind of simplified that. Outlane save, hit the target over the outlane a certain amount of time. So if it's yellow. That was like the cliff notes. Right. So if it's yellow, it means you need one more hit to enable it. Okay. If it's green, it means it's active. Current code out there, it shows red if it's more than one hit. We changed that to just being off because the red was confusing to a few people. Yeah. So yellow. And the reason we want the yellow there is if it's yellow and it's going down, then maybe it's worth risking the tilt to try to nudge it. Thanks, Hayes. Joe Bob. You know, potentially then hit that to get it green to get the same. So we actually found it was a little too easy. So this code makes it a little tougher to earn because you were just getting too many outlays saved. Right. Okay. Makes sense. One of the tweaks in this code. All right. Hey, come on back in. All right, we're jumping back on another one. We've got another game or two. Who came in last? I guess that's the question. That was Mr. Beattie. Hey! Hang on, hang on, hang on. So you've got one of two things. You can juggle. You can take a shot at something. Yeah, I'm good. Or you can play pantless for Jason at slapstick. Probably the best at taking shots.
    99:42
    You're going to help Jason out, huh? Hang on, hang on. I want to see the scores, though. I have one good ball. You have 65,000.
    99:51
    Yeah, that sucks. All right, where's the shot? The shot's last. All right, I'll give you a little something. You guys want to fire up another game, and I'll serve Steve. Yeah, do it. Now we're going to see whether or not the quick problem... Are we going to run in again, or are we going back to normal? Yeah, let's go back to normal. Yeah? All right, assuming the code works correctly and it does, then we'll go back to normal. All right. So we'll go back to normal on this one. I do like the one-handed, but I'm telling you, the way my mind works, Josh, is that top flipper button should control the left flipper and the bottom on the right. Well, then your mind really needs to be fixed. To have them reversed, it really messes me up. I can understand that, but I think that would confuse people when you're already accustomed to at least that one finger being the right clipper, and now it's backwards.
    100:30
    What's that? Malort should be Steve's drink of joy. Oh, I'm good with that. Oh, yes. Good call. My favorite. Do you actually have some? I think there's some Malort in this house. Yes. How else would I punish myself?
    100:45
    All right. It's not showing up. Oh, well. Oh, there it is. Okay. There you go. Only in Chicago. Just a little outside. Let me go up there and get you a dirty glass. All right, I'll take a dirty glass.
    101:00
    Let's fire it up. Fire it up, Steve. You're player one, man. Yeah, I might as well get this ball in before the Mallorca. Yeah.
    101:08
    This might be your best chance. So we're good there. No, no, he's going to go for it now. Yeah, this game is incredible, though.
    101:39
    Well, what's interesting, we've played, I'm not sure how many games, and there's multiple modes that I don't think we've seen yet. Oh, yeah, no. Yeah, you have to have more stuff. You know, it's funny, some people, oh, it's too many modes, but, you know, the idea is to have that variety. When you have this game, if there's only, you know, five or six modes, you're playing them every single time. Yes. You know, the ability to have that nice variety. And, you know, you get asked about your favorite mode. Well, it's changing all the time based on, you know, what's going on. Yeah. You know, sky's the light. Sometimes you're like, I want that. Or how you're shooting. Sometimes you're like, I'm not making that shot. Oh, that's quite a shot. I'm not going for that mode. I won't make you do a bag that much. Oh, yeah, that's a double. That's not a double. Yeah, that's a double. That's a double. You know a double, right? I know a double. That's a double. That's a double? I get forced out of Josh's drink. No, I'm good. That's true. See you when I'm driving.
    102:35
    So I helped Ken set this game up. And I had never played Oktoberfest. So what did you have it set up on? Where did you get the back lights at?
    102:46
    Yeah, and they should be. The game is designed both through Deanie and Oktoberfest. The leg levelers should be all the way in. So the way the cabin is designed, that with the levelers all the way in, the game should be at the proper place. Okay. And actually, if you hike it up too much in the back, if you raise it up, naturally the game will become potentially unplayable if you get it up too high. Yeah, oh yeah. The left ramp, the way it'll come off the wire, it's just not going to play right. I saw Steve Ritchie did a post about Black Knight, and while that's designed to play the slightly higher pitch, he was raising the same issue, that if you set it up too high, it messes with the side-to-side action in the game. It can mess with it in other ways. I know some people like to put it all the way up.
    103:38
    Houdini owners will tell you it plays better. if you have it at the proper 6 to 6 1⁄2 degrees that's designed for it, and the same with October process. And now we don't have to take it on. Just put them all the way in. Yeah. All right, then. Just a little adjustment, some heading in your floor situation. Right. So I played this game on, I think it was last Friday. I helped him get it downstairs, set it up, and we maybe put in three games, and I couldn't stop thinking about it all week. This show is produced and directed by Ken Cromwell. I was like, I need to get more time out of this game.
    104:17
    And I even emptied my stein. Oh, yeah. We've certainly seen at the shows people getting right back in line. It's just all... It's a fun game. You know, I was at Chicago at Expo, and the lines were so long where I was like... Oh, Expo. It was crazy. So one of the questions was, how do you redeem the left... Touch target skill test. The left. Touch target skill test. Oh, the mystery, the question mark target. It's a really hard target to hit, and it's incredibly difficult. It's worth a ton of points.
    104:54
    And as Joe's saying right now, it's very difficult to do. It's worth a ton of points. So, to me, it's only what I consider going for if I'm playing somebody and I'm really far behind. then I'll give up, you'll pass up basically getting the easy sign. So I'll pass up the easy sign or other points to go for the big points. It's very hard to do. Actually learning the 10th skill shot can pay off down the road when you get to the outlay mode, which is re-entry, which is all about. Could you point on the glass, the skill shot locations? Sure. I think everybody likes to get a skill shot. What I'm doing every time is the tent. When it opens, shoot it in. Right. I'm going to walk over to the table. Yep. So the one skill shot in up here. That first one is right up there. Which is the bar opening and closing. The bar. Okay. So come up. And that gets tougher each time as far as the timing. Okay. Right? Your second potential skill shot is the tent. Second skill shot's the tent. It's going to score points. And if it's lit, it's going to start a mode for you. So would you intentionally brick off of that closed door to come and get that, or would you soft plunge to the flipper? You need to soft plunge it either right into it or to the flipper and then make the shot. Oh, and then the soft plunge can go right in there. Yeah, you can absolutely make it. And what I'm saying is the outlay mode called reenter is no flippers. You have to plunge it right in there. Not easy, but I can do it. You get three tries about every third time I get that. So you're coming out here. Right. and drop it in there. Not easy. Okay. But like I said, I can probably make that one in eight, one in nine. So I'm not doing it for my normal skill shot. Games? But for the mode, you know, I can make that. Okay. Then this is the super high point one. Okay. Super high point skill shot. So we've gone through that. So 75,000. Yep. Okay. Then the most interesting one in some ways is this in lane because that then lights this shot for the super skill shot. So this shot in the in lane feeds the flipper for the super skill shot on the 180 ramp. Wow. And Joe, the scoring on that is? No, it's not just showing on there what the scoring is. Once it hits, then it'll change on here and tell you what it is. I don't know what the scoring is on that. So four skill shots. Right. And five if you count the super skill. Awesome. Nicely done. Nice. So hopefully Joe's telling us what the super skill shot is or they don't quite remember. Pretty good. I don't have super skills, so I don't go for that.
    107:38
    These people are drunk and they don't know what they're saying. I'm all about the super skill shot. Absolutely.
    107:43
    Thanks, Dennis. Now I know that's what I want to go for. Super skill shot. Yeah. The Harvard one. Yeah. Let's see if I can do it. The market trends fans, I think he suggested we're drunk. I'm not sure if he's talking about the flipping out pinball streaming channel hosts, because we're certainly not drunk. We're drunk with pleasure of playing Octoberfest. We're drunk on joy.
    108:06
    That's for sure. And we're drunk being in the company of Joe Shover and Josh Cooper. So Joe Shover says he believes it's $30K for the in-lane, and then $60K for the ramp, Josh, then $80K, then $100K, et cetera, et cetera. So what is the super skill? Is that the 100k?
    108:29
    I think he's saying it's the old Oh, it's gotcha And that's a very gratifying shot in general in gameplay when you can hit it consecutively I'm not sure if we've really gotten the right scoring on that yet or not So I need a short plunge into the in lane I didn't know that angle was possible That's gotta be like a real Hey! Steve almost nailed it.
    108:56
    Yeah, you know, and the key is to, over time, practice and figure out which one you like. And if you're a high-skilled player, obviously that combo of that in-lane and the right ramp. You know, one of the things that's interesting with that right ramp shot is we made a change to that mech. It was right before Texas.
    109:20
    we made a change to that ramp, which dramatically improved it. It just made it far more evocable. It was actually a very minor change, and sometimes it's all it takes. To the point that Joe had to go back and reevaluate the super skill shot because we were concerned it got too easy. That ability to now make that ramp consistently, and I'm not sure if he fully treated that or not. I know he was evaluating it and it was poor balancing. because all of a sudden we said, yeah, that went from being kind of a hard shot to a much cleaner, smoother shot. And that was a late change we were able to make and really improve that shot. And, you know, there you go. There's the ramp shot again and again without having it lit. Yeah, he's had bad luck.
    110:12
    We have to check that setting because he should have had it lit at the start of the game. I'm surprised it's not left. It's the, he's just dancing with the machine now. After he, uh, moved it. It's not our camera.
    110:26
    He taught me well. Yeah, right. Three and two. Well, you know, as far as the music goes, we haven't talked about that. The music's great. There's a lot of new music coming to the game. Really? In fact, just this past weekend, we had an accordion player in to the recording studio. So we get some more accordion music in there, working with Matt Kern, who's our sound engineer, who's composing a lot of the music. I think he actually has a second accordion player coming in to get kind of a different feel to it. another shot to the ramp without the lock because it's not being locked. Uh-oh, this isn't beta code, is it? That's crazy. We're seeing if any other ones are lit. All right. I love it. Hey, real quick, just to interject, Joe says he kind of wants to change that skill shot to be the in lane, then the right ramp, then the right orbit, then the bare barrel ramp instead of the right ramp over and over. Oh, okay. Okay, let's make it absolutely impossible to do. Which is fine with me because I don't have the skills to even make the current one. I almost made the in lane, and then I would have been screwed. Guys, if you want to grab an Oktoberfest, call Zach right now. It's 847-778-4876. And I'll say it again.
    111:53
    If you have questions or you want to order one of these, 847-778-4876. You can also send him an email at Zach, at D-A-T-H, at FlipNOutPinball.com. He's got a couple in stock ready to ship. So if you want to get one of these games here in a few days, give him a call or an email. Let's get one going. It's fun.
    112:13
    We'll link the machines online with the new technology coming. So we have a lot of new music coming in the game. Right now there's only one of the main tracks in. There'll be four. So this is the main track? No, this is the shooter group. I like it. So let's go to the main track. Right. So on the main tracks is one that's sort of this rock mix.
    112:40
    Right. Then there'll be two that'll be a little more polka, oompa. And then one that's going to be a little of a pop, oompa mix is the current place. That's why we've got the accordion guy in and we've got another accordion guy coming in. I already love it. Yeah. And then we're shifting the music in a couple of modes and a couple of modes don't have their real music yet. So, still playing a bit of music. You know, that's what we're getting into the game. This update really won't have much of it, but the next update will have a ton. Awesome. Player four. I got one.
    113:17
    Were you doing a one-handed? No, you're supposed to do one-handed. Hey, stop, man. Yeah, I was doing a one-handed. I was wondering why that player wasn't working. So it was good times, guys.
    113:35
    I'll say this has been a fun night, and again, we want to thank Josh Kugler for coming in after work at American Pinball, streaming the game with us, jumping on the podcast mics, streaming on the Flippin' Out Pinball channel. I want to thank Joe Shover, too, for joining in the chat here and answering a lot of questions and sharing. I wish he wasn't in Virginia. I wish he could be here with us. That would be super, super fun. and for those of you that are watching as Josh is in juggling mode, I think it's a two ball multi ball that can be accessed immediately in the game for those of you wondering what you're going to see on the Flippin' Out Pinball channel it's going to be a little bit of Ken and Bill from Special One Lit with a little bit of Steve Beattie here we're going to be streaming the new games from Flippin' Out Pinball as they get released so when they're out, they're here and we're there yeah, always a good time, so hopefully you guys enjoy and we'll keep rocking the new stuff. And I'll probably have different guests on occasionally.
    114:34
    What do we got here? Tim Boulders podcast. Albert, I am always recruiting pin turns. So he's got a pin turn. We met Chris at TTF. A lot of people probably know Chris and saw Chris at TTF. Chris is wearing the Willy Wonka gear.
    114:56
    Oh, dude. I don't know about you. That's the pinball podcast. Full disclosure, I don't hate Twilight Zone as much as I let on. Hee hee. So they had an episode today where they were defending or counter-attacking Twilight Zone. Are you a Twilight Zone fan? I am a Twilight Zone fan. I am too, actually. I like it a lot. What I'll tell you is when Twilight Zone was first out on location, I was not a huge fan. It was such a tough game to learn and grasp, and it was sitting next to Adam's family and other games of that era, and you were putting money in. Yep. I was quite lucky in my collection. I've had one there for a long time. I don't have an Adam's family in my collection or any of those other games I've played a lot then.
    115:40
    It's a challenging layout. For a game at home, it's sort of what you want. Never mind. Sometimes it kicks your ass. Sometimes you kick its ass. And that's one of the things I like in a machine. I don't want a machine I'm going to step up and just have an easy time with each time. Those kind of games get old fast. You don't want to run through the house on Adam's family three times on the first ball? No, no. And, you know, Adam's family was a great game in its day. It's still a fun game to play. Once in a while I'll play it. But that's not in a – my collection is about 14 games. And that doesn't make – So you have 14 games. You want to talk a little bit about your collection? I would love to hear about the collection. And what pins were more impactful on your approach to programming, in your opinion?
    116:30
    Well, obviously both. This is Josh Cougar, programmer of Oktoberfest. Joe Silver is also here in chat. He's the other programmer on Oktoberfest. Yeah, it was interesting. I just had this conversation very recently with Roger Sharp. Roger lives not far from me. Roger Sharp. And every once in a while I'll reach out to Roger and invite him to a cup of coffee just to pick his brain on stuff. And he's very happy to do that. And my daughter actually has interned for his wife. So that sort of got me in with Roger. Just to tell you that story, my daughter was a senior in high school and was looking to do an internship in art. She wants to go into art education. and through the school they set her up with an art studio as an intern. And I go to pick her up. She's like working after school on Saturdays. And I went to pick her up the second day she was working there on a Saturday. And she said, Ellen, the woman I'm working for, she and her husband, they're into pinball. I'm like, oh, that's great. We'll have to have them over sometime. And the next day my wife sends me a link, oh, here's a story about Ellen in the paper. So I start to read the story and it's Ellen Sharp. but recently I was having coffee with Roger and we were talking about philosophy of rules and he was kind of curious how my info is And then we talked about what was in my collection And it's a lot of mode-oriented games. It's Twilight Zone, it's Lord of the Rings, it's Next Generation, which are all obviously very mode-oriented games. Simpsons Pinball Party, which has got a lot of everything in it, but it's also fundamentally a mode-oriented game. just with the ability to run them all at the same time. You can see how it makes that game.
    118:18
    Great is the ability to stack every mode with every mode and extend the clock. What else do I have right now?
    118:27
    The oldest game in my collection right now is a Williams Grand Prix. So I think that's 72.
    118:37
    Then I have a 78 Valley Playboy. Home use only. I'm the second owner of that. Fell into that one. I got a phone call on a Saturday one day. The guy says, do you fix pinball machines? I'm like, no, but I collect them. He goes, yeah, I had your phone number in my wallet. It's a pinball guy with your number. I'm like, okay, we finally figured out how we had met. He goes, yeah, I got this Playboy. I'm looking to get rid of it. He goes, are you interested? I said, sure, I'll come over and take a look. He wasn't far from me. I go over, and the thing is just pristine. and they've been sitting basically folded up or in two pieces for about 12 years. You say playboy? Playboy.
    119:15
    They had bought it for their rec room years before. They had moved from their house to the condo they were in and had been sitting there ever since. So he says, how about $400?
    119:25
    So I said, how about each? And he looked at me. I said, this game's worth a lot more than $400. I said, I would feel really bad. And he's like, you sure? I said, well, you know, if it turns out the displays have an issue, I'll let you know what we'll work at. I said, I would feel really bad. So the back glass had been in bubble wrap for, like I said, a dozen years. So the game is just in interesting condition. Zero fade. I've never seen the light of day other than when it was moved from their house to the condo and then my house. Just a beautiful game. So you've got a couple of older games. I like having the mix. So then I have a mix. Right. And I think that if you have more than four or five games, six games in your collection, it's really good to have a mix. So then I have an 8-ball deluxe, a Centaur. So I've got a couple of games from the early 80s, drop target games. I'm a big fan of drop target games.
    120:21
    What I'm missing right now is I don't have a late 80s game. I had a Black Knight 2000, which I loved. Don't have that. I'd like to get an Earthshaker. That's one I'd like to get to fill into that. A little System 11 action. Yeah, I'm missing that System 11 game. A nice whirlwind. I consider that as well. So that's sort of missing that era. I had a taxi at one time. Never owned a taxi. Love one. That was when I sold, and then immediately people offered me a lot more money than what I sold it for. That's what's going on in pinball. It happens. What else do I currently have? A whitewater, which is a very different kind of a rule set, which I like. And at some point I can see incorporating some of that kind of very straightforward, forward, don't have to think too much, kind of a rule set in a game. I'm sure we would get destroyed on pin side for being too simple. We're not sure how to do that but then still have depth to a game. But a game that, you know, it's just sort of work your way through it, progress through a game, kind of a thing. I have an Indianapolis 500 that I bought years ago for a buddy of mine in Michigan. I was trying to get hooked on pinball. He's a huge Indy 500 fan. He's been to like the last 40 runnings of the race and I've just never actually gotten the game from my basement to him in Michigan.
    121:38
    I'm probably missing something. I own it for a throw or two. I'm probably forgetting sometimes. And then I have two custom games that I don't use. Oh, nice. This is how I got into American football.
    121:55
    Nice. Yeah, you made TNA, right? No. I need to hear more about it. I'm just kidding, Josh. I do have a phone in TNA. Yeah, see, there you go. Hey, guys, listen, as we come up, four minutes to 10 o'clock Central Time, we're going to finish this game off, and then we're going to do a proper sign-off. But we want to appreciate everybody's ability to come here and join us today. It's been fun.
    122:16
    Joe and Josh, it's been awesome to have hair and chat. Yep, thanks, guys. Josh, with living close in proximity, being able to stop in the studio has been fun.
    122:27
    Learned a lot. It's been a good time. Yeah, it's been a really good time. It's nice to see familiar faces in the chat. But it's really nice to see unfamiliar faces in the chat, too. As the expansion of pinball keeps going and going, it's nice to see fresh faces, get fresh ideas, have people ask questions. And I think that's where this channel is going to really benefit the pinball professional, the guy that's been playing pinball for a while to see something that's new, and maybe the newcomer that's coming that wants to know a little bit more about what pinball is all about.
    122:57
    So happy to be a part of it, man. So Zach and Nicole, thanks for letting us do this. Yeah, thank you, guys. Once again, I wouldn't be doing this without you.
    123:12
    What version of code is this? Is it on now, and I guess we'll let it go to. So what's today's rate? 5.14. So this is 18.5.14. I like it. So our versioning system, I'm not a fan of the .8, .9, and then people are like, oh, 1.0. I don't believe in that. So our version is really based on release date. So the current version is out. Most people either are on right now 18-3-21 or 18-4-11.
    123:46
    So as I said, there will be an open beta starting likely next week. And then if all goes well, the official release will likely be 18-5-27, I think will be the date. And this just makes it easier. Sometimes people are like, which version are you on? They're like, am I on .8, .9, .86? So it's a lot easier. And it also tells me the version number. I could immediately – did I say 18.19? Thank you, Joe. I've been drinking tequila. I'm allowed to do that. I'm still like on last year's numbering, right? 19.5.14 would be our numbering scheme. I'm writing all my dates wrong on checks still, too, not that I actually ever write a check.
    124:25
    So that's kind of the numbering that we have gone with, and it's a lot easier. Sometimes somebody will tell me what version, and I immediately know that's really old.
    124:34
    That comes up with Houdini once in a while, and somebody will have trouble updating the code. One of the changes we made in code updating is that the version number is now part of the code package. That wasn't the case originally on Houdini, but once you got to a certain update, it worked that way. Once in a while, somebody will call into Barry, our service tech, they can't do a code update, and I'll say, okay, well, what version are they on? It'll be, you know, like from, you know, January of 2018. I'm like, okay, strip off the last part, and now you'll be good to go. With our code updates, at least so far, with no exception, you can always just go to the latest update. You don't have to, like, go through every step of the way. You know, it's possible at some point there could be some exception to that, but right now it's always go to the latest code. code updates, you just download from the website, you throw it on a USB, open the coin door, there's a USB extension cable right there, you plug it in, the screen will tell you it's doing an update, it takes three or four minutes, and you're good to go. At the same time, if you stick a USB without game code in, it'll download the logs of the game, audits, copy of your settings, so anybody who has an issue will ask them to send us the logs, It's like a Deadpool update on there. It'll do nothing with that. And by the way, you can't do that, and you cannot put a Houdini update. Somebody posted on Pinside, it was a, I forget what game it was, but they had accidentally put Deadpool code on a different game. That's not going to happen. And it actually, I guess it was close enough, it let them do that. So you cannot accidentally put Houdini code on an Oktoberfest and vice versa. And if you rename the file, then it will attempt it and all bets are off because it will try to run the game. I can't imagine what would happen. Actually, I've seen that on my dev game. Yeah, don't do that. Well, Josh, listen, you've been very generous with your time. Joe, you've been generous with your time, too. I wanted to point something out. Scott at Penn Stadium, he's chatting with the community saying how accessible you are. You're able to take constructive criticism and have a conversation about it. And it's nice to know that there's somebody that's heavily involved in pinball at a major pinball company, a manufacturer that's involved in these games, that's listening to feedback, and something that you think makes sense, you consider implementing. So that's always welcome. I am happy to take good ideas wherever they come from and claim them as my own. As you should. Because pretty much any great idea somebody has, the reality is I already thought of that previously. So it's okay. Joe tries to do that, I try to do that it's certainly not easy at times being on pin side there's often I type things and then hit backspace, backspace, backspace you do have to do that you have to have a thick skin we've tried occasionally if the thread kind of turns bad to try and turn it into constructive criticism so if people don't like about the game whatever aspect it is we're happy to listen when we agree with things, we look to make changes. We're just hoping for people to be constructive. Obviously, there's some people up inside that are never constructive. They're just happy to be critical. It's fun to be critical and say nasty things, and I guess if that makes people feel better about themselves, I guess that's a positive for them. But I think we've been able to do a pretty good job of interacting with everybody out there and getting ideas from them. And so far it's worked for us, and I hope to be able to continue to do that and that we don't have to just abandon it because of what goes on there. Well, we hope so, too. And as we see, Oktoberfest now is catching full steam. If you want to go ahead, if you want to grab an Oktoberfest, you can contact your distributor, Flippin' Out Pinball, if you're at this channel. You can go ahead and contact Zach at 847-778-4876. There's a couple in stock ready to ship right now. You can have this pin in a couple days. If you want to e-mail Zach, you can e-mail him at Zach at Flippin' Out Pinball. That's Z-A-C-H at Flip, the letter N, out to pinball.com. Give him a call. Talk about the game. He's not going to put you into a game that he doesn't think is going to be what you're looking for. But this is a game that I think appeals to a wide variety of people, whether or not deep code or shallow code or fun code or fun rule set. I mean, this game is, in my opinion, just a fun pin to play with your friends. I mean, we had a blast tonight. Two hours went by very, very fast. I'm actually shocked that we're done. and I had no clue we were this far gone. I haven't had a good game yet, for crying out loud. Nobody had a good game. We're not supposed to have good games. This was just absolute. Nobody broke a million. Anybody broke 500,000. We had a good time, though. This was absolutely embarrassing. Josh, we're going to do the one-foot mode, where you've got to get your foot up on the floor. We're going to have to do this again so we can actually play better.
    129:31
    That was a really embarrassing amount of play. But, you know, hopefully people got to see. I think we tried to get to most of the mode. I know there's some we did not get to. But hopefully people got a pretty good feel. I don't think anybody did ring toss. I know I was trying to get to that and then drained. No, I like that, though. I mean, I don't like showing everybody everything because you should be able to explore that on your own when you get a game. One of the things you'll find with the mode, and this was something from day one that Joe Schober was really focused on as we were working through the modes, was to make sure that we took advantage of every aspect of the play field. So ring toss focuses on the October and Fest targets on the side. Skyslide is about the buck. And for those that don't know, a buck is a vertical up kicker. And that's that shot, the skyslide. So the skyslide is focused on that. So the different modes focus on different aspects of the play field so that you get to explore and we use all of the things that Balser put into the game. He creates these unique and different layouts, and we really wanted to leverage that. And when you are selecting modes, you'll notice that when you're in the tent selecting, based on the mode, we do flash in blue the shots that are involved in that mode. Nice. So you're probably not noticing that until you look for it, and it'll flash. Whatever it is, you have a sense of what you're shooting for. So it's not that every mode is, you know, there's five shots and you're going to shoot them in different patterns. We really try to use, you know, loopers all about the left ramp. And so the 14 modes really try to make you do different things. It's a lot of modes. So let's do this. Let's sign this off for this week because what will happen is next week we'll have another stream. We'll be back on Oktoberfest. We'll have a little bit of experience under our belts. Josh may or may not be here, but he's kind of taught us the ways. He's like the Yoda of American pinball. He's training us as young Padawans to become Jedis of Oktoberfest. So let's see our improvements over the course of the week. I want to take a time out and just say, hey, Scott from Penn Stadium, thank you so much. This game for the strings has been illuminated by Penn Stadium, so thank you. I want to thank everybody that came in the chat. We got a lot of people that we know. And for those that we don't know, thanks for coming in and joining us. I want to thank Bill Webb. I want to thank Steve Beatty, my partners in crime. Josh, thank you. Thank you. It was great being here. Awesome. Joe Schober. We'll do it again sometime. You're not here, but you're here in heart, and we appreciate that. And I also want to go ahead. I want to thank Zach and Nicole Menny for allowing us to stream under Flippin' Out Pinball. And, again, in closing, it's not a commercial, but if you want to get an Oktoberfest or you want to get some pinball going, give Zach a call, 847-778-4876, or just email him. And that's Zach at FlippinOutPinball.com, Z-A-C-H at FlippinOutPinball.com. And, Zach, I'm sure I'll be hearing from you tomorrow because if you only have two in stock, I suspect you're going to probably need a few more. So we'll talk to you tomorrow. That's right. And you know what? If you only caught a part of the stream and you want to hear a little bit more about what happened earlier because there are some stories, go ahead. Go to the Flippin' Out Pinball YouTube channel or check the stream channel. This is all archived. So go ahead. Go back. Figure out what's going on. Listen to what this man says because this is the mastermind behind the game. Now, I have been drinking, so for any of the people I insulted, I'm blaming it on the tequila so i'm just declaring that all good all good for uh josh coogler bill webb and steve beattie i'm ken cromwell thank you guys so much for joining us on the flipping out pinball twitch network All right. That was good. The mic is still live. Hey, hey, hey. The mic is still live. All right. Let's play some pinball. Oh, yeah. All right. All good. Are we needed now, or are we off? The mic is still live. Are you kicking us out? No, we're not kicking you out. This is where we do the, now we can go. Oh, now you can actually talk to people. Yeah. You might want to get your computer over here and like chat. Well, no, I mean, we can keep chat open for anybody that wants to stick around, but the stream is officially over. And the mics are down, right? No, the mics are live. The mics are live. So we can still answer questions. This is like the after hours part of here. So if we got some after hours, let's do some after hours. I know, Bill, you got to work early. If you got to cruise, we can cruise out. Bill Webb's going to be out like trout. Everybody have a good night. A good morning, good afternoon, or evening. Good evening, good afternoon. Right. And whatever you do, don't forget to take some time out of your day and play some pinball.
    134:18
    Absolutely. Good times. You want me to walk you up there, man? Bad neighborhood. I don't know where the door is. All right, so let's see. I'm going to sit with me. I'm checking it out. How was it, man? Did you have fun? Yeah, it was great. I can't thank you enough for coming out. It was a lot of fun. I'm really surprised how fast that went. It went by very fast. Yeah, a couple of good stories. we didn't even get to. I know. That's what I'm saying. Well, we've got to keep some in the can. We'll have to do it for the next time. You know what we should consider doing if you're up for it is we should maybe think about doing a making of the Oktoberfest like a podcast or something. Yeah, we can kind of talk through the evolution and the history of the game. For sure. You know, every game has its ups and downs. Right, right. Through it, certainly our Oktoberfest journey was different than our Houdini. Bye, Albert. Thanks, buddy. So certainly different experiences, and, you know, Game 3 is unique in itself as well. Right, right. And I'm sure Game 4 will be its own adventure. So I'm, like, secretly hoping of what I want Game 3 to be, and we discussed this on our podcast that we recorded earlier, and it'll be uploaded tomorrow.
    135:26
    So I'm just curious to get kind of your feedback on what I was anticipating and hoping. I know you can't confirm anything, but it's exciting times. I like that you guys are two pins in and that the company is sustainable and successful enough to be thinking about a third, fourth, and fifth. Because what seems to be happening is it's hard for most companies to get that first pin out. You know, we always joke about pinball is hard. Yeah.
    135:51
    And it is. And people sometimes underestimate that or they think they're joking. And what's funny is coming from the homebrew custom pinball community, and I've watched dozens and dozens of people jump into that and many of them, for lack of a term, crash and burn. There's a tremendous enthusiasm and then as they get into it, they realize it really is hard. You might have a particular skill set that can carry you through part of it, but there's so much involved in a pinball machine from the designing a layout and to be able to create rules and then be able to code rules and art and animation and sound and understanding the electrical aspects of it, which is beyond game design and the electronics and all of that. Dennis Kreisel is lurking. He's lurking on you, Josh. Just, you know, be careful. Okay. Getting material for his show. All right. That's fair. Okay. So, you know, there's so much involved, and, you know, you see some of these projects, and they're going great, and then they just fade away because they get to the point where either they've lost the enthusiasm where they've now gotten to that part that's outside their skill set. And having successfully built... Where do you find most of these games stall out?
    137:08
    It's not at the manufacturing standpoint, because a lot of these games never make it. Oh, they never get close to that. So sometimes it's somebody will be excited, and they'll quickly get a partially flipping, and then they realize there's so much more to do. So whether it's the skill to create that, or then it's the software. And they'll be able to get enough software to flip, but not develop rules. And sometimes you just lose your drive. It takes a tremendous amount of work. The people who have built successful and complete games, you know, we'll tell you a great example of that is Nightmare Before Christmas, Mark and City's game.
    137:46
    You know, Mark went gangbusters early, had a flipping game, and then there was probably a year lull where he kind of wasn't making much progress, and then he kind of got his second wind, and then he got a lot of his artwork done, and then he kind of had a ball. Then he got his third wind and redid his ramps and got the medal, and that game has really come together. But on Benny, at this point, it's four years that it took him to get there, and he's put a lot of work, and it's a tremendous effort. And in Homebrew, there's lots of ways, and that's a complete custom game. Then you can look at Buffy the Vampire Slayer, done by Michael Ocean and Dave Nelson. Local guys? Or where are those guys at? Well, that's a great part of their story. Dave is here in Chicago. It's like Naperville area, isn't it? Yeah. And Michael is in Boston. And they worked on Buffy and had never met. And the first time they met was at Expo. And it was the first time that Michael got to play the game. So Michael coded the game. This is how we get the scoops. Completely. Right now, right? The scoop. Right. The scoop. Tequila and after hours. Michael. I'm good because I don't have to drive a little bit. All right. So Michael coded the game on a laptop, never saw the physical machine, and that was a re-theme of the Swords of Fury, although they actually modified the play field a little bit. So they created a new play field based on it but made some tweaks but used all the mechanisms from it. Michael coded it. Dave did all the physical work in redoing it. They had never met until Expo, and it was also the first time Michael got to play the game. Wrath of Olympus was somewhat similar. That was a virtual game, and then Scott Gulick, who did the physical game, and Frank, sorry, Frank, I'm forgetting his last name. It'll come to me. Frank did the code, and they had never met until they got together at Expo, and it was the first time Frank got to play the game. Joe Schober will tell you that I think the first time he ever played Alien, and I might have this wrong, but I think the first time we ever played Alien was like a day or a few hours before. Joe wants to make sure you know this is live. Joe Schover is like, you know this is live, right? Yes, I know this is live. This is the flipping out pinball after hours part. I know this is live, so Joe is going to correct me here if I'm wrong on this. Like I said, I believe, Joe, the first time he played Alien was just like the day before or hours before it was shown. So he did all the coding on that originally without seeing the game. So it's very interesting some of these homebrew things who have happened with guys in different things because you found the guys with the right skill sets. You needed the software guy. You needed the hardware guy. To do that all yourself, though. But what's the most important aspect to a homebrew build? I mean, I know there's tons of aspects, but I mean. I don't know if there's one important because just like with any pinball machine, it all has to come together. I guess we need a bunch of crazy-minded people that are going to put forth that time and effort. Well, you do have to be insane. One of the most insane guys is Matt Bonham. I think that's how we pronounce his last name. He's done two games. He did Deadpool, and then he did Doom.
    141:04
    Not Deadpool, Deadpin, sorry. He did Deadpin, and then he did Doom. And he does some of the most incredible metal work. So now he doesn't do the game. the software is not his strength but he's learned to do it, he does such incredible metal work and attention to detail, I think his games are on Pinside you can go find them what he did with Doom is just incredible, the look of the game so he's pretty insane and then you have people like Eric Pripke who did Cactus Canyon Continued so Eric's somebody who says I'm never doing a custom game that's a hugely popular add on to a rule set. It's incredible what we did. I had a debate with him years ago as to who was crazier, him or I. He felt I was crazier for doing a custom game from scratch, and I thought he was crazy to take an existing game and recreate the rules and then expand it. Because I said, you know what? Anything you get wrong, you're going to hear about it from people. So Joe's saying, he said, I first played Alien two hours before it debuted to the public.
    142:12
    I was so nervous. And then he says, totally not crazy. Hee, hee, hee, hee, ha. Okay, right. So I knew I was close to this. It was two hours before the first time he ever played it. So how crazy is that? And, you know, so Oktoberfest was a dream compared to that. We got him one, you know, a few weeks before.
    142:36
    Dennis from Eclectic Gamers, just to interject real quick because I know Joe's here for now. I said Alien Software was the best part of the game. Very nice design to the modes on proper, improper shots. But I think I've mentioned that before. And I apologize. I'm not stumbling my words because I can't read. It's just the distance here is challenging to read. I just noticed I was leaning in the screen. It's because I was trying to read it. So Joe thanked Dennis for the compliments. And then Scott from Penn Stadium said he installed Cactus Canyon Continued on his machine, and it blew my mind. Yeah, I mean, what Eric did on that is incredible. And Eric is actually now doing some work for Spooky. I believe he's working with Scott Denise on Scott's second game. Yep, good. Obviously, TNA, a tremendous homebrew project. I think TNA kind of paved the way for people to have hope that their homebrew designs could actually go to manufacturing. It could. And when you look at Scott's game, he never did the art because I think he knew that was going to be one of the parts he was going to struggle with. So it worked out great. He didn't have to do the art. They brought somebody else in to do the art. And I believe on game two, he's not really doing the code.
    143:50
    He's not. I asked him. He doesn't want to code. He's not a coder. And I joke that I have code in TNA, and I do, and other people do, because we help Scott. And I talk to Scott probably multiple times a week on stuff. And I'll throw ideas at him and stuff or help him with stuff, and he'll help me with stuff, whatever it is. It's just funny because when I think of a programmer, like, I mean, we're sitting down, we're having this conversation, friends with Dwight Sullivan, Tanya Kleist, like, you guys are a different animal. Like, you're cut from a different cloth where you can approach a game and attack it in a way that most people can't wrap their heads around as far as, like, having ideas and then being able to program those ideas and have them playable and enjoyable and flippable on a pinball machine. Well, it's true, but at the same time, some ideas don't work. Calorie Coma, one of the modes in Oktoberfest. I recently coded this, and I said to Joe, try it out, and I wasn't happy with it. He basically came back and said, yeah, this would be a mode I would avoid playing.
    144:51
    And I couldn't disagree with him. And I'm like, yeah, it didn't come together like I thought it would. We talked about it a little bit, and then that night I meditated on it, And I thought about it. I came back the next day and I said, okay, here are the new rules for it. He's like, yeah, okay, I think that can work. And sometimes you have it in your head and then you do it and you try it and you're like, yeah, this just sucks. It's not working. And so there's a new version I'm implementing of it now that I think will work a lot better. And, you know, fortunately we have the time and opportunity to do that. And, you know, we try to come up and be creative and do different things. And, you know, most of the time, fortunately, it hits occasionally. It's a myth. And, you know, you back off and you say, okay, either throw it out or, you know, start over or whatever it is. So not every idea works. Let me take you, like, outside of the world of American Pinball. And just because we're talking about Cactus Canyon Continued. So, for instance, somebody that coded Cactus Canyon Continued. Now, let's say that CGC, they go ahead with the remake of Cactus Canyon.
    145:53
    What are the issues that have to be dealt with if they want to use that continued code? Is that something that you think would happen, or do you think that there would have to be a completely different approach to expanding on that current rule set of Cactus Canyon? Because I know arguably, maybe not so arguably, a lot of people consider that game unfinished.
    146:13
    But Cactus Canyon Continued has been so popular. It's a really great code, and Eric did some great stuff there, and I stole something from Eric in that code, and I'll happily give him credit. You're like the Hamburglar of coders. That's all for that.
    146:29
    In Houdini, we have a mode. It is the return from beyond where you get only 30 flips to complete the task. And that limited flip thing was something, I think it's one of the many modes on Cactus Canyon. I thought that was a really creative thing. With the outlay modes where it was sort of a case where I could do that. In a normal mode on a traditional game, you're probably not doing something like that. but on an outlay mode where you've lost your ball and they're giving you a chance to have it back, I felt I could do it. Who doesn't want a chance to save the ball? So I thought that idea was a great opportunity to be able to take that.
    147:10
    Good deal. So Josh says, or Joe says, Josh is right, and to be fair, I've had some bombs of ideas too. You've got to be willing to play test, see what works, and see what doesn't. And then he follows up by saying, in my opinion, one of the most important things in any software dev job is being willing to try things, not get married to them, embrace the great experiments, and abandon the bad experiments. That should be like on a shirt or a pinball flag or something. Absolutely. If you're not willing to say something's bad and throw it away because it is and just stick to your guns, hey, that's not going to be a very good product. You're going to lose the respect of your peers when they're like, yeah, you can't see the forest or the trees. It's your idea, and you're not going to let it go. Well, that ties into you guys taking the criticism and changing things. Evolving based on feedback. For sure. Sometimes people criticize, and we talk, Joe and I will talk about it, and they'll say the police is completely wrong about that. They're wrong. Sometimes you go, yeah, they're right about that. Or you think about it for a few days, and you say, yeah, maybe that's not as good as it could be.
    148:17
    That's absolutely part of it. And that's why we're open to the feedback, and we read it. Yeah, you know, some of it we listen to, and some of it we say, okay, you know, this person's cool. Yep.
    148:28
    Mostly. You know, I'll tell you, go read the thread. You'll read some things, and, you know, somebody pops in, and you're like, you know, has this person played the game? Yeah, yeah. Sometimes you just get some really wacky stuff that comes from people. Yeah. But on the Cactus Canyon continued thing, you know, Eric made that a much better game than it was. Right. Anybody who knows that the game was never really finished, it was kind of at the end of that. It was 1997, right, that game came out? I'm not sure that's a great... It was one of the later ones. Yes, it was at the very end.
    149:03
    If they remake it... What's up, Bazzi34? They will not be using Eric's code. I don't think he's interested in having them take his stuff for a variety of reasons. But they're going to have to finish the code in some way if they're going to do it. Right, you can't release that as is. I mean, and that's got to be part of the appeal of the remake is having something there. I don't know if it's a great game to make. I think certain games are highly desired because they're rare and people haven't had a chance to play them. Right. Big Bang Bar is a fun game. Right. It's not a great game. It doesn't lend itself well. I could easily come up with a dozen games I'd want in my collection before. I know three or four people that have it. I've had the opportunity to play it. But it's a fun game.
    149:50
    What about Kingpin? I mean, what are your opinions on that? Because that's another one of those rare games that didn't really make it out, and now you're seeing that potentially resurface. Right. I've only had a chance to shoot Kingpin a couple of times, and I've enjoyed shooting it. Great. I like the fact that they're looking to not just have the original rules, but kind of expand it and do more with it. Sure. Which is, I think, critical to make it a success in the current marketplace. But it's a really good shooter. so I'm really curious to see what they do with that when they remake it, are they going to be able to sell 5,000 of them? no, I don't think so, but I think it's a game that people will enjoy having in their collection I think they can do their plan is to have the original rules and then an expanded rule set and still figure out what to do with animations and that's a big part of it And I think that's part of it, too.
    150:47
    No, it wouldn't surprise me if they could sell 500 or 1,000 of those games because it is a unique and rare game. But it's a fun shooting game, and that's critical. So sometimes these games, you know, are there. So, again, could you do 500 of Big Bang Bar? Absolutely. Yeah, right. I mean, it is a fun game. Ooh, barfing hell. But it's not the game that people, you know, some people think it's, oh, my God, the greatest game ever. It's a good game. It's not a great game in that regard. And I think that's a challenge. You know, basically with Chicago Gaming, you know, Medieval, obviously a great game. You know, hard to get. Monster Bash, you know, it's a really fun game. Certainly was ready for a remake. There weren't enough out there for people. I'm curious to see as they go which titles they find there's enough demand for to bring back it's a thing you can't bring out like an Adams family where there's like 10,000 posts that went out there's enough out there 20,000 made but at the same time I bet you to have a new one that people would they could probably move a bunch that people would want a brand new one there's 20,000 out there 18,000 of which are trash let's do this Josh Because we're going to transition out of here in four minutes, but I want to bring everything back to American Pinball real quick. And if you can speak on this, great, and if you can, it's no problem. But I know that at one point when Nerma was on our special One Lit Pinball podcast, he talked about opening up a line for contract manufacturing. And Scott from Penn Stadium, he's also kind of seconding the question. Is that still an idea that you guys might have where you might have a line out for somebody that does have a homebrew or something that might be ready to go to production? Are there still options with American Pinball? for you guys to help and aid and bring a game to the masses. Absolutely. It's something we're interested in, too. It has to be the right game. The money aspects have to make sense around it. Right. The theme, those types of things. One of the challenges, obviously, a lot of homebrew guys are doing licensed games. Yep. So then you still have to potentially work through that. One of the issues, and this was kind of a big eye-opener for me having done homebrew games, is that the level of detail required for a commercial game is so dramatically different than a custom game that a lot of people think, oh, look at this game, it's ready to go. And it's not remotely ready to go. The detail needed to be able to, you know, when you do a homebrew game, you make a flat rail, you get a piece of metal, you try and get the right kind of stainless, and then you bend it on your knee or you bend the rig, you know? You need something to replicate that. You wind it up and you kind of drill holes and you do things like that. That doesn't work for production.
    153:33
    That level of detail that's required on that. The development of cable harnesses that are going to be the right way. The software requirements are far greater. You need more service modes. You need code updating. You need – there's all these things. This is Josh Kugler, one of the programmers. He programmed Houdini and he co-programmed Oktoberfest with Joe Schober. Joe Schober is in chat. Josh Coogler is here. We're wrapping this up, but for those of you that might be popping in and being like, who are these guys talking to? I'm Ken Cromwell from Special Unlit, and that's my buddy Steve Beattie. Here we go. I'm sorry, Josh. I just want to interject. That's part of the challenge, that the amount of work involved is sometimes greater. I think somebody thinks, I got this game and they're going to pay me millions.
    154:17
    First of all, nobody makes big money in pinball. I can assure you that Joe could be making a lot more money outside of pinball. I took a massive salary cut to come do pinball, but you know what? Every day I come to work and I'm making pinball machines. That's awesome, man. I'll tell you what, I appreciate that. This is sort of a second career for me and I had the opportunity, unfortunately, busting my ass in my first career to allow me to kind of pursue my passion and do something fun. I think Joe would probably make similar comments about that. We're fortunate we're able to do that and have fun. I hope to meet Joe. Doing it as long as it's fun. Yeah. I mean, that's good. Actually, we scheduled this one. Joe was here last week. He's here in Chicago for a week. Okay. He and I were working from early in the morning to late at night, taking advantage of his time here working on October 12th. I'm sure he loved the trip out, right? He's like, oh, what the heck. You know, he's coming to town. It's like I abandoned my family for a week. Yeah, right. Literally, because I think he and I were – I was picking him up at his hotel every morning at 8. We'd have some breakfast, talk about the day. And then I was dropping him off at like 10.30 at night. Wow. We did that for four straight days to maximize the time working on, you know, Oktoberfest, working on improvements to our toolkit, and starting, you know, talking about, you know, stuff on the future games. Perfect. Well, listen, guys, we're going to wrap this up. For those of you that might have missed it and you want to hear, you know, Josh talk about Oktoberfest as we kind of played and learned in real time, if you want to see Joe Schober and his interaction with chat, you can go to this. I mean, you're here right now. It's the Twitch channel. If you haven't followed us, follow this Flippin' Out Pinball channel. But you can also watch this on Archive. I'm sure it will be here on the Flippin' Out Pinball channel. And I would also suspect that there will be a YouTube channel set up to watch this.
    156:06
    But, Josh, thank you so much, man. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you. It was a lot of fun, guys. Bill Webb is out like trout. But for Steve Beattie and Josh Kugler, I'm Ken Cromwell. We appreciate everything. We'll sign this one off tonight, guys. Thank you so much. You good? I'm going to play the flipping out commercial one more time. And then we'll start. Who doesn't like a flipping out commercial, right? Let's do that. I like Joe's finish to it. What do you think? He said, I was right, this is a passion, not a wise career choice. That's right. Can't blame you for your passion there. Right. And it's, you know, if you can do it, it's great. But you have to be a little insane. Well, we appreciate you guys.
    156:52
    Thank you.