Welcome back to For Amusement Only. This is Nicholas Baldridge. Michael Ocean has been programming pinball for some time as both a homebrew and commercial developer, but he's much more than just a programmer. He's a computer science professor that uses custom pinball as a teaching aid. He's created and maintained for many years a custom pinball machine framework, Skeleton Game, which has been used for both homebrew and commercial game developers. He's been a developer on several first-party titles for Multimorphics P3, including Weird Al's Museum of Natural Hilarity, Final Resistance, and The Princess Bride. He's also released his initial third-party game on the P3, Dungeon Door Defender. Today, I'm pleased to welcome Michael Ocean to the podcast for a discussion of his game, Dungeon Door Defender. Welcome, Michael. Thank you, Nick. It's awesome to be here. Good to see you, as always. Same to you. So, let's get started. What's your background in programming? I trained as a computer scientist in college. I got a PhD in computer science in the area of sensor networks. And I take software engineering and programming very seriously. I think a lot about programming languages. I think about trying to balance elegant software design with maintainable, practical software that you can actually deliver in a reasonable time frame and the tensions therein. and so I wind up teaching a lot of classes related to software engineering, object-oriented design and I write a lot of code mostly for pinball in my free time. Students will ask me things like, what are you doing this weekend? What are you doing over break? I hope to write a lot of code. I hope to get a lot done. They say, really? I say, yes, that's what I want to do. How did you find pinball? I found pinball because my dad loved pinball and I was a typical teenager who wanted to go play video games. So I grew up in the heyday of arcades, and I would occasionally play pinball with my father, but mostly I would play Street Fighter. And then when people didn't want to play Street Fighter, I would wander over and play roller games or Cyclone. Cyclone is the game I really remember playing with my dad a lot. And it was when I learned that we could win free games through skill and that we would just put in four plays and we would try to maximize the number of credits that we got per game. And that was a lot of fun. And then so I found myself balancing pinball a little bit more with the video games. But then when I was in college, I mean, that was really the heyday. So I remember leaving class and going to play Attack from Mars in a laundromat and playing a lot of pinball probably at times when I should have been. I did fine. I did fine in school, but I played a lot of Twilight Zone when it was in its prime. I played a lot of Adam's Family when it was in its prime, and it was hard to imagine those things would ever go away. I even played some after graduation. There was a great location in New Jersey, in Morristown, a video store. That was the first time I ever saw Medieval Madness, and I just remember being like, this is the craziest thing I've ever seen. What an amazing, funny game that is fun to play. But yeah, I didn't think I was going to make pinball. I just, it was just a thing to do. What attracted you to custom pinball? And when did you kind of dive into that world? Okay, so I was in grad school and I used to ride motorcycles. I used to have a pretty nice collection of bikes and I was in an accident and I walked away from it, which is how you measure any good motorcycle accident. And my wife and I at the time, my fiance and I decided I was done with motorcycling and I sold what was left of my bike and I bought a cheap sorcerer off of Craigslist. And Sorcerer's a great game, but I was fixing it up and I enjoyed it. And I thought, boy, this is pretty cool. I want a different game. And then I believe that's when I decided to buy the Revenge from Mars because I thought this fusion of video game and pinball was like the most mind blowing thing I'd ever experienced. And I loved Attack from Mars. I played it at a laundromat when back when that was the thing you could do and not even waiting for laundry. I never did laundry there. So I bought the Revenge from Mars and I thought, wouldn't it be great if I could add more code, if I could do something and change this? And through some research and a lot of talk with friends who were in the same program as I was just thinking about this and planning, what would it be like to build a pinball machine that you could just change the layout or change the rules? How would that even work? What would be involved? And at the time, I was mostly thinking about programming languages and software engineering and resource management and all these different things. and it just kind of stopped. I just didn't think about it again. And it sort of stuck with me. It was in the back of my head, but I didn't really think I could do anything. And then at some point, we just finished this big robotic sailing competition at the school. And I coached a team of students to make a semi-autonomous, well, autonomous enough sailboat. And after that, I somehow at the same point in time learned about the P-Rock in trying to figure out, is it possible to maybe reprogram my Revenge from Mars? And what I quickly learned is no one had a good framework to do Pinball 2000 reprogramming. That was sort of an odd thing to do. But yes, the P-Rock existed, and this would be possible. And even if I wanted to, maybe my Hurricane at the time could be rethemed or something. And that just quickly snowballed. And that turned into me asking my dean, can we buy a Terminator 2 for the CS lounge? It obviously makes sense to have one. I'll get these P-Rock boards and I will do it as a student project. We'll reprogram Terminator 2. And then everything fell from that. So when did you first learn about the P3? I learned about the P3 when Jerry was promoting it. I was working on PyProc game. Skeleton game happened pretty early on. And so in the first group of homebrew folks with, you know, Scott Denisey, and I always feel like I was a little bit after Eric Priepke. I was sort of in that cohort, Josh Kugler, all those folks. And Jerry was very clear on the fact that P-Rock is a step toward developing this hybrid pinball machine experience that could be completely dynamic and completely swappable. And it was all the things that I had imagined. And I'd seen the flyers and I thought, well, it's more expensive than I can afford right now. And it wasn't until I was at Pinball Expo with the Pinball machine, which is how Skeleton Game came to be, that I happened to see the P3 in real life and experience it. And I played Lexi Lightspeed when it was very new. And I said, oh, this is incredible. This is what should have been happening in the time between Pinball 2000 and now. I'm right. We sort of promised this interesting, really innovative future for pinball. And I'm looking at it. I'm looking at it right now. And this is just the first title. I was very excited about it. I didn't want to ask if I could work on it. So I just that's really cool. That's really awesome. But you're a fancy, important guy. And I'm going to go stand in the corner over there with my homebrew machine and my and my homebrew friends. And at the Pintastic show in a suburb of Boston close to nine years ago, I played Lexi Lightspeed a lot. And then it became clear that, why don't you work on the P3? It's like, well, I don't know. I'm shy, was I think my very silly answer or something. And then I wound up, thankfully, working with Multimorphic a lot more from that point forward. Do you remember what year you joined Multimorphic? It was before Cannon Lagoon was released. So I was part of the Cannon Lagoon development team, and I had also provided some framework code and some map code for some various other parts. 2016, 2015, thereabouts. So quite some time, almost 10 years. Wow. So you were there very early on, transitioning to your first third-party game on the platform. What was the concept for Dungeon Door Defender, and when did you begin working on that game? So I've been working on Dungeon Door Defender in some capacity for five years. And in much the same way I think a lot of people do, and I heard Ian say something very similar, is you look at Barnyard, which is a game in which the physical pinball rolls over virtual targets on the screen and knocks over barn animals to keep them from getting to where they're going. I looked at Barnyard and I said, this has a lot of the elements you would need to make a proper tower defense game. What would it look like if the animals actually had different routes? And what would it look like if the animals took different paths? And then what if they had different attack levels? And what if I could upgrade my ball? And I quickly realized, oh, I'm trying to design tower defense, but as a pinball game. And the original version was a 2D game. It was 2D graphics and very, very simplistic. and I never thought it was going to be very fun until one day early on I had the idea, you should be able to spawn heroes. In the oldest version of it, the hero was about four times the size of enemies and just marched backward down the path, just slaying every single enemy on its way. That moment then turned the whole game on its head for me where I realized, oh yes, this game should not be a game in which you just try to hit enemies with a ball. This should be a real game in which I try to use pinball to satisfy the objectives of a tower defense game. I can still use the ball to attack my enemies, but let me build in every crazy thing that I like about video games. So there are 13 waves worth of enemies, and each one has a different attack value and health value and speed and recovery time, and they have different models, so they all look different. In the version of the game that's available now, there are four distinct maps, and each of the maps actually has a specific route, and it's been designed so that the player will have to try to choose different strategies to best defend their door. Their attack values are different. I had someone tell me they thought there was a bug because a single enemy hit the door, and it did all four damage that was left to their door. And I said, well, that was the attack value of that attacker. Yeah, you were in a high level. That's going to happen. Oh, and honestly, that's the thing that's been the most rewarding about the game is watching people play it and discover all of the design decisions and small details that went into it where they say, wait a second, on this level, there are stairs. My ranged attackers can hit the enemies before they even get to the stairs. Yep, that is correct. And it makes me very happy. But for those who may be unfamiliar with tower defense. Let's back up a little bit. Can you describe the basic goal of Dungeon Door Defender and how the player accomplishes this? Absolutely. So in a basic tower defense game, you have wave after wave of attackers who are marching a predefined path, trying to get to some item that you're supposed to defend. And in typical tower defense games, you have a certain amount of resources, gold, money, whatever it is, and you use it to buy towers and elements that automatically attack the enemy horde that is coming after your defensible item. And Dungeon Door Defender does this by saying you have wave after wave of enemies who are marching toward the item that you're supposed to defend. The item that you're supposed to defend is the door, hence Dungeon Door Defender. And your first tier of attack is the pinball. And so you use your flippers and you hit the pinball to physically hit the virtual targets, the attackers on the screen. Then you start quickly realizing, oh, if I shoot specific shots, I can spawn in heroes. And the heroes actually act as the turrets in a usual tower defense game. And so I typically confuse people when I talk about Dungeon Door Defender because I will use the term hero and turret interchangeably. What do you mean they're a turret? Oh, the mage throws fireballs. He's a turret. The rogue throws three knives that spread out as they get farther. He's a turret. The knight is just a damage sponge tank that stands in front of the door as your last line of defense. The knight is a typical hero in a tower defense game. Then you realize, oh, these shots collect mana for magic. And then you collect enough mana and you select the magic with your other flipper buttons to imbue the ball with fire magic or earth magic. In the case of frenzy, stun, ice magic. So these different things that when the ball hits an enemy, it may do the same amount of damage. It may do more damage when you have magic active, but they'll also do something else like the fire does a trickle damage where the enemy stays on fire for a certain number of turns or certain number of rounds. So as the enemy is marching, it slowly loses health, which means if you light an enemy on fire right next to the door, the enemy still might hit your door. So it may not be enough to stop them. And you collect gold and you go shopping at the end of a wave. So there's a lot of video game elements into it. And now with the new release, there is even more video game elements coming. So aside from a lot of elements, there's a lot of strategy that the player can implement as they play. Dungeon Door Defender is currently compatible with the Heist playfield module. What made you choose Heist as the basis for the game? It's a good question. Dungeon Door Defender started out as a game for every module. And I had tested it on a bunch of different modules. and as Ian had said recently in a great interview on your podcast, you get a very different play style on different modules. When I tried it on Heist, because Heist has so many dynamic ball paths, I could prevent the ball from essentially ever going into a hole when I didn't want it to go in a hole. And then it has a jail door, right? That jail door, it looks like a portcullis. And so the first time I finished the wave and the door went up, I said, yep, this is where the game needs to be. And it wasn't an easy decision because when you release a game for a single playfield module, you obviously are excluding some people who want to play it anywhere. And I'm sure there are people who might hear the idea that the game could technically run on other playfields and think, oh, you've excluded me. But the experience on Heist is pretty great. And so I said, I can't imagine adding explicit compatibility for another module unless a perfect module came along that fit the theme so perfectly that maybe, just maybe, then I would reconsider it. But this is Heist Forever. And then the dot, dot, dot to forever was the Princess Bride module. There's a promise that Dungeon Door Defender will be made compatible with the Princess Bride. Yes. Yes. It's more than a promise. In fact, I have that development well underway. And I think it's good. Josh Coogler, who is a friend, is a big Dungeon Door Defender fan. And, you know, he was very insistent that, yes, you should port Dungeon Door Defender to the Princess Bride. And how do you look at a castle and say oh no I can possibly put Dungeon Door Defender on a module that has a literal castle on it How could you do that Yes that is underway but it is happening after the artifacts release Everyone who owns Dungeon Door Defender will get the Princess Bride compatibility for free, and they will get the artifacts update. I didn't want to charge people for what felt like just an extension of the same game. Heist is a really impressive playfield module. From a gameplay standpoint, every shot can be diverted, and it has a variety of launchers to bring balls directly to the upper right flipper or to the lower flippers in a controlled or an uncontrolled fashion. How do you utilize those capabilities in Dungeon Door Defender? This is why it runs on heist predominantly. It's because I can launch the ball either down the center or off to the side, which is very nice. So every player, when they drain a ball or have a ball save, they don't know whether the ball is going to be served up straight down the center, which will inevitably stun the attackers who are headed right for their door up the middle, or whether it's going to come down the side. And then the player goes, no, I need the ball to go right down the center. In addition, during a wave, I can have every ramp and every shot bring the ball right back to the player, either on the play field or through an in-lane return. And then when the wave is complete, I open the jail door, and I divert a bunch of the shots to then take the ball off the play field. That way, when you finish the wave and you start the shopping experience, I can take the ball off the playfield from any shot, which means you have this perfect flow, flow, flow. And then the ball's off the playfield. You can go shopping and spend 20 minutes if you want to, deliberating over which upgrade you should buy. It's a great playfield. It's a really it's a really great playfield. I like all the playfields and I honestly like every play field more after programming for them because there are a lot of elements where you don't realize the capability and the potential of a play field. Weird Al, if you shoot a shot into any hole, you can kick a ball out so fluidly from the left side and so quickly because they're pre-staged that you can make a ball that goes into the hole behind the drop target feel like it's a flow shot. Like it will just immediately go in and then come right back out the side that if you're not paying attention, you won't realize whether you hit that side loop or whether or not you hit the hole. The staging from the Infinity Trough is so cool that you can do tricks like that. It's pretty neat. So the crane isn't utilized in Dungeon Door Defender currently. That's obviously a big component of the heist playfield module. So what was the thinking behind the exclusion of the crane for Dungeon Door Defender? I've tried to think about ways to bring the crane in, and I have a lot of good ideas. And people have suggested really interesting ideas about boss fights or sort of other elements. The trouble is, when you're dealing with virtual targets that move across the screen pretty quickly, I can move the crane pretty quickly too. But I'm concerned about blocking shots with the crane because the rules of Dungeon Door Defender are pretty well set up in an attack wave. And so if I bring the crane down, I have to do it in basically what would be a new mode of play. Honestly, I can't find a way to place the crane down. And Heist does this brilliantly, right? When the crane comes down, it's because you're doing something specific and then the crane gets out of the way or it's part of the specific element of play. And so the way the rules are structured right now, I couldn't come up with a way to bring that crane down without blocking your access to something that is still an active target. So if you've got enemies who are marching behind the crane, you would be kind of annoyed to hit the crane. I could tell you every random idea that I've had. Well, technically, if the crane did blank, then it might be OK that enemies are obscured behind it. It was a decision I still feel good about. I also don't use the walls and scoops in this game. And I've had a lot of ideas about possibly bringing them in. But I really like the flow of the game. And I think that the game is fast and it's furious. And then you have this slow time to buy upgrades where you can sort of recompose yourself and get ready and try to remember, OK, this time strategy. Last three waves, I was just flailing. But this one strategy with every update, I'm afraid of breaking it. I'm afraid of breaking what makes the game fun. These are very designed experiences. And so any change to the design has the possibility of really altering the player's experience. Dungeon Door Defenders modes are each very unique. Upon release, the classic mode was the only mode available, but you've since rapidly added new modes of play. Did you always plan to add these extra modes or were these ideas that arrived after the game had been in the wild for a bit? My son had a huge list of ideas and still has a fairly long list of ideas of things that I'm supposed to add to the game. Some of them I may eventually do. Some of them I sort of thought about doing. And Frenzy was such an idea. And so the classic version of the game is you have all these different enemies and it's intended to be a much more strategic gameplay experience. And the idea is that enemies have different amounts of health and they have different attack values. and it encourages you to take different sorts of upgrades in order to survive all the waves. My favorite thing about the classic mode is somewhere around wave six or seven, you think, great, I've upgraded this thing, I need it to upgrade. And then the enemies are super fast and are only one hit anyway. So you think, wow, I've just worked really hard to upgrade the ball to two damage and yet I could have knocked these characters down with one. Why didn't I instead upgrade something else? And then after you get past them, then there are heavy hitter enemies again. But this idea that there would be these fast enemies that they only take a single hit from your ball, but if any one of them hits your door, you lose the door because they have three attack damage and your door has three. That was an idea that my son had pitched early on. And a few early adopters of the game really, really liked the game, but were disappointed about the lack of multiplayer, which I had put in the description of the game. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how you would implement multiplayer on Dungeon Door Defender. It didn't make sense to me. It's a lot of work to try to fit that back in. And so people who wanted multiplayer, I thought, well, Frenzy is sort of perfect for that because the gameplay is quick. So a player could potentially lose after the first wave or the second wave. And so then I started trying to craft that basic core of an idea that one hit enemies. That was my son's pitch. One hit enemies. they could take down the door in one hit and they only need one hit to knock down that's a fine idea but when you talk about a game that has magic and upgrades to increase your ball damage or do these other effects that suddenly don't make sense if you could always knock down an enemy with one hit that had to be fully fleshed out but i had to come up with a new magic spell that would work to not destroy the enemies on the screen but stun them to buy you more time and make sure that was the only magic you were using and i realized well it would be cool to let someone heal their door in the shop as you would do normally. But if you do that, your game could go on longer. So I think it only makes sense that when you heal the door, you should make the enemies even faster. And so that became an element of Frenzy too, that after every wave you succeed in, the enemies get a little bit faster. And if you do buy a door, you heal the door, the enemies get even faster on top of that. And so it was a good, simple idea that had to be fully fleshed out. It's tough to say whether I was always going to do that or not. Obviously, if people didn't like the game, they would have deserved Frenzy even more. But it was because people enjoyed the game that I wanted to add that in as another mode. In a high intensity game like Dungeon Door Defender, in classic mode, there's a pause between each wave. You talked about this going shopping. That's always a big change up emotionally for the player going from an adrenaline fueled ride through a theme park to a very considered decision making process. What inspired you to add the shopping component to the game? And can you describe a bit about some of the things that the player can purchase? You've mentioned ball upgrades or changes to the health of the door. There's other things to experience in there, too. The shopping phase, the sort of break between waves is a classic part of a tower defense experience. And so I wanted to make sure that was part. In playing tower defense, you have this moment where you say, OK, I'm going to now stop. And between the next wave, I'm going to build out my defenses. And so I always wanted that to be part of it. I just hadn't been sure what items you would purchase. And if you could look at older versions of the game, there were many fewer items in the shop until I fully fleshed out everything that was possible. But you hit the side targets, and when you complete the side targets, a volley of arrows will fire from whichever side. So one of the upgrades is to increase the damage that those arrows do. You can spawn in these three different heroes, the knight, the mage, and the rogue. You can also upgrade each of their individual sort of health stamina. It's a combined health stamina or their attack value, so how much damage they do. And because the knight is a tank who sits in the middle of the path and takes direct damage, he has a slightly higher health stamina pool than the rogue or the mage who then throw weapons. And so the idea is that when you're spending your gold, yes, you can upgrade the attack damage of your ball, but you do well to upgrade their health or their attack value, depending on what sort of a build you're going for. There are so many side decisions and trade-offs that went into this game. originally the health pools for the heroes were just their health pools however they lived for too long and so it became this sort of hybrid health stamina in that every time they attack they lose some of their health right which makes it more honestly stamina but i i feel maybe some people would be confused by what that meant so if you really increase their health slash stamina they can stay on the board for a lot longer but in later levels when enemies have a lot of health keeping them on the board is not very helpful. Well, the knight's always helpful to keep on the board. That knight may buy you the time to take out the enemy on your own or through a combination of factors. So this is an amazing element of risk-reward, picking your upgrade and then maybe you don't have quite enough gold to purchase the one that you really want and you have to make a decision at the time of play, do I want to purchase a different upgrade that may impact my play style or do I purchase the one I was really going for by saving my money until the end of the next wave? There's careful consideration the player has to make in between each wave, which I find extremely compelling. How did you determine the amount of health different monsters should have in classic mode? I have a giant spreadsheet that defines what each enemy has. It's health amount, attack amount, how many enemies of each enemy there are per wave, their walk speed, their stun speed, and of course what 3D models I use. And actually, in each wave, most people don't notice this, but there are two of each type of enemy. So you might get one that is a little bit faster or has one more health than the other type but one less damage just to add a tiny bit of variety in an individual wave. But a lot of playtesting, honestly, to just try to determine what was possible, what was easy, what was too easy, what was too hard. I think one of the nice things about the game is that I think it is a good balance of hard, but not infuriatingly hard. Working with Scott and Bowen on Final Resistance, Final Resistance, TNA, these games are frustrating and challenging, but they still leave you wanting to come back to it. And that was really what I was going for, for Dungeon Door Defender. I wanted folks to feel like, all right, well, just one more. I'll just do one more. I wanted to give the player the first two waves essentially as a freebie. Anyone should be able to get to the first two waves. Your biggest threat in either of those first two waves would be draining, because if you drain the ball, you get a drain ghost who then runs at the door and does door damage. But not in Frenzy, actually. That was another thing. So people felt the game was too hard, and that's fair. Everybody's got a different skill level. So Frenzy was also a way to let people have unlimited drain damage, but you just have to hit the enemies with the ball. But yeah, trying to find the right balance of difficulty so it was challenging but didn't feel unfair. It was still rewarding to play. One of my biggest concerns about the game, and I don't think I have this concern anymore, and I think Artifact is also going to address this, is that if you get very far in the game, if you get to wave 12, say, or you get to wave 11, and you lose, your time investment shouldn't be so much that you just think, I don't want to press start again. We've all had that experience in a regular traditional pinball game where you're almost at name the wizard mode and you've spent a long time to get there and then you fail. You are rarely excited to press start again and go at it right again right away. And so trying to find the right balance of, well, how long should each wave take? How long should you be in the wave? And I remember Jerry saying, you don't have a timer on the shopping experience, which makes it not great for location play because I suppose somebody could go shopping and then walk away and subject everyone in the arcade to the really beautiful shop song for a long period of time. But I've watched streamers play the game and I myself have played the game where you're in the shop and you just have a conversation, you do something else, you check your phone, you recompose yourself and you go back in. And so I used to joke, oh, maybe I'll add a feature that gives you sort of achievements or high scores for how little time you spent in the shop. Like, I don't care how long you spent playing the game, but you somehow played six waves. You went to the shop six times and it was under a minute in total. You are decisive. You're the most decisive players. A lot of balance, a lot of play test from some very kind and generous testers who were gracious enough to spend time playing it and give me feedback and tell me things were too hard or too easy. It's part of the equation of what is this game. So Frenzy Mode, you've discussed a bit. It is a much faster experience where the enemies require fewer hits from the ball to start with, at least. The door has much less health and you have a very useful ball save mechanic. So the drain ghost does not spawn, destroy your door right away. And it allows you to have a really intense experience when compared with the classic mode. But it's wholly distinct. And I think that is a very challenging thing to do within the framework of the same game and the same rules. The additions and changes to the rules are such that it is not totally alien to somebody who's familiar with the classic mode. And I think that a really tough thing to pull off I very impressed by that But going even beyond frenzy mode let talk about artifact mode so this is the third main gameplay mode in Dungeon Door Defender You have classic you have frenzy and then you have artifact. It gives the player even more choice. What separates artifact mode from classic and frenzy, and why did you choose to separate this from the other modes? Frenzy had design considerations in it that I had originally thought of but had to solve along the way. So one of the interesting issues is that Frenzy has a flag in it called Respect the Dead. And Respect the Dead is false for Frenzy, which means if an enemy is falling, another enemy will just walk right past that enemy who's currently in its dying animation. And, well, part of what makes classic mode possible and playable and enjoyable is the fact that there is this interesting traffic system that happens in which enemies get stuck waiting behind each other. And so if you stun an enemy close to the door, you can actually back up a few enemies. They'll all sort of be waiting to get past each other the door. It's a very odd thing to have such respectful attackers. Oh, no, please, you first. We're queued up here. I'll get to the door when I have my chance. But Frenzy turns that off. And I had always had in my mind many games that I deeply love and have way, way too many hours in to admit. Games like Slay the Spire and Rogue Legacy and Rogue Legacy 2 and rogue style games that added upgrades that fundamentally changed the way the game works. and frenzy was a little bit of me dipping my toes into that water so i thought well what would it be like if i enabled unlimited ball save and disabled respect the dead and made sure the enemies were always one hit my son had said one hit wonder that's the name of this mode frenzy is one hit wonder which i loved but i didn't think anyone would understand what that meant i had this very long list of ideas and he would pitch them we'd go out for walks and we do any number of things oh you should add an assassin the assassin should be able to kill the enemy attackers in one hit and i said well where is the assassin supposed to be how what does it just appear behind him and next thing you know i'm designing very elaborate mental structures in my head to try to make this happen but i still had a lot of code in place when i wasn't sure how to get the balance quite right the very first version of the game would let you spawn a hero by completing the lanes so you'd complete all the lanes and a hero would spawn and at the time that decision felt arbitrary as i was still balancing the game and figuring out well actually it should be the shots and each shot should be a different hero and so on but the the fundamental structure of the code was there such that these events could trigger nearly anything and so artifacts then add this element that's similar to how many of these other games work in that you collect a random artifact and the artifact will change what happens in the game in a way that feels random at first. So what artifact is available to you as you complete a wave is randomly selected, but you are told what the artifact will do and you can choose to collect it or not collect it. Originally, I had planned to have evil artifacts, things that would hurt the player, but they were just not fun. You would just be annoyed if you collected them and it wouldn't be great. And it doesn't really speak to risk reward if the strategy is don't collect that. That's not exactly a very deep decision that you make. I'll choose to not lose if that's okay. I wanted to let people still experience classic as a separate mode of play, but I really wanted to add this as well. You know, small things like Midas's glove, which will give you 50% more gold anytime you would collect gold. For the cursed coin. The cursed coin is worth 200 gold right now, but 20% less gold forever. And so if you really want that upgrade or you think that upgrade is going to be worth it for you, or you happen to see that artifact late game, it might be a smart move to just get the 200 gold and then take the penalty later. Plus, if you can combine the two of those, then you're still coming out net ahead because if you've managed to collect Midas's glove and the unlucky coin, you're still doing better than 100%. And if you have Midas's glove first, you'll actually get 300 gold when you pick up the unlucky coin because you're getting a 50% bonus. And that's the thing that's really neat about the artifacts is that it's not just that the individual one modifies things. It's the combination of them that creates interesting strategies. So there are certain things that happen when a ball drains. There are certain things that happen when the door digs damage. When the ball drains and you take damage, that means you could be getting two benefits. Sometimes you can spawn heroes, depending on what artifacts you have, depending on what happens. Then you can have other artifacts that cause events to occur when you spawn a hero. So you can actually get a cascading effect of, I drained, but that drain caused this artifact to happen. That spawned a hero that caused this artifact to happen. In testing artifacts, I've drained and lost the game more times than I can count because I was so interested in the strange artifact combinations where I was like, oh, I think if I drain right now, this will cause this to happen, will cause this to happen, will cause this to happen. Oh, right. My door couldn't survive. Whoops. Well, that was fun while it lasted. And I put in a lot of artifacts. I have a huge list of possibilities. Some of them are cool, but just too much work. And I tried to find the right balance. There are more than 30 artifacts that are waiting to be collected. A player can only collect four of them. You can choose not to collect them. There's still a bit of a skill check in that you have to hit a specific shot at the end of a wave to collect the artifact, which can be very disappointing if it's an artifact you really want and you miss, or if you drain when you're trying to collect that artifact. It's cool and it's fun and it provides a lot more to discover about the game. It makes the game easier, which I think is okay, because people have told me they wish the game was a little bit easier. Very, very, very few people have seen the quote-unquote end of the game. There is the fourth room, which is the endgame scenario. At this point, the game has been out for quite a few months, and I'm okay with more people seeing that endgame scenario. And technically, the game goes on and on in its current condition. So if you complete all 13 waves, Wave 14 is a specific thing. Wave 15 is a specific thing, but it will go on indefinitely. and there are bragging rights to be had when you clear wave 13 that's for sure so let's talk about artwork dungeon door defender is a 3d game did you use any pre-purchased assets absolutely yeah in fact this is what's the hardest for me is that i am not an artist i barely i certainly can't fake it and so i happen to buy a lot of asset packs online i am always surprised that artists be them graphic designers, 3D modelers, musicians, people who make sound effects. All of these folks are seemingly willing to almost give away their work online for relatively little money. I will buy most any Humble Bundle that comes along with art or music or sound effects. The 3D models come largely from Sinti Studios. I've bought almost every single Humble Bundle they released. When they have sales on their site, I will buy those as well. Those assets are great. They're polygon on set because they really look like a common world. And so people, you'll see these assets used in mobile games and other games like that, but I don't have access to someone to do 3D modeling for me. And if I were to do that 3D modeling myself, it would take forever. And I am very efficient at programming. I am very inefficient at modeling or animation. I can do some basic manipulation of something that exists, but I'm better suited at making an animation controller than I am at making an animation. The Sinti Studio stuff is what I'm using for the models. Also from the Unity Asset Store, which is a fantastic resource. The individual animations for the characters come from animation packs from Kevin Iglesias, who has a huge collection of animations out there. I started with some free ones to see if I would like them, and I built a controller and immediately thought, These are great. Let me buy his mega pack to just have all of them. And yeah, I have a stockpile of I shudder to think how many gigs of my hard driver in use with these various asset packs that I'm using. Some stuff, the 2D stuff, especially for the artifacts and other UI elements come from asset bundles I've probably owned for 10 years now. Hoarding this stuff, thinking maybe one day I'll use it. That day came. Well, the UI feels very tailored to the game. So it's an impressive use of these assets, which are not specific to Dungeon Door Defender, but your use of them and the combination thereof is unique in the game world. A 3D game has some considerations that a 2D game does not. Notably, lighting typically becomes a lot more important as light sources are rendered in three dimensions as well. Dungeon Door Defender has several light sources. How did you balance the playfield illumination from physical LEDs with 3D light sources displayed on the playfield monitor? I have watched many videos about Unity 3D scene composition, but also have read some very interesting articles about lighting for low poly and how to make low poly look good and try to try to honor that. I built the scene and I looked at it and I knew I didn't want just the sort of traditional overhead sun view. It was supposed to be a dark game. And I thought I'd like a light here and I'd like a light here. I think I can spare a particle engine as particle effect here and here to make this look like fire. And I can put the illumination sources right where the fire is. And that looks pretty good. There are some dynamic lighting elements that I had to add after the fact. So I really wanted when you spawned in the hero, the hero was colored cyan. I wanted the hero to pop, so the hero actually has a cyan real-time 3D light above it. The rogue is red, and the rogue has a red light, and the mage is magenta and has a magenta light source. So that way, when they come in, they sort of illuminate the screen around them a bit, and they match the color of light shows and other sort of insert effects related to them. It's a little bit confusing because the magenta of the mage and the mana purple are essentially very close together. It's hard to distinguish. I guess the answer is not perfectly. I didn't get the colors perfect, but I tried. I spent a lot of frustrating time trying to get those scene elements right. And I'm not good at it. It takes me a long time. People want more rooms, and I don't blame them for wanting more rooms in the map. But there are a lot of considerations. One is that it takes me a very long time to assemble a room. But then I also have to think about what the paths look like and how do the paths change the gameplay mechanic. Three dimensional lighting was not going to be a concern in the original version because it was just going to be 2D. But I quickly decided, let me try 3D. Let me see what I can get done. Here we are. Your back glass includes a lot of dynamic information about the game in progress. Did you always plan to include that much information persistently on the back glass, or did this evolve over time as you added new features throughout the development of the game? So I didn't originally plan to have that information on the back glass at all. And my original concept of what the back glass was going to be was almost a static trans light with a reproduction of some of the information that's available on the screen on the P3. because three quarters of the P3 play field is a screen with physical elements floated on top of it. The P3 has this amazing ability to show information to the player right between the flippers. So score, wave number, how much mana you have, if there's a magic running, the active timer, these things could be right there between the flippers where the player could see. And I wanted to put them on the back glass too so that way someone who is looking on can see that information without having to sort of awkwardly cream their head around the player. That's how the back glass is used in most games, right? You want to provide something for someone who's not looking at the play field to see. But as the shopping experience came into existence, it became clear that players would want to know, oh, I have upgraded my hero's health, my mage's attack, and my rogue's attack is level three with its health is level one. And the back glass provided me a mechanism to show all that to the player persistently. and it's an awkward way to think about it but i i feel that most people wind up learning the rules of a pinball game either by watching it on stream or by watching someone else play it so you're watching someone else play and then you have the ability to take in everything while the other person is busy just playing and so i thought leaving those elements on the back glass made a lot of sense because someone could then say oh actually you're at level two for this and you need to know right you're shopping and the shopping experience takes up most of the screen on the playfield, so you'd want to know what levels you're at. So, you know, that definitely evolved. And in the artifacts update, I had to reconfigure things a bit to make room to show the artifacts that the player currently has, and also find a way to not just show the icons for those artifacts, but actually come up with one-sentence descriptions that explain, this is the artifact that you hold, this is what it has, ability it has, what it buys for you. So that required a lot of reshuffling of elements and restructuring of the UI. It's not a light undertaking to make a massive UI shift like that. So speaking of shifts, let's talk about light shows. Sure. How many different light shows are in the game and which light show was the most challenging to create? So the trick that I use that I learned fairly early on is that light shows make the most sense as there's just motion across the play field, right? And so it's, am I exploding light from a point? Am I converging light to a point? Am I doing wipes? Am I doing side? Because these are the effects that you're most likely to see. And the original version of the game, when it was going to run on every play field module, you simply can't count on anything. But the thing you can count on are positions of interest. So when you defeat an enemy, I explode a show from the position on the screen where the enemy was. When trying to bring your attention somewhere, I'll do a converged light show. But I have to be honest, the light shows that I find most interesting in Dungeon Door Defender aren't those reaction shows. It's the fact that I made the buildings look like they're on fire. And so I was trying to figure out how do I theme this city to make you feel like you're actually in a dungeon. And so I brought down the house lights, so to speak, and made it slightly blue, if I'm remembering correctly. And then I set all the windows of the buildings to look like flickering candles. Now, whether they look like flickering candles from candlelight or from fire, or it looks like the whole city on fire that the discretion of the viewer I really like that show It a silly trick that I done in Arduino before actually where you have some RGB LEDs and you put them next to each other and you do some color cycling that randomized And it's a pretty good effect. It's probably the one I'm the most happy with is every time I see the buildings on fire when I'm watching somebody else play, I'm just like, oh, yeah, right. So let's move to sound design. There are no direct call outs in Dungeon Door Defender in the classical sense. Hey, shoot this shot. Do this thing. How did you determine the noises that need to be made and how does that convey to the player? Why were those decisions made? It's much easier to do sound on a game when you're working with sound engineers. So when I'm working on first party games with Multimorphic, I've had the luxury of working with Scott Denisey, who is amazing and lots of other talented folks. and just sort of say, I need something that is upbeat and feels triumphant, and I need to be able to play it up to four times. And then some magic happens, and you're holding four wave files or eight wave files if you have variations. And that's not how this worked at all. And so I was really going through my many, many, many gig folder of sound effects. And it's an enormous waste of time for me because I just listened to this audio, and I think, I don't know, these sound about the same. And you're just trying to listen to these different sound effects back to back and say, oh yes, this whoosh feels like the whoosh of I made a shot and got mana, but not that other one. That one definitely doesn't work. Some people I'm sure have a very good ear for it and I don't. And so it takes me a lot longer and it's a much more iterative process of putting it in the game and listening to it and feeling, was this triumphant enough? And typically I find that when I'm listening to something on its own, I've stopped doing this, But I used to look for things that had more sort of distinct character to them. And then you realize very quickly, oh, that's going to get annoying in the game very quickly. So you need something that is both impactful, but not so distinct that you get sick of hearing it, especially if you're going to hear it a lot. So, yeah, a lot of trial and error. There were many days of development of this game, many, many days where I go, well, I should have sat down and programmed. But instead, I just wasted two hours listening to sounds. And I picked two hours is probably an underestimate and two is probably an overestimate. but I have to make myself feel better somehow. So the music in Dungeon Door Defender is very fitting, and I particularly love the horn at the beginning of the stage. It really sets the tone right away. Really, from a player's perspective, you kind of get the idea of what you're in for here. How many different tracks are in the game, if you recall, and at what phase of development was that horn introduced specifically, but was music folded into the experience? The horn was there almost from the beginning, actually. I really, I wanted the player to feel like, oh, no, I hear the enemy hordes are coming. For some reason, you never see the horn, right? Like the first enemy in every wave, you should knock the horn out of their hands. But they just left it in the field or wherever it was behind. So the horn was part of the early part of the game. And I really wanted something specific for the music. And what I wanted for the music was a track that built and built and built. so that the first version was sort of stripped down, sort of slower thing. And as you progressed farther and farther into the game, I would add another layer on top of it and another layer on top of it and another layer on top of it. And I was very lucky to find in my musical asset hoarding this Industrial Combat eight layers sound file from a game music collection from John Leonard French that I couldn't tell you how long ago I purchased. And it had eight layers. And as you listen to each one, it brings in another instrument and sort of raises the sort of the tension of the piece just by adding in more instruments, even though it's the same track. And so in every successive wave, I play the next version and the next version, the next version. And players might not even notice that that's happening because you've taken a break and you've heard the shopping theme, which I quite like. And so it's not continuous. But and that is the eighth track is the one you hear for the rest of the game. once you get to that point. But it really gives you this sense of progress and audio diversity as you're playing it. But I'm glad you dig the horn. I dig the horn too. What was the biggest challenge in programming the game? Oh, Nick, I'm very good. I don't have any challenges. We all know this, Michael, but surely you can pick one. I'll try to pick only one. So I mentioned this respect the dead flag, which causes enemies to wait politely leave behind their fallen enemies and when i was first trying to figure out how to set up the physics and the collisions and the triggers in such a way that they did this i used to have this bug i mean until very close before i let anyone play it even where enemies would occasionally get sandwiched between each other and then shoot out to the side right like it was some sort of odd property of the physics engine where there's enormous pressure on the character in the middle until like another character was gone and i had written all this crazy mitigation code to try to make the the outside of the room like a i don't know like an air hockey table so well if they hit the side bounce them back in and all this nonsense and then finally i realized that i was doing wrong and i was embarrassed that i'd written so much code to just try to mitigate the problem instead of actually fixing it at the truth cause but i was like it's not so bad that that enemy flew off to the side and bounced back in, right? Or, you know, looking at logging and thinking, well, that character is 27 screens away. The wave can end when that character gets back. And then at some point, okay, well, if you fly too far away, just destroy that one and make a new one. Just all these silly things. Like, no, just fix it at its source. Yeah, it was pretty bad. That might have been the most memorable, odd thing that I experienced in the development of the game. In what ways was the development of this Dungeon Door Defender, a third party game, more challenging than developing first party games like Final Resistance or The Princess Bride? Oh, that is a hilarious question. Well, I did this game entirely by myself. And so constantly I would look at things and say, I think this looks pretty good. hey steven can you take a look so i'm referring to Stephen Silver who is creative director on several multi-morphic games and who i had the pleasure of working with on weird owls museum of natural hilarity and princess bride and you know he was creative director on heist and i would show something to steven and say this looks pretty good right and he'd be like oh um well have you considered maybe doing something else i'm just like okay i get it it looks bad i'll try again and so you know and sound design where i'm doing the whole thing myself and it's just it's just doing everything yourself right and the simulator is amazing because the simulator you can basically just play a game entirely at your computer without actually going to experience it on the machine but then at some point you go to the machine and you realize oh i forgot to create all of the launcher media assets so you know i'm missing an icon for the game as it's sitting in the carousel or I'm missing some other thing. It's okay, I've got to do that too. Or, okay, I think this version is ready to release. Oh, right, I need to write web content for it to go up on the store. And just every small thing that you don't realize has to be done. A lot of it I was used to doing from the development side. It's, yep, I need a service menu. I need to provide things to players, to owners who want to be able to change some settings or see what's up. That stuff wasn't unfamiliar to me because I'd done that stuff a lot of times And I'm sure for someone else, you know, these are all the 80, 20, 90, 10 sort of the principle of you spend, you know, some huge amount of your time on some small percentage of things that. But yeah, I think what was really hard is not having an animator and having a graphic designer and not having someone to say, OK, yeah, that was a cute mock up. But here is the real version, which is, you know, what I'm very used to when I propose something as a first party. What do you think about this idea? And Stephen will say, that's a nice idea. Let me work on it for two seconds. And now it's beautiful and better and smarter than what you thought of. That sort of collaboration is sorely missing. And it just made everything take a lot longer. Conversely, what ways were things easier as a third party instead of a first party? It was nice to be able to do anything I wanted. So I know that when I work on first party games, I'm trying to provide a pure pinball experience that gets to the heart of what it means to play pinball as reimagined on this framework. And here I could do the weirdest video game things I wanted to. I could make all sorts of strange decisions as long as they were in service of something fun for the player. And look, I mean, I don't want to alienate players. I didn't do things that were too weird. I definitely had some lines I couldn't cross for myself where I was like, I don't think players are going to be on board for that because it's still fundamentally pinball. But artifacts are crazy. And one of my favorite pieces of feedback I heard about this game came from the Wormhole Pinball guys. and they said, well, you know, you're going to buy a video game. And I told my wife, I'm not buying a video game. I'm buying Dungeon Door Defender. And I thought, oh, that's awesome because it is a video game, but I've done it. I've tricked you into enjoying a video game by all I had to do was extending the boundaries of what a pinball experience could be. Infusing it with video games is such a cool, weird, pleasant thing. So yeah, it's just the ability to do things where I know that if Jerry could say no, he would say, too weird. Don't do that. No, I did it. And maybe it was too weird. We'll find out. People will tell me. But by and large, people like Dungeon Door Defender. I think they respond positively to it. Yeah, I guess that would be it. The worst thing, not having feedback from the people who I really want to have help me. And the best thing is ignoring their feedback when I choose that I don't want it. So yes, a bit of a double-edged sword. I was lucky to be one of the beta testers for Dungeon Door Defender, and getting a game into beta is a tremendous feat. People who have not developed a game don't quite understand all of the soup that needs to be made before you send it to other people to experience. What was your testing process for the game, and how did you determine it was ready for external testing? I don't know why I suddenly decided I've got to stop messing around with this game and actually make it for real. But something happened. Some switch flipped in my brain and I said, OK, this is coming together. This is pretty good. I need to assemble this game into something that other people can play and enjoy and give me feedback on. And it's yes, to your point, it is a it is an enormous amount of work to get something fully ready. And then basically what I did is what I would do, what I did with Homebrew and Multimorphic were much more structured than this. So it's not really representative, but it was just a gigantic list, right? I play the game on the machine and make a list of everything I noticed that was wrong. And with a Homebrew game, with a game that you're never actually intending for people to play other than on location, you'll stand there and you'll watch people play it and enjoy it. And then you'll notice that text is going off the edge of the display. and you go, I noticed that a hundred times. Why did I never write it down? Why did I never prioritize fixing it? And that's the stuff, right? That is all the stuff that has to happen. It's, oh, sometimes the ball will accidentally go into a hole here. And when that happens, the ball doesn't get fed out. Well, I know that I put in a little cheat code in the buttons that if I hold down this button, I'll get a new ball back if I do this. So it's okay. None of that's okay, right? The player can't be left without a ball. If things happen too quickly and the player doesn't get a chance to read a message, all that stuff has to get fixed. And so it is, you know, it's the note app is filled with notes on my phone of everything that has to get fixed. And, you know, that's also partially where artifacts came from, too. It's just like, oh, it'd be kind of cool, though, if that happened instead. Well, all right, I'll make a separate note for this idea, but really just get the game toward the finish line so people could start testing. But yes, to your point, it is an enormous amount of work to get a game done. I mean, done is insane. Done is a level above beta. You know, that's even more work on top. Yes, it's a tremendous amount of work, but it's so very rewarding to release a game that people enjoy, especially and are able to connect with on the level that you intended for them to connect with it. Oh, my gosh. Yes. Totally, totally worth it. Worth every time I go back in and add more stuff. As long as I don't cause people to hate it, then it was worth it at any rate. So, Michael, I also work for Multimorphic on the support team, and I wanted to say it's been a great pleasure to be able to work with you and see the passion that you bring to development every day at Multimorphic. Dungeon Door Defender was released in September of 2023 and is available now for $199 in the Multimorphic store. It's a fast, challenging, and addictive experience for the Heist Playfield module, and I encourage everybody to pick up a copy today. Thank you. Nick, can I shower you with praise for a second and say that in the early days of the P3, you know, Jimmy got out there with Grand Slam Rally, and you then plowed ahead, releasing game after game. I know everyone mentions Reigns of the Ruins and showers you with praise for it, so let me do the same thing. And it's awesome. It is a cool video gaming pinball experience that people have to experience, have to play. You're much more passable than mine is. The elements you pick up influence your pinball play, whereas I'm definitely leaning more toward the dark side of video games. But honestly, working with you at Multimorphic is awesome. We are very fortunate to have you. I think the community is fortunate to have you. I think the bingo community is fortunate to have you. You do awesome stuff in every community where you are. And so the fact that you have anything nice to say to me makes me feel even better. So thank you. Well, thanks very much, Michael. And thanks for joining me today to talk about your game, Dungeon Tour Defender. Thank you. Thank you very much for listening. My name again is Nick Baldrige. You can reach me at 4amusementonlypodcast at gmail.com. Or you can call me on the bingos line. That's 724-BINGOS1, 724-246-4671. thanks very much for listening and I'll talk to you next time