How To Make Your Own Pinball Machine In Visual Pinball - Crash Course

Dead Flip·video·29m 49s·analyzed·Mar 31, 2021

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.017

TL;DR

Dead Flip tutorial: Visual Pinball basics for rapid table design and scripting.

Summary

Jack Danger from Dead Flip provides a comprehensive tutorial on creating custom pinball tables in Visual Pinball, covering fundamental tools (walls, ramps, bumpers, targets, flippers) and basic scripting with if-then-else logic. The guide emphasizes rapid prototyping, practical workflow hacks, and leveraging the example table as a learning resource for beginners.

Key Claims

Visual Pinball's blank table is fully playable immediately upon creation without any modifications needed
high confidence · Jack demonstrates hitting 'play' on a blank table and confirms it renders and becomes immediately playable
Walls can be smoothed by right-clicking points and selecting 'smooth' to create curved slopes instead of angular shapes
high confidence · Jack explicitly demonstrates this feature: 'if you right-click on a point and click smooth. And look at that. Zoop! Now if a ball hit this, it would roll down'
Ramps can be used creatively as ball guides by setting both heights to zero and width to two, creating low-profile walls
high confidence · Jack describes this as a 'quick little hack' and demonstrates: 'for both your heights make them zero. Your width make it two.'
The example table in Visual Pinball contains code examples and mechanics that serve as learning resources for beginners
high confidence · Jack repeatedly recommends studying the example table: 'I do suggest opening up the example table once you get to the scripting part'
Table dimensions for modern Stern pinball machines are width 952 and height 2115 in Visual Pinball units
high confidence · Jack states: 'if you wanted this to be a standard modern Stern right here the width would be 952 and 2115'

Notable Quotes

“It's Papa Duke intimidating when you first open the editor here but I'm going to give you just an idea of what everything does”
Jack Danger@ 0:08 — Sets the tone for the tutorial—acknowledging intimidation factor while promising accessibility
“I love using ramps sort of the way you're not supposed to but this is great if you just needed like a quick little horseshoe”
Jack Danger@ 11:02 — Demonstrates creative problem-solving and unconventional tool usage in Visual Pinball design
“that's all this is doing that's all it needs to do... if it's doing this then do this else do the other thing so straightforward”
Jack Danger@ 19:19 — Demystifies if-then-else scripting logic, core to Visual Pinball game mechanics
“A great way to stay organized in Visual Pinball is layers right here... The ramp disappears in your editor, but it is still there.”
Jack Danger@ 20:57 — Explains workflow organization technique critical for managing complex table designs
“if you don't like the angle that you're seeing... if you hit f6 it will act like it's rendering the table again but the flippers will be disabled”
Jack Danger@ 25:32 — Reveals camera control technique for design review and playtesting

Entities

Jack DangerpersonDead FliporganizationVisual PinballproductOrbital Pinballorganization

Signals

?
community_signal: Dead Flip providing free, comprehensive Visual Pinball educational content demonstrates commitment to expanding accessible table design learning for hobbyists
high · Full-length tutorial covering fundamentals through advanced scripting; Jack explicitly encourages viewers to create and asks to see results
?
technology_signal: Visual Pinball remains primary entry point for custom digital pinball creation; emphasis on example tables and frameworks suggests active community learning infrastructure
high · Jack repeatedly references example tables as learning resources and mentions downloadable frameworks with scoring systems

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.089

0:00

Hey Internet, Jack Danger here of Deadflip. I just wanted to give you a quick and dirty rundown on how to hit the ground running creating your own table in visual pinball. It's pretty intimidating when you first open the editor here but I'm going to give you just an idea of what everything does and how you can quickly make a game, shoot it, and just sort of feel out how your design is going to play. So what you're looking at here is a brand new file. All you have to do is go to file, new. This is the blank table or you can go to the example table which you'll see here and there's a lot more stuff going on. So if we switch back over to the blank table we had, if we hit play, play up in the top left hand corner sort of renders the game, makes it playable right off the bat without having to do anything. You can hold down enter, shift buttons, flipping and then you have a game. Alright and you can vary like how the plunge goes but you'll notice on the left and right hand sides here, these are all the things that you would typically see in a pinball machine. So these are the various caps from pops, all the various posts that you would find in a game, some rulers to help you measure out exactly what's going on there, these look like some kickback arms, various flippers from over the years. The blank table has this, you know, sort of like old EM style layout and we'll get into how to change that. If we go over to the example table and play that, it's the same layout but they added a bunch of the components on here so you can actually play sort of everything. And this is a great place to find how to make stuff work. So you'll see when you shoot the ball, when it goes through a lane, it lights up that light. The pop bumpers are all popping. If you knock down a drop it lights a light and then the drop comes back up you know so there's a timer there all these have lights associated with it the spinner even has a sound attached to it which I don't think is actually showing up right now but I do suggest opening up the example table once you get to the scripting part of things yes this looks intimidating but it's not as bad as it seems especially if you understand just the basics of if-then-else statements but again we'll go into that. So into the blank table let me go over a few things. So if you want to select something you could just click it. See we clicked it. This is a one-way gate. You can make it a two-way gate. Everything that you click will have some settings here on the right. I believe this is a wall. You see there's a whole bunch of settings going on. So let's just go down the line and show you what's going on here. On the left you'll see the very first thing is called wall. So you click that, you place it wherever you want, now you have this wall. And it has a bunch of settings on the right, but let's just render this to show you what that did. So by default, it made a 50 units high block that the ball will interact with. So you see how it's sort of getting stuck up top there.

6:11

You can adjust the heights of this. So right now it's bottom height zero, top height 50. So if for some reason we wanted a wall that was like stacked on here because you could get the ball up there somehow. So if I wanted, if this wall is zero to 50 and I wanted this wall to be on top of that, that means the bottom height would have to be, you guessed it, 50. And then we'll say it's also 50 tall. So this would have to be 100. So now we're going to see that shape on top of there. And the ball can actually roll on top of surfaces as well. So, you know, we essentially created a little upper playfield area that the ball could roll around on. We could put a flipper, some targets up here. Pretty easy peasy. Let's get into, so that's walls. Walls are fun. Walls are great. Gate is the next thing that's up. Click, put a gate somewhere. You'll see it's a circle, line going through it, two arrows facing either direction. What this is telling you is the ball can go through this gate left or right. This is great if you wanted it to be a switch, But typically you would want a gate to not be a two way you want it to be a one way so that it can pass through this way but it can go back this way So that is exactly what this gate doing It not letting the ball back into the shooter lane And you can increase the size of this all you want You can adjust the rotation over here. All these settings tell you like how tall it is, how long it is. So, you know, this would be a super long gate, you know, an elongated gate. Got it. Rotation, you know, you could do 40, so the ball could roll along the top of this but it can enter through the bottom gates are pretty straightforward that's how you put those in and uh yeah let's move on from that that's your gates now ramps super easy it is wild how easy it is you just click ramp click where you want the ramp here's the entrance of the ramp here's the exit of the ramp okay so right now this ramp is 50 high which means it exits at 50 units so if we wanted this ramp to sort of put the ball on top of this 50 unit high wall we have here well this would have to be 50 units but you have to keep in mind that it's not 50 going all the way down so this would either have to be a little higher than the wall or it has to line up exactly now you'll see there's only two points here? Well, we can right-click anywhere and put a little curve on it. See that? Pretty cool. Then you can line it up. So shooting this will put the ball right on top of there and then it'll fall off. You can make this as tall as you want from the bottom to the top. Walls are very important. So visible wall, let me just render this really quick. Visible wall is the wall you see, but it is just an illusion because it's not the wall that the ball interacts with. So you see how it's like going up that ramp. Zoop. And it was rolling on top of there. Pretty cool. So 30 is the wall height that you see. This could literally be zero zero and it would look like the ball should fall off, but it's the physical wall that's holding the ball on. So the physical wall is actually double, it looks like, the size. So like if this ramp's really close and you just rocket a ball at that, it's not going to go flying off. It's going to stay on there. So you can adjust these sizes all you want. You can adjust these sizes all you want. Top height, top width. So let's say the bottom width of this ramp isn't enough. You know, we can go like 150. So now it's a super thick ramp at the bottom that sort of funnels out at the top. And then we can just shoot that and the ball goes in there. See? Ba-boom. Excellent. Again, you can give this an image and a material. You can make it metal if you want it it'll put a cool sheen on it um you don't really have to worry about the rest of this stuff uh top height top bottom height top width bottom width um a one cool trick i will show you with ramps is if i need a ball guide to be sort of like in the middle of a game i actually use ramps instead of walls because i feel like i can get more action out of them this is a quick little hack. So for both your heights make them zero. Your width make it two. Okay now what do you have? You have this little stick but what's cool is if you add a point you can put these bends in it and because the height is zero zero this thing is just this cool wall that is chilling on the ground that's real easy to move it's real malleable it's it just pretty chill. I love using ramps sort of the way you're not supposed to but this is great if you just needed like a quick little horseshoe you know you could just build them out of these walls are great but you know I like hacking it with the ramps flipper will come back to bumper this is a pop bumper this couldn't be any simpler click put a pop bumper boom you now have a pop bumper and it works and it's ready to go it's actually that simple and if you want to you can copy paste it. Now if you copy paste, if you control C and then you immediately paste, it'll paste directly on top of where that was. Or you can hold shift and paste and it'll paste where your mouse was currently sitting. So we have all these pops here and as I mentioned they immediately are active so we can just throw a ball right in here and they'll just start doinking around. Boom, Look at this, we've already got the most disgusting looking pinball machine designed, and we got this little slingshot here. Much like everything else, it has its own parameters. You can change the cap material, base material, skirt material, ring material. Yeah. What's interesting though is the way pops work, if I wanted this pop on top of this 50 unit high wall, I would have to select what this wall's name is. So currently this wall is called wall001. So I can collect this pop surface wall001. Now when we play that pop bumper is going to be on our little faux upper playfield.

12:42

Boom. Awesome. And then it can bounce around up on top of there. Easy peasy. That's also how we'll put flippers and stuff up there. Okay plunger don't worry about spinner. you have to have a million of these or I don't like you so spinner click it there's your spinner actually that easy and much like the pop bumper if you wanted a spinner sort of up top here you would just select the surface which is wall zero zero one now it's going to be up top you can change the rotation of it you can change how long it is so if it's like a super long spinner and then if you hit play you will have the spinners up top see big boy down there and the bracket you could turn on and off but spinners again are ready to go now what's cool about this is these all have hit functions so whether or not you told it to do something this game's registering that that's spinning and you can associate that with something that happens in the code like turn a light on or uh you know activate something we'll get into the code of that in just a second timers we're not going to really worry about triggers are your switches your rollover switches so by default this is a rollover this line right here is the rollover switch but if you let's see copy this there's different kinds of rollovers there's even star rollovers everyone loves star rollovers and you'll see that these are currently like in the in lane here. They did a lot to try to help you with the Italian bottom feel so you could just stay up here and design what you want. But again you associate what surface this is gonna be on. So if we wanted this on the upper play field here we could change it or by default it's down below. Wire thickness, rotation, you're gonna have to make sure your rotation is right like if you wanted it up here because the ball can't hit the side of a rollover like that. Kickers are pretty cool Put a kicker in there and by default again this program is trying to help you out as much as possible So there the hole The ball falls in there Now it just waiting for a command to do something with it Is it going to kick it out? What direction is it going to kick it out? How hard is it going to kick it out? Does it hold it and fire another ball into the shooter lane so that you can start a multi-ball? Now what's cool about that is on the example table, they've done that for you. so you can go in and sort of like peek at the code to know how to do this but you see how there's a saucer right here it will hold the ball kick another ball into play and then once you get that in there you now have a multi-ball so this example table has a lot of great stuff in it to help you get started with just some of the basics of coding especially like switches turning lights on etc etc targets obviously you're going to have a million of these your first click automatically puts a drop target down. And again, the drop target will work as intended. It will be up. When you hit it, it will fall. But there's several different targets in here that you could choose from. Like, uh, like old, like, I don't even know how old, uh, is that like an old Gottlieb, super slim, but thick target. You got your standard round targets. Um, let's paste a couple of these in here so you can see what's going on. So it's round, rectangle, Let's see, copy pasta. So you can click on something, but if you want multiples, just drag a little lasso around it and you can move it around. This one could be... We'll make this the drop, so you can actually see what happened. Drop target, simple. Boom. Alright, let's hit start. Overplay. Waiting for it to go. Alright, hit it. hit it see the drop goes down and the targets react as they should the reason everything's pink pink is sort of the default color it's saying like this item's here it's ready to go but there are no textures or materials associated with it so you see we got the roll over here got the star roll over this control gate all right so that's targets next we've got lights now lights are pretty cool. It will by default just make a round circle. Cool. Over here are all sorts of fun light settings that you're just gonna have to play with to feel it out or find an example table where you know what looks good and then you use that color. You know you choose make it red, you can choose if it's like a bulb, if it's an image, the surface that it's on, the state that it defaults to, and the example table again does a really good job of giving you something to mess with here. That's what all these little red circles are. So here's one, falloff 20, falloff power 2, it's gonna be red, get in here, and you can see the light up top right there, and then when you roll over it lights up now you need to tell this light to light up with a with an event so for instance we'll take this light it's called light zero zeros one okay awesome very original then we'll take this target and we say we want this target to light this light right this is called target zero screw this we'll take target zero zero one just so it's not confusing so So we'll go into script here and I've already put like a quick little thing in here, but just copy pasta some code off of the example table. And so our target is called zero zero one. Okay. And this is saying zero zero one hit event if, and the light was called light zero zero one, zero zero one, zero zero one. Okay. Here's what this is saying. target is hit if the light is on then turn it off else turn it on right so that's that's all this is doing that's all it needs to do we're gonna hit play the light should be off and then when we hit it with a ball it turns on and when we hit it with a ball it turns off that's the power of if if then else statements if it's doing this then do this else do the other thing so pretty straightforward if you had like a whole bank of targets a whole bank of lights just make sure everything's labeled and named appropriately and everything has a hit event so this spinner for instance we could say let's see what is this spinner called it's called spinner 001 copy so we could say instead of target hit we could say spinner spin all right okay that is called a syntax error spin so now that that's in there for every spin that this goes through this light is going to turn on and off boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop boop pretty cool you do have pop bumpers with hits spinners with spins targets with hits obviously we turned that off anything that has like a hit event you can make it interact with something else pretty chill is there anything else i mean i think that's pretty much all you need to really start making a game is like lay out your shots put targets in front of things that you think would be fun things to shoot you can grab posts with rubbers on them so this is like a mini post with a rubber around it that is a these are lights so you can copy this and then say you know to protect this edge i want to put this mini post with a rubber so select this put it right there so the ball isn't going to just smash that corner and get destroyed a great way to stay organized in visual pinball is layers right here. So you'll see there's number one, two, number three, number four, number five. You can turn all these things off. So what a lot of people will do is they'll put, you know, all their ramps on one layer. So, you know, I want my ramps to be on layer six. Okay. So if I know my ramp is good and I don't want to see it because I'm trying to work on other stuff, you could turn six off. The ramp disappears in your editor, but it is still there. Even if all this is off, even if the whole thing is missing because you've turned off all the layers, when you hit go, it will be there ready to work. It's a great way to stay organized and you're not clustered up when you're trying to work on stuff. You know, if you only wanted to work on the ramp, turn on layer six, or you can click this to turn them all on and off if you know the dimension or if you know the type of cabinet that this game would emulate you would go into your table dimensions manager here and find if you're like i definitely know this game is going to be a uh you know a wms like a williams super pin body or if it was going to be a williams standard body or if it was going to do a modern stern game these are the table size dimensions that you will want to type in so if you just click anywhere here you'll get all the base dimensions of the game and over here you'll see table width table height glass height if we wanted this to be a standard modern stern right here the width would be 952 by 2115 so we would just type that in there and then push everything around accordingly so if you wanted to start doing graphics for this and you're you're ready to start drawing on it and putting colors and uh images and graphics and decals everywhere what you can do is you can export this as a blueprint pull that into photoshop draw over it and then re-import it so you would just go to file export blueprint then you know name it whatever you want i got test up there we'll call this test two because we're awesome um don't save it as a solid you just want these lines it'll say export finished then we can come over to Photoshop and we can open up that image we just made we'll drop it in here and you will have the drawing of what you just made and then if you wanted to paint you know let's let's just goof on here really quick so you know red circles here's a cool arrow there's a smiley face here in the middle um there's a sunburst man i'm an artist bro little explodey things there um you can i i would recommend doing this all on a new layer you know swirly swirlies hearts and the thing because you just want to use this as a guide so you know where things are so the ramp okay this looks amazing right so let me give this a solid background and we'll export it export and we'll just make it it doesn't matter what it is all right it will have the dimensions of what this needs to be you'll just hit save call this obviously I saved this already because I'm hiding stuff from you internet, so I'll say 3. Then we'll come back over to Visual Pinball and in here you'll go to Image Manager, Import, and select your image you just made. It's called Test 3. Great. Then click anywhere here. Over here it says Playfield Graphics where it says Image. Your Test 3 will now show up and you won't see it here because you have to go to View and turn on Playfield image and backdrop and it didn't take so let's go test three again bump now look at that there's our graphics perfectly lined up and then when you hit play well I'll be there it is beautiful this obviously would be some better artwork that you would create besides this big swirly mess that I had just made if you don't like the angle that you're seeing instead of hitting play and make sure you save before you do this because this can f things up a little bit but if you hit f6 it will act like it's rendering the table again but the flippers will be disabled but instead of the shift buttons making the game flip it will alter the angle at which you're looking at the table so you can get a better view of like what's going on and where you leave this the angle that you leave this in it remembers it so that the next time you play it will be that angle that you just had now inside of there is a lot of settings that can really sort of muck up your lighting and your physics and stuff like that that's why i suggest that you save before you go in there and mess with that just so you don't have to you know do a bunch of geometry to figure out how to fix everything that happened. So if you wanted another flipper on here, it's pretty simple actually. The code already exists, so let's say we wanted another right flipper. We would copy this, paste it, thing, you're awesome. Here's the flipper that we wanted. So let's say we wanted this to be up top here, all right? So this is our right flipper. You could choose the surface that it's on. remember it's wall 001 so this is going to be on our upper playfield area and you can choose what the the end angle is so you can see here this little line it's showing where the flipper starts where it's going to end and all of that adjusted here the start angle so this could be you know maybe it's going to be a very tiny flip it's not going to flip much so right flipper 001 we can call this like upper flipper and just remember this and then we'll go into the code and what I want you to do is go all the way up and find where the right flipper is okay so right flipper rotate to end and what you're going to do is so that this flipper is also firing at the same time. I'm going to paste the upper flipper here as well. Copy this rotate to end. Just literally copy copy pasta. It's so so easy. So this in theory should just have you flipping once you flip the right flipper. So we're going to fire it off and there you go. So it flipped up. We did miss one little part because we have to make it go down. So what we're going to do is find anything labeled right flipper there it is return to start is what we missed so we're gonna grab our upper flipper rotate here come down forgot this part and make sure your formatting looks good so use your tabs to make sure everything's lined up it's just gonna help you in the end keep a clean code so So there we go.