Episode 477 - Blood Bank Billiards with Ian Harrower of Ian Harrower Games - 5-4-24

For Amusement Only EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·48m 31s·analyzed·May 28, 2024

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.029

TL;DR

Ian Harrower releases Blood Bank Billiards for P3 Drained, blending pool-game rules with EM aesthetics and innovative digital effects.

Summary

Ian Harrower discusses Blood Bank Billiards, a new P3 Drained-exclusive homebrew game inspired by Target Pool with a vampire theme. The game features innovative design choices including EM-era aesthetics blended with modern digital elements, custom callouts by Glenn Waechter, dynamic blood effects using ball tracking, and detailed light show design. Harrower details his development process, design philosophy prioritizing nudge-based gameplay over shot accuracy, and technical challenges in creating conversational AI-like callouts without background music.

Key Claims

Blood Bank Billiards took approximately two days to prototype Target Pool rules on Drained, then three months to reach release quality.
high confidence · Ian Harrower, episode 477; direct quote about development timeline
The game features approximately 150 callouts with another ~100 in script at the time of recording.
high confidence · Ian Harrower, episode 477; explicit statement about callout count
EM-era flippers allow nuanced control through variable electrical current based on button-press speed, unlike modern on-off binary systems.
medium confidence · Ian Harrower, episode 477; personal opinion on EM vs modern flipper mechanics
Drained playfield module uses infrared grid ball tracking to enable dynamic blood splatter effects and trail visualization.
high confidence · Ian Harrower, episode 477; technical explanation of blood effect implementation
Glenn Waechter performed all sound design and callout voice direction for Blood Bank Billiards, and previously worked on Saw homebrew.
high confidence · Ian Harrower, episode 477; explicit attribution
The game's back glass artwork was hand-drawn over AI-generated reference images created with Stable Diffusion, then rotoscoped over a 3D scene.
high confidence · Ian Harrower, episode 477; detailed description of artistic process
Ian Harrower does not favor Gottlieb EM machines; he prefers Williams EMs from a play perspective.
high confidence · Ian Harrower, episode 477; personal collecting preference statement

Notable Quotes

“I am not a very accurate shooter, so I find that the strength of my game as a pinball player typically is on nudging.”
Ian Harrower @ ~13:30 — Reveals design philosophy focused on nudge-based play rather than shot accuracy; directly influenced game design
“On the modern games a lot of your control comes from shooting accurately... Whereas most of the EM era and early solid states, your control comes from nudging.”
Ian Harrower @ ~14:00 — Core design principle explaining the divide between EM and modern pinball gameplay philosophies
“I wanted this game to exist. I enjoyed Drained. I enjoyed Drained bite-sized a lot, but I wanted this game to exist... I figured the fastest way to get there was just to write it myself.”
Ian Harrower @ ~08:15 — Explains motivation for creating Drained-exclusive module rather than multi-playfield compatibility like Birdwatcher
“If you're playing a game of pool with your friend, but that is not how they act... I wanted things to be a little more laid back and dialed back from what we typically get in pinball callouts.”
Ian Harrower @ ~35:00 — Design philosophy for callout tone and atmosphere; commitment to realism over traditional pinball excitement
“The most challenging part... is trying to create that conversational feeling with the callouts... I'm still not 100% sure I've got it right.”
Ian Harrower @ ~48:00 — Identifies primary technical and artistic challenge; reveals uncertainty despite three months of iteration
“Drained is like very clean and simple... There is no state change in the mix... You don't have to worry about like setting your diverters via shot paths.”
Ian Harrower @ ~52:00 — Explains why Drained was chosen as ideal platform for rules complexity; contrasts with crane-based modules

Entities

Ian HarrowerpersonNicholas BackbonepersonGlenn WaechterpersonEdward JosephpersonBlood Bank BilliardsgameDrainedproductMultimorphic P3productTarget PoolgameBirdwatchergame

Signals

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product_launch: Blood Bank Billiards released May 2024 as Drained-exclusive homebrew P3 game; follows Birdwatcher; code complete with final callout recording underway
high · Ian Harrower: 'The game is code complete, but I'm waiting for another batch of callouts... we are currently recording this before I am finished'
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design_innovation: Blood Bank Billiards blends EM-era visual and audio design with modern digital effects (3D rendered pool table, dynamic blood splattering, digital callouts); uses static overlay with cutout reveal of 3D elements
high · Ian Harrower detailed artistic and technical approach: 'static silk screen look to the playfield... giant hole cut out of it that gives you a view down into the 3D rendered pool table... video overlays get placed on top'
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technology_signal: Blood Bank Billiards uses Multimorphic P3's infrared grid ball tracking to enable real-time blood splatter visualization and trail rendering based on ball position and velocity
high · Ian Harrower: 'I'm well aware that the P3 has the ability to track the location of balls using the infrared grid... I wanted to splatter blood... as the ball rolled over the blood, blood would... track a trail'
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design_philosophy: Ian Harrower articulates preference for EM-era nudge-based gameplay control over modern shot-accuracy-based design; this philosophy directly influenced Blood Bank Billiards mechanics
high · Ian Harrower: 'EM era and early solid states, your control comes from nudging... the ball has a lot more side to side action... that style of game that I actually really enjoy'
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Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.146

0:00

Welcome back to For Amusement Only, this is Nick Baldridge. Ian Harrawer of Ian Harrawer Games has been busy since our last conversation, which was episode 475 of this podcast. He's been hard at work on a brand new game for the drained playfield module on Multimorphic's P3 pinball platform titled Blood Bank Billiards. Ian, welcome back to the show. Well, thanks for having me back. Nice to see you again. Can you please explain the concept of Blood Bank Billiards? So from a thematic standpoint, the idea of the game is that you are a vampire and you are in a bar called the Blood Bank. And we're going to say it serves various animal bloods, not human blood, because we're a friendly vampire group here. So you're in this bar and you're hanging out with your friend. I call him Minnesota Bats. And he was turned around post World War II era Poole Hall, inspired by movies like the Hustler and that's sort of when he was turned and he played pool at that time

1:32

and so he's sort of a pool shark who is hanging out and the two of you are just having some drinks and playing pool and that's the general premise of the game and what are the goals of the game? As a player, I am taking heavy inspiration from specifically TargetPool The game is a classic pool game from the early solid state era. Just like those games, we have an incredibly inaccurate game of 8-balls that we are playing. We don't actually follow the rules of 8-ball, but we pretend that we do. As a player, your goal is to sink all 14 of the object balls to qualify the 8-ball shot and then complete the route by hitting the 8-ball. Knapp Arcade is a game that is designed to be a game of pinball even though that is not how you actually play a game of pinball. And the 8 ball on drained is the gobble hole. That is correct. Yeah. So the sort of design of how to turn drained into a pool game fell out very naturally. When I looked at drained, there's a clear connection to target pool. And one of the first things when I saw it, I was like, I wonder what it would be like to do a pool game on this. Close屁 gatherings Οなく� ج�ären이 ważne. はい, 같아요τοёт 몸 promise경ого 이유는 herramient over these straplikepl 언젠간 한번에 지금 투포 bezpie med scheduledisto 담보를 입 Herrn 이글링화를야 합니다. And don't forget don't break down the I started counting and I'm like, okay, I need, I need 14 to be able to do the solids and the stripes. And I kind of looked at it and I'm like, well, if I move them towards the back of the playfield, that's going to cover the drop targets and down onto the standups at the side. And then the leftover targets, there was coincidentally another 14, which worked out perfectly to have a one-to-one correspondence like there is in target pool. And then the goal all along was that gobble hole is just perfect for a sink the eight ball. And much like innate www.cinemagazine.com, http://www.cinemagazine.com.sarenGet dzinos.html Adobe John Papadiuk, Black Water, person's name or role at Stern Pinball), or So that's the first thing you need to know about the P3. I think from a playstyle perspective, this doesn't happen on the P3, but one of the things I love about this era is actually the flipper moves. And a lot of people disagree with me maybe on this, but flippers on an EM, they're not a binary on-off. You can do various things to control flippers on modern machines, like you can do things like a tap pass on a stern, but it still has this on-off nature to it. The way you're doing the tap pass is by having a very quick on-on. But I feel like there's a whole range of skills that you get. Genuine electromechanical machine with high voltage going through the flipper switches, the speed at which you press the button impacts the current that gets to it and the speed at which the current gets to it. Hitting the button more quickly actually does make a difference to how that electrical closure happens. You can actually control the power to a degree that you can't in an on-off way. And I really love that about EM. Terms are not a very accurate shooter, so I find that the strength of my game as a pinball player typically is on nudging. The way I kind of describe to people the classics games versus the modern games, on the modern games a lot of your control comes from shooting accurately. Because if you can make the shots, you have rails that will return to your inlanes and you can feed to do another controlled shot. The game is a game that is controlled shot. So you gain control of the game by never missing. Whereas most of the EM era and early solid states, your control comes from nudging. You're controlling the game as the ball returns to your flippers. And so you're anticipating where it's going to go. You're nudging early. None of the shots are generally safe. And so the ball has a lot more side to side action. And it's just that style of game that I actually really enjoy. Drained is a playfield module for the P3 that my company, 4amusementonlygames, manufactures. Why did you decide to make this game available only on the Drained playfield module as opposed to your previous game, Birdwatcher, which was available on every playfield module to this date? This game is designed 100% from the Drained module. I made the game because I wanted it to exist. I enjoy Drained. I enjoyed Drained bite-sized a lot, but I wanted this game to exist. I wanted to play pool on my drained module and I figured the fastest way to get there was just to write it myself and if I'm going to write it for myself I might as well release it for other people as well. And how are the unique features of drained utilized in Blood Bank Billiards? The gobble hole we've talked about a bit but there's also the bell and the knocker? So the knocker, my first thought was, well, I'm doing a pool themed game and I want to fire that knocker when I launch the ball and break the rack. So when you first launch the ball and immediately there's this hard crack of the knocker as the balls hit, and then there's a background noise of an actual real recording of balls being broken from the rack. So I thought thematically that fit really well. And then the bell adds to sort of the broader sound package of what I'm doing with The game as a natural EM sound, but I use it for what are the highest scoring most important shots in the game to kind of reinforce to the player that that's what they should be doing. And so much from the inspiration of Target Pool, there are the front series of standup targets as well as the three moving up the sides on each side are what I call the blood bank. And there are up to two targets which are indicated by flashing inserts. And if they are the front targets, It's also a visual blood indicators on the playfield, which indicate that they're lit for 300 points. And that's a really big score within the game. And that's primarily what you're trying to do is to build those up and then hit them. And so your reward to reinforce that this is a really important thing is that when you hit that the bell goes off. Thematically, this is what many games of the era would do, they would use the bell for something like this. And thinking like a game like John Papadiuk, Black Water, person's name or role at Stern Pinball),a, person's name or reference, John Papadiuk, Black Water, person's name or role at Stern Pinball),a ramp shot title or abbreviation for retro Can you describe the thought process in mixing these two styles and why you chose this approach? When we talked about Birdwatcher, I talked about how I wanted to try doing a bunch of stuff myself to learn how to do it and to see how I was. And that's true here again. There's a spectrum of new things I wanted to try that I hadn't tried before. John Papadiuk, Black Water, person's name or role at Stern Pinball proportictory, person's name or reference, Which was something I hadn't done before because I wanted to add it to my toolbox of things to do. And so I wanted to create animations when things happen in the game. Scratch being one of them, sinking the eight ball, and then the way the game played out. Every time you drain, it shows you an animation of you missing your last shot that you tried to make. I had this, well, I'm going to do animations and I'm going to do animations of blue balls. And so there was going to be a view of the pool table. And then at the same time, I really wanted to make this as true to an EM style game as I could. And so for the playfield art, I did want a static silk screen look to the playfield. And so what I ended up with is this static overlay, which looks kind of like a silk screen playfield with inserts. Um, for the, like they're on the inlanes, there's starburst inserts above them. There's wood cutouts where switches would be had there actually been switches there. It's got kind of this fixed silk screen wood look to it. And then there's a giant hole cut out of it that gives you a view down into the 3d rendered pool table. And then video overlays get placed on top of that. The back glass artwork for Blood Bank Billiards is an extremely detailed 2d image. What was involved in creating this image and did this image help shape your concept of the game's world? It's all hand-drawn over top of reference images from the rendered scene. My inspiration of the artwork was kind of, again, throwbacks to other pool games, especially like 8 Ball Champ, where like 8 Ball Champ has this person in a vest holding a pool cue kind of standing there in its artwork. But cueball wizard eight ball deluxe some of them have action shots where the person kind of making a shot at the time but they tend to have this is your opponent standing on the other side of the pool table and this is who you are playing against And I wanted to make that what this felt like the look but I also wanted to reinforce the vampire theme of this because to me it was important to lean into the drained concept Drained is a vampire themed game I wanted to stay on brand John Papadiuk to be distinct to be able to look appropriate with the slings plastics and the side art and the cabinet art for Drained and the playfield art for Drained So I wanted to kind of be my own thing, but fit into that sort of world. As I described for the signs in Birdwatcher, I started from AI concept art. So I used Stapled Diffusion to create a vampire playing pool wearing a vest in the 1940s. Various things to kind of shape what I wanted this to look like. And after a lot of working and massaging, got kind of reference photos that made some sense. When it came time to make the real back glass, I drew the character myself based on those reference images and then used the 3D scene, which is Bar by Edward Joseph. I was a little bit confused about the name of this game, but I did a little research and I found out that it was available under Creative Commons attribution license and I drew over top of it. Let's call it rotoscoping to sound fancy as opposed to tracing. To create the 3D background scene with some modifications on top of that. Add the base imagery from that and then tried to make it as period appropriate for an electromechanical game as I could from there. TimelineGlass also features virtual score Reels with over-the-top backlit scoring. Were there any challenges in creating these elements? The Score Reels themselves, I'm pretty happy with the way they came out. I am not an expert in Unity and lighting and various things like that. I'm sort of disappointed in the Score Reels. I am happy with them, but they're missing the depth between the glass and the reel itself, which from a lighting perspective, I should be able to do in Unity. Julian P daherczyk, eps�다음 conservařleris, Johie Sisto друзzišk зв. Simulating their motion, simulating all of that. As you mentioned, I had actually done this previously for what I called GammaCode sample app. So I'd actually just took the code from that. And I'd figured that out years ago on how to fairly easily translate the visuals of doing the score Reels. And many people have done it before and possibly better than me, but I'm happy with how it came out. You talked about the over the top lights. I tried to make everything on the back glass look as if you could have silkscreened the back glass, put a blocking layer on the back and then illuminated the text via real lights and this is how they would kind of look and so as much as i could i tried to keep that look and so you can see the over the top lights there's a nice gray solid area for them to exist in so that it could authentically shine through in that spot i think they're probably in reality placed too close to the window for the score Reel for a John Papadiuk, Black Water, person's name or role at Stern Pinball), or Basic starting point was I want this to sound and feel like an ant. And so from a sound perspective, there's a combination of noises that are going on within the game. Every time you score the one point and point or 100 point, every time you trigger that scoring relay, it plays one of the corresponding chimes. But you also hear every time the reels turn the click over of the score reels that So, I wanted to create that EM feel. When you start the game, the score Reels reset back to zero from where they were and there's this ch-ch-chunk, ch-ch-chunk, ch-ch-chunk. And I didn't do it as you would actually, I don't walk across, I do them all simultaneously, but you get that turnover sound, you get all of this stuff that's sort of authentic to what an EM sounds like. So, I wanted to create that EM soundscape as you're playing and I think it works out reasonably well. And then there's paired with that a background of pool sound within the game. I don't know if anyone but me can actually tell what's going on in the sounds, but when you make a shot, there's a pocketing sound like recordings of balls actually going into pockets. When you hit an unlit standup target where a ball used to be, you hear missed shots. So you hear balls hitting rails and various things like that. Sort of creates this sound atmosphere to fill the space. And then there are call outs in the game as well. A lot of the, how do you fill the void sound by conversational sort of small talk type call outs jokes various things like that to have a serious but light humorous aspect to the game and also give instruction to the player to give them a sense of what they're supposed to do and reinforce that they did good things like if you make a shot it will compliment you in a friendly way hey nice shot and it just sort of helps fill it out and i think it creates a fairly full playing experience even without background and how many What unique callouts do you have in the game? So we are currently recording this before I am finished. The game is code complete, but I'm waiting for another batch of callouts. So the actual number of callouts is a little unknown right now. I have about 150 in the game at the time of this recording, and I have a script for about 100 more that I expect to get into the game. Bloodbank Billiards with its suite of callouts is quite different from Birdwatcher which features no human callouts. What was the process of voice direction or sound design that you took with Bloodbank Billiards with no background music but with those electromechanical sounds and then blending these callouts with those electromechanical noises? So the callouts are done by Glenn Wechter, who was really excited to help me out in doing this. He also did all of the sound design and sound work for the Saw homebrew. What I had in my head when I talked to Glenn about what I wanted is I sort of described a deep voice, fairly calm in how it's presented, described it as if he could do something in a Sam Elliott or Chris This video features some regulations related to yay reserved for fans and click the link for the promo orución who phased in the drop-down tab onells Lite 했던ime per each video. Your name and your target is simple format or ranking helpable kashyy ok const' SO PAWL!

19:27

And I welcome you to playscore 03 third portal. I wanted things to be a little more laid back and dialed back from what we typically get in pinball callouts. Whereas pinball callouts, like you've got this like excited jackpot screaming. If you're playing a game of pool with your friend, but that is not how they act. So I think combining the callouts and the sounds and all of that, it really is just supposed to feel like you're hanging out with one of these. And your friend just happens to also be I'm a fan of Pinballструмент, and I've been asked by several people why I didn't go with a cartoonish, traditional, Transylvania-type voice for the vampire to reinforce that. And my answer was, that's not who Minnesota Bats is. He's American. He was turned in the 40s in America. And he stayed in America and grew up in America. And that's what he sounds like. Not all vampires The You have a number of interesting light shows. The walls and scoops are used in a great way to highlight what are known as the capeshot targets in Drain. Can you describe the playfield illumination and light shows within Bloodbank Billiards? There's a few areas. So on the object balls at the back, solids are on the left hand side through the LICMIR and HOLI targets, and then the WATR, ROR, and STA targets on the right side of the playfield. And those are illuminated with the corresponding color of the ball, one through seven, nine through 15. And my goal with the light shows was Contradict the I also wanted them to be one color, because you wouldn't actually have color changing LEDs at the time. You could have had two light bulbs with a diffuser over top of them because that did happen in the EM era. There are a lot of games that had red diffusers to create and so you could have two colors and still be appropriate. So those are just on off and when you hit the ball they turn off and the corresponding image in the center of the playfield of the ball in the rack disappears as if it was pocketed. Then the blood bank, which is the eight targets at the front and the first three targets, so the G, A, R and the K, E, S targets, Those sort of back blood bank targets are illuminated in white. And we'll kind of get into the why of that in a second. And then the front targets represent the blood bank filled with blood. So these targets start out red. And since there were not inserts in front of the cape targets, as you say, I use the the wall, the scoops within the wall as a proxy for that, that I think works out fairly well to represent those targets. So from a light show perspective, I had to be able to communicate two things. The original design was to follow a target pool and to have a lit target that you hit. And so when I first started the game, I just turned on a light. If the corresponding object ball had been dropped and you were in one of the two positions, it would turn on the light. And if you hit a lit target, you would get your 300 points. It would ring the bell. But there's sort of two things that happened here. One feedback from my beta testers was that they really wanted I was a little bit of a fan of PinballINTERNATE, but I wanted to do it more. They really wanted to have a reward for having hit every single one of the eight targets at the front. And I wanted to play around with some blood effects. But the combination of that is that I had to change to represent a state within the lights that showed within this completion of the blood bank, you have hit this target. And what I decided on was red targets represent targets that are filled with blood. Knapp Arcade is a game where you can play a game of pinball translucide, which is a game of pinball translucide, where you hit a target with blood and when it's flashing, it will be drained of the blood and it will go from a red target to a white target. And we indicate which one of the targets is available for the 300 points by having a flashing target. I found in early playing of my own and in feedback from the beta testers there was also a challenge that people didn't notice the blood bank targets on the sides, the white ones. Partially because they a little more out of view They not red which is a little confusing but your eye wasn as drawn to them And so one of the other tricks that happens which I think helps people notice them but I had very few people actually try the game So we'll see when it's released as people play, whether they agree with me. But Drained has GI lighting. And so I actually turn on the GI behind the side targets when they're flashing to help draw your eye to it, to know that there is a blood bank target there. And hopefully you'll notice it. It is amazing to have the number of available inserts, all of them clear, through being able to do light shows. And as much as I did a very simplified light show here, I much prefer clear inserts as a third party dev. They give me the most flexibility because you could have chosen to put decals over top of the inserts for the garlic and steaks targets. Those would have reduced my ability John Papadiuk, Black Water, person's name or role at Stern Pinball), or GUEST 1 afterlife

26:09

You have this horrible off on flicker. Depends on the games. I wanted to emulate this. And I remember when I first had this idea, I was like, is this going to cause problems? And one of the first things I did was message Nick as also the tech support for Multimorphic and the manufacturer of the Drained Playfield module and ask, if I do this, are people going to think their game is broken? Because I wanted to mimic this effect. And you encouraged me to go forward with it and are happy to field customer questions if they think their playfield GI is incorrectly dimming. And you can turn it off, but what I do is, it's actually not hard at all to do within the game. I just find a listener for the switch or the flipper button and I enable a light show which does a very subtle dim, which you can control in the settings how much you want that dim to be and how long you want that dim to be. But each time you flip the flipper buttons, it just sort of does this very subtle dimming of the top playfield light. So on the P3, it has a strip of LEDs across the back that shines down onto the playfield. The defaults on the game right now are tuned such that if I'm looking, I see it. But if I'm looking down at my flippers, it's not enough of a flash to distract me. The defaults for my ambient light in my room are kinda tuned just right for this. But there's a bunch of these like attempts to be as true to EMs as I can within the game. What was your biggest challenge in programming the game? This game came together remarkably easy and also then a lot of detail after that. I had the prototype of this game is now playing basic target pool rules took me about two days to implement. I remember just sort of starting it and then I sent Nick a picture being like, look, I have target pool on my drain. And that took me about two days. And now it's taken me about three months to get from that point to where I am on release. But I think the most challenging part and I'm still not 100% sure I've got it right, is trying to create that I did my best to try to make sure that the callouts were not repetitive. I tried to create a realistic conversational callout interface. Have it fill the void of silence, have it not sound repetitive, have it not sound artificial. And that has been a new challenge, a unique challenge and hard to get right. I am very locked in to a few ideas on what I want the callouts to sound like, I'm at odds with my beta testers and various other people playing the game who get confused by my callout, but I'm 100% committed to these jokes going forward with them, even if they're going to confuse the players. Was there anything that was easier than expected? You mentioned the rapidity with which you were able to get the basic rule structure in place. And aside from your experience and your expertise and the fact that you've already put out another game on the platform commercially, I would say part of that is also the strength of the SDK and the ability that I built into Drains Playfield module to allow you to build those games. Is there anything that was easier than you expected once you started making this game? This is different than Birdwatcher in that Birdwatcher was timed. So this is the first time I've done a proper four player game, five ball game. You know, there were a bunch of little things that the base SDK mostly just took care of that I was quite happy about. Things like how do I deal with dangers and warnings and put that into the game, making sure that the ball advances between players and all of that will just work out. For the most part, that all just worked out really smoothly. Drained was a relatively simple module to work on compared to some of the others. There is no state change in the mix within Drained. So you don't have to worry about like setting your diverters via shot paths to the correct way. You know, there's nothing as complicated as trying to use the crane, which I'm still too afraid to actually try to do and various things like that. The Drained is like very clean and simple. John Papadiuk, Black Water, person's name or role at Stern Pinball), or Well, that's all for the video. We've talked about different electromechanical games. Target pool, of course, has been referenced, and yes, you are correct that that was an inspiration for the curved target portion of the layout of Drained. It diverges from Target Pool quite a bit in the actual angles of those targets, and then the angles of the upper slingshots. And of course the fact that there's no ball arch to drop the balls in to one of two controlled lanes in Targetpool. But that was the base inspiration. I love the curved layout at the top and it's something that we haven't seen in pinball in a really long time. So I wanted to bring that back for Drained. Now as far as electromechanical games though, Targetpool, Golden Arrow, what are some of your other favorites? So I own a Prospector, a Fireball, a Centigrade 37, and a Woods Queen. I like to have a lot of variety in my collection. I like to sort of survey all manufacturers, survey all games from that perspective. Like Target Pool is a favorite game of mine. It is a tournament favorite game of mine. As far as two inch flipper games go, a two inch flipper game with although giant slingshots, a very traditional kind of Italian bottom. For some reason, that John Papadiuk, Black Water, person's name or role at Stern Pinball),a ramp shot title or abbreviation for Retro Atmingham, I love the double spinners on that. I love the Sagasa. Scoring reels are just so smooth. And when you get that click over on the spinners, they're really rewarding. You know, I enjoy oddball games like Doodle Bug because it's just fun to get the Doodle Bug going with a massive point total and watch your game roll over a bunch of times. I like weird games that have like one shot that you repeat over and over again, like Butterfly or Gay 90s because I've had I ended up in tournaments where I was able to do that one shot over and over again and because I did well on it I then enjoy those games even if they're massively filled with flaws. So generally speaking I like most games. Unlike most collectors I would say I don't favor GoT. I tend to favor Williams EMs from a play standpoint. I thought how their flippers play which are spongy and weird but I like them and the games like Sagasa's which are essentially Williams games. Important to the title of this podcast, have you ever played a bingo pinball? I have never played a bingo. I don't know if I've ever seen a set up and functioning EM bingo in my life. I've seen photos of them and I've seen them At the fleetmarket at Allentown? Well, we'll have to change that one day. Hopefully we can meet up and play some bingo pinball together. Let's talk about the blood bank, though. This is a major divergence in rules from the rules of TargetPool. You're not just completing the rack. You're also trying to achieve the secondary goal more than just the points. But there's a specific thing that you can achieve through the blood bank. And so I'd like to talk through your process John Papadiuk, Black Water, person's name or role at Stern Pinball), or I'm well aware that the P3 has the ability to track the location of balls using the infrared grid. So you can track the location of the balls on the screen. And when my development process, I tend to think, hey, it would be cool to try blah, and then just go off for a few days and see if I can come up and make something work. And here I'm like, blood, I'm doing this blood themed game. I want to splatter blood So, let's get started. So, we have a little bit of a little bit of a video here. So, we're going to start off with a little bit of an introduction of how I started my goal of making a game called Splatter Blood. And originally, my plan was, if this works, I'll make it default off and then people will have to opt into it. And now I'm actually thinking it's pretty cool. And we're just going to default it on and people can opt out if they don't like it. So I started from, I want to splatter blood and I wanted to splatter blood in such a way that blood went onto the screen, and then as the ball rolled over the blood, blood would The game is based on the Game of Thrones which is a series of games in which you play with your favorite character and you play a game where you have to pick up a pole from the other side of the screen after you get on the ball and track a trail of blood further onto the screen And I actually played with a similar idea on my previous prototype EM game My previous prototype EM game actually got dirty As you played it it would keep track of sort of voxels of where the ball was going and it would build up dirt and start getting muckier and muckier in the spots where the ball was actually going more And so I wanted to kind of do a similar idea to that My first attempt at this was okay when you hit the blood target it going to put blood on the screen Then I going to create like a little pool and I create a I'm going to go ahead and do a little bit of a circle and when the ball goes through the circle, I'll sort of track the direction it's going and draw a trail from there. And there was two problems with that. One is it looked really weird, so I had the blood sort of splattering straight up out of the insert on the screen, like the graphical insert, but it didn't really make sense as to why the blood was splattering that way. And then the tracking going through that circle was far too small in the least sensitive area of the playfield possible to really be a good trigger. So I ended up refining that to be, no, no, no, what really happens is when you hit the standup target, blood splatters out of the standup target. And the spread is way too narrow for what would really happen, but that's the idea now. So it's now splatters forward onto the screen. I still have the implementation of the ball will leave a trail but instead of it leaving a trail when it travels through the blood on the screen what happens is as it reenters the screen from hitting the target it is as if it has blood on it and I track the direction that it is moving when it first enters the screen after a target hit and draw a linear path at that point and it's accurate enough that I think it fools the player into thinking that the ball left the trail. I'm not sure if I'm accurate enough that it actually isn't the path the ball took, but it's close enough. And you asked about how that influenced the rule. So this comes back to my beta tester group is Derek Mutterfutter on the discords and the Twitch. And yourself. And from the very first build, Derek was like, I want something for the completely the build bank. And I told him no many, many times. My first implementation of the blood splatter, I just had the blood fade after a few seconds. I'm not sure if you can see the screen, but I'm going to try to keep it consistent over the length of the ball. Once I got that effect to work well, now you start filling your screen with all of this blood. You can tell which targets you've hit because there's blood splatters on the ones you've hit. I'm like, okay, now that I've done this effect, you really do need to get some award for filling all of this. That's when I went back and said, okay, what can we do? And I was torn a little bit to be accurate with the EM type era. I actually kind of wanted to go with a special. I actually wanted to do a replay on completing the bank. It was a little too easy and I didn't want to bring the side targets into play. And I also wasn't sure if modern operators are okay with objective based replays, even though I would have allowed them to turn up and put it to points. So extra ball seemed like the natural thing to do from there. So I introduced an extra ball rule so that if you complete the entirety of the blood bank, you get an extra ball. And then thematically, I will give full credit to you and Derek for talking it through with me where we came up with this concept of you draining the targets. So the inserts go from red to white when the blood's been drained out of them and splattered across the playfield. The gooey inserts on the John Papadiuk, Black Water, person's name or role at Stern Pinball),a ramp shot title or Tim Pantek, I'm a member of the testing team. Thank you very much for trusting me to take a look at this gameearly and provide myfeedback. When did you realize that thisgame was ready for external testing, and how did you goabout that? And did it differ from yourprocess for Birdwatcher? I brought people in fairlyearly, and by people I mean yourself andDerek, which is two people. This was very different in a lot of respects, and I think that the changes that we've made I think that the changes I've made as a result of the testing is very different than Birdwatcher. Birdwatcher was a pretty complete concept. Whereas this concept was Target Pool. That was the concept. The elevator pitch is I'm implementing Targetpool, but I want it to be more than that and not just a copy. I kind of wanted to get early feedback on is anyone going to want this? And you were also a terrible beta tester in some respects. um but if we compare them toール Swift to over the 67, overly às Overwatchcer quantity Spanish no of an imire accgate our Damon on the end of my I wanted someone else to be able to get some feedback from them. So one, I have a more limited pool of people to draw on because I know some people who own Drained. I don't know all of the people who own Drained. I only know the people who have sort of publicly stated that they own Drained. And sort of the trust relationship of bringing someone into beta test is you want it to be someone that you can actually trust with this process. I came to asking Derek because he spoke I think the game is really highly bedrained. The module itself, the game, was enjoying it a lot. He was a great supporter of Birdwatcher. I know him from the tournament scene and he was totally on board with helping me out and he's provided me with a ton of great feedback. As I said, Birdwatcher, there were changes that came through the beta testing process, but I don't think there was like big changes that came from this. I almost feel like I owe you both design credit, not just beta and spester credit on the game, because I think that the rules and a lot of what's happened has been a lot more back and forth and very collaborative on getting to where it is. And the game has changed more than Birdwatcher did in a lot of respects, and sometimes in like annoyingly big ways. So the way the game used to work was that I followed what I considered to be the standard of electromechanical games, which was to have a rack of inserts, so to speak, that were off. And when you hit the ball, it would turn on the insert and then you'd complete the rack by filling the inserts. And so with my 3D models of the balls, I sort of had them in a ghost version. And when you hit the ball, it would become a solid version within the rack. I had a friend of mine over to try the game. And his first feedback to me I'm like, well, that's because that's how everyone does it on their back glasses or their playfields, but they weren't using 3D models and they weren't doing all of these things. And so I swapped this around. And so the way the game works right now is the balls are start in the rack solid on the table. And when you sync them, they get taken away. The reason I described this as slightly annoying is because the balls are not in the rack solid. The reason I describe this as slightly annoying is because this was literally a two line change in my code. So that was not hard. But I felt I was fairly deep in the process. And so I spent three days cutting together a trailer, which once I changed the visuals to be reversed, I had to throw out both that video and redo it. I have redone it. So hopefully there aren't any other changes before on the feedback. But it seems every time someone plays The game there is more feedback which I take into consideration and some of it I will change and it will make the game better and I have some other changes from the state of the game today versus what I expect to launch that are still up and coming. Very good. As with Birdwatcher, Bloodbank Billiards has a release trailer and you mentioned that you had been putting that footage together. In it, a three-dimensional neon sign is shown. This sign doesn't appear in the game. Can you tell us how the idea for this neon sign came to be and about the creation of the model? I wanted to create something that gave you the sense that this was a real place. Nothing in my environment in the game really tells you this is the blood bank. And for the trailer, I was just like, well, what if I made a sign to put outside the store? And it was sort of like, this is the blood bank and it is open. And I just kind of wanted to explore whether I could make a realistic looking neon sign in Blender. And so I looked at a bunch of YouTube videos and found a tutorial where someone showed how they created a neon sign by basically taking a font, text, on This might be throwaway, but I'm just going to spend a day making a neon sign in Blender for no reason. And then once I had the neon sign in Blender for no reason, I decided to create a backstory intro for the trailer and end with it showing that Blood Bank is this place and it is open. John Papadiuk, Black Water, person's name or role at Stern Pinballשוב and estavam $199 in the Multimorphic Store. I'd highly recommend any drained owner or EM enthusiast to add this game to your collection. Thanks very much Ian for your time and for talking about Blood Bank Billiards. Ian Hamilton Well thank you very much Nick. My full expectation is that at the time this drops this coming Saturday I will be streaming this game on Buffalo Pinball. Tune into Buffalo Pinball for the reveal stream of Blood Bank Billiards. Nick Fantastic. Well you know I'll be there. Thanks again Ian. Thanks again, Ian. Thank you very much for listening. My name again is Nick Baldridge. 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. Thank you very much for listening and I'll talk to you next time.