Episode 41 - Homebrew Games

“The whole concept with it was to make a new 8-ball game that paid homage to all the three prior ones that Bally made in the 70s and 80s. So it includes a shot that is similar to one of each of those games.”

“I didn't think about the theme at all. I just thought I would make a cool play field and then bolt the theme onto it later. And that was a bad way to start, not having a plan, basically.”

“I definitely wanted it to be code complete before I let anyone play it... Once I saw that and started thinking about ways that I could include some more features that took up that back part of the play field, I started running with all these different ideas.”

“Having played quite a few homebrews at shows now... to learn that like this thing's actually just been living like I said in the wild like a pinball machine should, it's very impressive.”

“You can count on that. [about the audio crash happening once a day]... If it crashes, they just go reset it kind of thing? Yeah. Yeah. It's the only thing different is you got to wait about about like 20 seconds after you turn it off to wait for the laptop to shut down gracefully.”

“Most fun part? Anything having to do with modeling... I spent about a month or two kind of spending a few hours every day learning Fusion 360... it was almost like my own kind of like making my own like project management tool while doing it.”

“It's hanging on, forcing yourself to do something every day if you can and to think about or to try and plan out some events or milestone in the future that you can look forward to. You just have to endure it.”

“Games have to work... my criticism is reliability... these people are passionate about pinball getting themes they're getting cool art they're doing all the right things and i think when the games play there's an audience there but i'm just concerned about reliability of handmade games.”

“It helps that not only are the board sets that are available, like, really high quality. I mean, the case of Fast and Multimorphic, they're both used in production games. But also the parts that are now available on, like, M-Pinball Life and Marco, like, they're super high quality, too.”

“I'm completely out of motivation to do anything else on it. Once you said you've been playing it every day in your living room for three years, I was like, yeah, I think I would be probably ready for the next project regardless.”