Postmortem of Pinball

In conclusion, I am very happy with this actually. I am very happy that I did go with Unity for this one, because I actually quite like Unity. I don’t know if this makes sense but it gives me the same vibes as Maya and I love Maya. I also genuinely find it really fun to actually play the game. And as I mentioned in the devlog, I do intend on continuing with this by making a complete pinball machine model, and refining gameplay a bit. 

But with what I have now, I really like the layout I have. I spent a surprising amount of time actually moving around the bumpers and the layout of the machine a bit in an effort to get satisfying gameplay. I'm sure these things in real life get a lot of consideration into their layout for game play, for it to be satisfying (y’know like getting the ball to bounce back and force between bumpers if you hit it right and stuff) It just took me a lot of trial and error moving the bumpers around until I could get some patterns that felt nice to play. And in conclusion with that I think I got a really fun layout!

I do wish I could have spent a little more time on the model, and given it textures. And I think adding lights that light up when the ball hits the bumpers would have been cool even if it wasn't polished. As the large amount of light action is part of what gives a pinball machine its feel/vibe. I also would have liked to add sounds, if I could have made it so every time the ball collided with something it like made an impact sound, and the sound of the flippers moving. I can almost vividly imagine it in my head but I think adding those sounds in would have made it really cool.

One thing I really should have added but just didn’t have enough time for was a button to actually reset the game. It is majorly annoying to have to close and open the game wherever I lose the ball. And it probably isn’t that hard.

But beyond that I could have just gone about adding more pinball stuff. I know machines have other ‘mechanics’ other than bumpers. They have targets and those spinny things. I originally wanted to do something with targets where if you hit them in the right order it gives you a combo, which is something a lot of real pinball machines have. Makes it more than just trying to keep the ball in play as long as possible. I also could have added multiple balls. Usually pinball games don’t end after one ball. Sometimes the player gets 3 or 5 for one game, not all at once. But sometimes the player will also get another ball in play at the same time as their original ball (so they have 2 in play), again more complex gameplay stuff. Would have been cool but I didn’t have the time to sort that out. But definitely stuff I can build on for later.