Impatient to launch the game in time for Christmas we still had to put everything together. All the game logic, scoring, when to trigger each dot matrix animation etc.
There was a lot of testing and debugging too. This was tough as we had to hit all the targets and sensors in a certain order to test if everything worked. No easy task, we would be playing this game for days and ticking forms as we tested each part.
It was a painful process as we were nearing December, we had pretty much the whole game put together but we couldn't launch until we had tested all the main features. Eventually we had to play in super slow motion to check the scores were being calculated correctly.
We really do need a team of testers for our future pinball tables!
With the bugs ironed out we started on the high score system, a major feature of any pinball table. We went for a daily, weekly, and all time high score. This way it should be possible for someone to get onto the daily high score table if they put the effort in. We show the top 15 but can change that depending on feedback from our visitors.
Finally something we try to do to all our games is to have a demo mode. Where the game starts up playing automatically.
It's something we admire from the coin op games of our youth, although Pinball Tables never had such a feature. Instead they had dot matrix animations, and the table lights running through in patterns.
We are not sure if it was the correct call but we did it anyway. Once that was complete we could launch the game as last and start planning our next Pinball machine. The next one we plan to go through the design process in a much more professional way.
This time around was too manic as we had so many previous attempts that we were not happy with, and we wanted to launch before the Christmas break.
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