For a long time I seem to have an obsession with Pinball machines, I remember them in the early 80’s and 90’s arcade a game of skill, racking up high scores. Bagatelle, Pachinko are both fascinating for me, the randomness of the balls falling down the table, the chance of scoring. The illusion of skill, where really it’s mostly luck based games.
So with that in mind, I thought I’d had a go at writing a Bagatelle/Pachinko machine on the PC. It proved to be an interesting challenge, there are physics involved (with the movement of the balls) and then the scoring and purpose of the game.
So the first problem was physics, I needed to make sure I could make something the appeared to be remotely realistic. App game kit has support for physics (in this case 2d) so I set about working on a prototype game. The result is below.
With this early version working with lots of balls :); I was happy that I could carry on with the project. At this point a rewrite was in order, as this version was very basic. The play areas was fixed, drawn in code, and very basic. It served the purpose, but nothing in the code was flexible enough.
I started on Version 4, and progress was being made, until disaster struck, App Game Kit updated and refused to run the code!. Version 3 would work, Version 4 wouldn’t, development halted :'(.
Finding myself with two weeks holiday booked over Xmas 2020 and very little to do (thanks Covid) I loaded up Version 4 code of Pinball to see if any progress has been made regarding the IDE. Much success, it now works again, whatever prevented it in AGK from working, had been fixed. I have spent the last week or so, on/off working on this game again.
Version 4 has a built in playfield editor, allowing me to add ramps, score tunnels, pins and rotators! into the playfield. It also allows saving and loading of the playfields so ultimately I can turn it into a fully fleshed out game at some point. Oh and importantly it works on tablets / mobiles too!!. I’m still not 100% sure where I’m going with this, but I love playing this game even thou it is totally random.
Anyways, I thought I’d share and I’ll carry on working on this one. Hopefully at some point it will be a game everyone can play 😀