I've been working on this game for about 2 months, and I've decided to start talking about it publicly. The rules and concept are about 80% done; layout is at 90% unless that last 10% borks other shots. Construction and build is about 10% done. :/ Suggestions from fans are certainly welcome.

Some quick basic info:
* Original custom project from scratch; flow style game.
* Hardware Platform: FAST
* Software: Mission Pinball Framework

Concept: You are the robots, playing a Daft Punk live concert.

Visuals: The game will pull primarily from Alive 2007 including a stage based on the Alive 2007 tour as well as other visuals from their music videos including: Charles, Interstella 5555, Technologic, Around the World and many more.

Game Modes: All modes are song-based modes with the ability to stack at least two songs and create your own mix of any available song on the fly. Each song has it's own set of rules. There are no cities. Song selection is based on shots made after plunge and skill shots attempted. Combos are rewarded.

Other Miscallany:
* Skill Shot, Super Skill Shot and a Wizard Skill Shot
* 2 Wizard Modes, 1 Mini-Wizard Mode
* There are no "extra balls", but you can earn Encore Mode that a skilled player would use as an extra ball.
* BPM increases with each ball.
* Live and Studio Tracks to be mixed
* RGB LED throughout.

Cheers.

I'll post some pics next week of the early progress. From Sketches through whitewood progress.

One quick note: I started this project with no skills other than a little programming knowledge that I knew would be sufficient to get Mission Pinball Framework to do what I wanted. I didn't know the first thing about how pins worked, how to build or maintain them. Hell, I'd never even soldered a single thing. This is an effort to acquire new knowledge and skills.

That said, you'll see a lot of missteps along the way. Those are shared to show that anyone can tackle this kind of project successfully.

I'll start posting from the beginning of the process, eventually I'll be posting updates as they happen.

The first sketch for DPP:

I knew at this point that I wanted a fast playing game with lots of shots that came back to the player quickly. I was also starting to toy with the idea of shots taking multiple pathways depending on how well you hit the shot. That is, a weak shot isn't a total brick it just flows down somewhere else.

This sketch also has an idea for quadrilateral slings that I shelved in favor of more player control.

In the top left is a Television toy that would have either been shot through or possibly have an lcd screen for playing clips. That idea is still in play, but in a different location.

In the top middle was a quasi-stage with the robots as a sort of bash target / AFM / Tron style feature.

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This was sketch 2 a few weeks ago. I started working with the idea of shots serving a dual purpose as both an in and out. The "inner orbit" on the left as an example. Shoot it from one side and it takes a particular path. Shoot it from the other and it goes elsewhere.

The lower left shot was designed to roll across the playfield into the lower right and feed back to the flippers.

Several ideas from this sketch were trashed and brought back, but a few were eliminated entirely. After this sketch, I moved to a cardboard mockup that I will share next.

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First cardboard mockup in July and first Thomas Helmet painted last week.

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I don't have a pc, so that option isn't an option. Thanks for the tip all the same!

That is the exact plan! I have files out for quotes to laser the parts to build the stage.

Can't you tell this is the Alive 2007 Stage plopped down on my cardboard mock? Very sophisticated.

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Fast forwarding a few weeks, this is a whitewood I started making with 1" PVC lattice and hot glue. Cardboard wasn't doing it for me, and this stuff is awesome. This layout isn't quite the final, but getting much closer. This is when I started laying in switches for shots and realizing that I had some physical space conflicts that needed to be resolved. Also, I started to realize that I wasn't leaving quite enough room for stand-ups or posts to protect the edges of ramps / orbits. That said, this part of the process was critical for me. My 3D modeling skills weren't able to help me understand some of what I needed before good old hot glue and real switches came into play.

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I've made a lot of progress on this pin, but since Casino and DOOM are - literally - stealing the show, I'm holding back pics until after expo.

BBS Style Update:
* Lots of fun material ordered to make this pin look special
* Shots re-worked, particularly on the middle 1/3 after determining that they were awful.
* Skill shots re-worked
* Captive ball w/manual 2-ball multiball added.
* Playfield art starting to come together from a conceptual standpoint. Started search for illustrators.

I've been at work modeling and 3d printing some tiny specialty parts that do things like hold the LEDs and side-glow fiber to make the stage and re-working shots after more mockups. More work needs to be done to make the shots smoother. I added a new 'through the pyramid' shot giving me a 2nd ramp that I wanted. Once the next round is modeled in Fusion, I'll share a screen shot.

Here's a snippet of the playfield just above the slings. The DMD display will be split in half and masked so that all game scoring and regular DMD stuff will be shown through the Robot's masks. The black rectangles represent the outer edges of the DMD display; On the right side of Guy's helmet, you can see a custom baffle that I modeled and have since printed to have LEDs in there for the full effect of that helmet.

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Here's a pic of the printed prototype of a part that holds 4 LED and fiber at the proper 60 degree angles with proper spacing to make the stage nice and tidy.

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I'm planning to have a working session or two this weekend on Twitch to resolve a couple playfield issues as well as work through the next prototype of the stage. I'll take and answer questions about the planned rules, layout and design.

It looks like we're all set for the inaugural run on Twitch.tv tonight [Dec 2] around 9:45p Central [EDIT: It's over now]

I'll be modeling an idea for a new area on my game and drinking various craft beers chosen by anyone who drops into the chat. If we run out of beer options, you call the drink.

Don't miss what will surely be a hilarious catastrophic failure on Twitch even after I've done a fair amount of testing.

twitch.tv/brewinbombers

Cheers!

Progress slowed significantly over the holidays, but I'm picking up some steam again.

Here's a quick shot of what I'm working on for a new lower left area. The idea here is to have a toy that pays tribute to the famous "Around the World" music video. The player will shoot the newton ball which will force the captive ball up a 'ladder' and then down the stairs. There is a tunnel under this toy for the left orbit.

This toy needs a lot of work, but it's more fun and whimsy than the previous design for this area which was fought with questionable decisions.

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I've started streaming work sessions on this project at twitch.tv/KCLovesPinball Just follow the channel to be notified when it goes live.

Robot Rock will definitely be in there.

I just started really working on this again last week. Reviewing old, dumb playfield designs and starting to write the code.

Updating:

I'm Human After All; I've been learning a lot about Mission Pinball Framwork while coding another homebrew game for someone else. This has been massively helpful.

Additionally, I started from scratch with the playfield to get more flow. I really want this to be pretty easy to shoot and keep the ball moving while the player continues to mix samples from Daft Punk's catalogue. This version doesn't have the 'Around the World' Toy and I want to get it back in there somewhere.

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The left side is going to take some real work. I'm stealing the inline drops from MET, but using them to reveal a ramp. Once the ramp is available, a clean shot leads to a scoop. This will be the primary jackpot shot. You have to work for it, then you get a satisfying "thunk" when you make the scoop.

When you miss the shot, or it falls out from the drops, I want it to fall into the kicker which hits the center ramp shot and feeds the left flipper. It's likely that this won't be super reliable, but I won't know until I get stuff into a whitewood. I like the idea enough that it's staying until I prove I can't make it work.

There are plenty of other unresolved issues here, but directionaly, I like it.

Again, the concept remains that you're the 'Third Robot' invited to do a live Daft Punk gig. I'm spending a lot of time beat matching songs so that the player can mix almost any two tracks to make their own concert while playing the game.

Given that the game is based on the "Alive 2007" concept, the player can always have two tracks running and mixing them together. I have a set of 'beds' and a set of 'melodies'. Various shots start/stop/change one or the other.

I'm pulling something from nearly every track from their albums and creating at least 3 tempo variations for something from every album.

TBH, I'm not really concerned about scoring right now. However, 'A different experience each game' is absolutely the goal. My main challenge is making it super obvious to the player how they can add/change tracks. I'm going to have to sort of limit the track selection process b/c otherwise the player could be spending a lot of time just shooting shots to select a track. This part will have to have some randomness to it out of necessity.

Here's a short video of a prototype captive ball toy; I'm helping write this person's game in MPF and he's helping turn some of my ideas into reality in the physical world.

This can obviously be refined, but the core idea is there. I need to decide how to add visual interest to it. Lots of ideas, but none feel right yet.

The nice thing about what he's made is that it has a very small footprint and can go just about anywhere. It has enough clearance on all sides for a ball to travel under it.

Making loops and beat matching samples

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