I decided to start work on a superfan edition of GoT. It began as a small project to design a decal for the shield area, but snowballed into something a lot bigger.

I attached a still of early progress and there's a little video teaser above. I'll add more details as things get further along.

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Why?
I really like the game. Strategy is phenomenal, layout, sound effects and music are all great...it's a really nice package that I believe will be remembered fondly.

I really like the main concepts, too...Lord of Light ball save, building up your supply of wildfire for Blackwater multiball, "valar morghulis" as the drain, and the main mechanic of fighting different houses. I want to push those ideas further and really get into the details...presenting unique motifs for each house shield, pulling in more Blackwater details like oozing wildfire and ships in the bay, showing a fiery manifestation of the Lord of Light...and overall just packing the playfield with lots of small details and easter eggs.

The Plan
The plan is changing out the playfield and plastics.

I'm also going to brass as much hardware as possible. I want all of the materials to feel accurate to the GoT universe (brass, wood, parchment, stone).

The Design Concept
I always liked the idea of the throne in King's Landing perched at the center of the playfield. It's such a central, iconic artifact and I really wanted to emphasize the different houses vying to sit in the ultimate prize.

It's a fan layout game, which is perfect for the concept--the middle is the seat and each lane is a sword blade jutting out of the back of the throne.

Style
I'm not a professional illustrator, so I needed to pick a style that I could pull off reasonably well. I'm horrible at dynamic figure drawing and creating depth, so I'm going with a flat, graphic approach...lots of thick lines, layered textures, and pretty reserved use of color.

The goal is a mash-up of classic pinball line art mixed with a more textured, watercolor look. It should feel like the playfield is inked and painted on parchment by a Maester in the Oldtown Citadel.

I have an LE, so the plan is to base it off of that. I don't have access to Pro plastics or PF scans.

I did kick around the idea of selling the LE and buying a Pro for this project, though...I like them both pretty much equally and modding the Pro would be a lot easier.

My premium playfield from Automated arrived! I have an LE already, but wanted a second playfield to apply the art to...hoping it'll make the eventual PF swap a lot easier.

It's a Stern "reject" that looks like it was at least partially installed before being deemed no good. There's some mylar installed and several deep gouges in the clear. Not a big deal for me, as I'll be sanding it down to bare wood.

The first step will be getting it scanned in to line the art up correctly. The drawings I've posted so far were just eyeballed, so nothing will be properly aligned. This will be kind of tedious and I'm not looking forward to it.

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When I saw "GOT Pro" written on the side I was worried that I made a huge mistake by buying some test Pro PF where they tried the blue background, but the insert names and insert layouts match my LE...hoping that all of the other stuff under the ramps/mini PF is the same, too.

Thanks!

Yeah, I was originally a little hesitant to strip down and redo such a new machine, but I figured...I really want to see a version of GoT that looks like this and I'd rather not wait several years for a Vault Edition that may or may not happen, so why not?

In the process of scanning the playfield and just wanted to post a few close-up pictures. It has a lot of details that I never noticed while playing.

The "SWORDS" insert has a lot of little flying blades swirling around it:

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There are lots of major cities on the background map graphic, but some of them are hidden under plastics or mechs:

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There's a bunch of detail in the little gears and chains. It looks like a lot of work went into rendering them by hand:

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So I finished scanning the PF and recreating all of the inserts, holes, and boundary line art. Very tedious work.

I think that there was some distortion happening with my scanner because there are tiny misalignments here and there...hoping that doesn't turn into a nightmare later on.

Does anyone have tips on lining up artwork with inserts on a full playfield? I was thinking about going to a shop and getting it printed out at full size on transparency paper so I can see exactly what's off and make adjustments, but I don't know if any place can or will do that.

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I've spent a bunch of time moving inserts around to perfectly line up and may have to try another approach. I used the Scanjet 4670 to create about a dozen scans, then stitch them together, but there are too many distortions. It'd probably take me another 10-20 hours just to line up inserts.

Next step is finding a place locally that can do a single scan of the whole PF in one pass.

In the meantime, I've been working on some other ideas:

New Castle Door
I always felt that the battering ram on the Premium/LE is underwhelming because it's flanked by both the huge upper PF and castle ramp. Also, the door is pretty tiny and the lane for the battering ram is narrow and hidden, so when I hit it I don't see very much visual impact while playing.

I'm looking at molding additional castle walls and designing a larger door that's more prominent:

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I'm also designing a more interesting interaction for when the ram is it. When the ball hits the ram, and the ram hits the target, I want to tie an LED into some insert to create a lighting effect inside the new castle area (like TWD building). I also want to use the kinetic energy of the ram to swing the doors open.

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I also have a crazy idea that may or may not be technically feasible -- creating small towers on top that shake on impact by using the energy of the ram to trip a simple mech...kind of a milder recreation of the MM castle explosion. I don't want to reduce the efficiency of the ram too much, though, so there will be lots of trial and error.

Yeah, it seems like the Cruse scanner is the way to go.

I found a place locally, but they charge $225 for one 36"x48" scan. http://www.pictureelement.com/cruse6.php

How much was your shipping on top of the $100 fee?

I made progress on the logistics of printing as well as some additional art, but I'll wait to post more until it gets a little further. Also scanned in and prepped a bunch of plastics.

Until I show more, here's a first pass at blocking out some color. Not sure how saturated it will end up, because in my head it's mostly monochrome -- golds, brass, and parchment. I feel like the inserts are already crazy colorful, so any color I bring into the playfield should complement those. I did try and respect the colors each house was assigned in the code (red for Lannister, purple for Greyjoy, etc.). We'll see if that sticks one the rest of the art is done.

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Other stuff:

I originally scanned the PF in sections, then stitched it together, which seemed like it worked really well. However, I was kind of nervous that things would be off a few millimeters here and there, so I splurged and had an art shop do a single-pass scan of the entire thing.

That was money well spent, because there were big sections of the PF that were off by 1/4" or more. It would have been a nightmare to print, test, adjust, print, test, adjust, etc.

So the artwork looks pretty similar to what I posted six weeks ago, but is now accurate.

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I printed out a full-sized version of the playfield in order to see the overall balance. First time seeing it in the real world felt pretty good.

I was concerned that some of the lines would be too thick or shapes would get lost, but when I stand back and look at it from playing distance it feels really balanced. There are definitely some changes and refinements in the works (e.g. Drogon's body looks like an unformed lump of scales), but I'm happy with the overall look.

Next few steps:

- Tweak existing art & insert typography
- Finish outlanes and drain area (have a cool idea for that, hope it pans out!)
- Finish inlane inserts (I honestly don't know what I'm going to do with these yet)
- Decide what to do with the pop bumper area. I'm thinking I may just leave it the plain parchment paper, because you can't really see the art in that area once all the ramps and pops are installed, and I'd rather just keep it clean so the bumper caps and throne stand out more.
- Color and finishing work
- Prep PF (sand down and poly playfield)
- Find a shop that prints directly to wood
- Figure out how I'm going to do the mini playfield (do I cannibalize my working machine or buy a new mini PF?)
- Find a shop to brass all the hardware

I still have to do the backboard and all the plastics, but I'm confident I can knock those out more quickly and I'm not dependent on the whole playfield sanding/printing/clearing process to get those done.

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Hey everyone, thanks! The project has been put on pause because we're in the back half of a major renovation. No room to do anything and all of my free time is wrapped up in that. Planning to get back to GoT in the new year.

The house has some pinball-related stuff too, though -- we're sinking a backlit Genie playfield into the quartz kitchen island.

(don't worry, we're not modifying the PF or ruining it for future use)

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It ended up turning out great! The playfield GI and inserts even have a light show (the lighting is in color here, but it's usually just warm white).

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Also, the real reason I'm here, I was asked about this recently and wanted to confirm that everything is moving along again. The art is all finished (playfields + plastics + new backglass) and I've found someone to do all the printing.

I think I'll wait to post any more full art until it's printed on the real playfields, but I've done some more real-world tests it looks nice in person with the real GOT lightshow and layout.