Yeah, I expected that to blow right the hell up.

Keith Elwin? Doing what?

KME?

I'm not sure that people here really care about KME, it's not like he's in the mirror blade or LED business.

But for anybody who does care apparently Stern has hired the #1 ranked pinball player in the world as a designer. Cool that they are bringing in some fresh blood, hope he turns out to be a good pinball designer. He designed the Archer homebrew game that many of you have been following - I believe his brother is coding that game but could be wrong on that as I haven't been following it.

Design

Archer had a pretty cool layout

Kind of reminded me of a standard body demo man

Can he code also?

Another top player designing for Stern. Good times.

LOL

Until your post I didn't know Archer was designed by him. That is awesome!

There are 2 Archer projects though - so depending which one you saw, either KME did design it, or he didn't

Was this published somewhere?

Keith's Facebook. No press release or anything as of yet.

What, Pinside is not good enough for you?

I thought he was working with JJP.

That is pretty cool. Hope it works out for everyone. He def knows how a game should shoot, and has played enough to know what code ideas are good and which are bad and potentially how to improve on both aspects.

Well , there is this post about him working for stern. Congrats if true.

Well, to answer the title question, there are now at least three posts about KME working for stern!

Or also trying to sell LED leg light ups in every thread

I got a chance to play Keith's Archer. It's quite a bit of fun and hopefully he can bring that design to Stern. If they get the Archer license and it actually gets made, that would be amazing.

I don't know about Archer's mass appeal in the general public -- but it seems like it'd be a great pinball theme for stern to make even if it's not all that well known outside of fans of the show. The visual style and humor of the show would really be great. Even if you aren't familiar with it.

Maybe they are keeping the design to go with a different license?

Who knows...honestly you could tell me my neighbor's dog is gonna be Stern's next theme and it wouldn't shock me.

God I hope he makes the clunkiest, slowest, stop & go-iest, design ever to shut up all the aunt flow lovers round here.

That is great news!

Period lovers?

Archer is a cool game, different and fun to shoot. Keith is a nice guy and a great player, hope it all works out. Be great to see new blood designing more games, especially at Stern. Staffed with legends, but they're all long time vets, good to pass the torch some. Pinball can't live on otherwise.

Kinda sucks for KME having to move from San Diego to Chicago though.

Current temp in San Diego: 63 degrees

Current temp in Chicago: 29 degrees

Gotta get him in CPL. I mean, or not, for obvious reasons.

Better yet, look at Zillow...

ain't nobody got time for that!

What??? He should work in PR,not design!!Thats like taking a drunk to a brewery and asking him to work as head brewer!! I can ride the bottom off my jet ski,but I sure couldn't build one!!

Will he actually have to move though? Seems like a job that could be done remotely, but I have no idea.

OK,how would you like a pin that he made to fit his ability??Far beyond the regular player!And he would always be looking for more of a challenge,of his ability!You think GB is hard?? he mastered it in 1.5 hours!!

Shows how dumb I am, I thought all PF designers were engineers by trade...

This is a faulty generalization. Just because he's a great player that doesn't preclude him from also being a good designer. He showed pretty well with the Archer project that he can design an interesting playfield and cohesive game concept. He's got a mountain of experience with playing to know what works and what doesn't -- and if he also has the creative skills and talent to design games, all the better.

It's KMFE.

And he's the new sheriff round these parts.
Giddyup.

I wouldnt bet on this.

Since I've played the pin he designed I can answer that: it's fun.

Even if all Keith does is consult on the rules for games it should be a major win.

Nobody has chopped more wood on boring, repetitive rules than he has in his life. He also seems to have a pretty keen idea of what is fun fun vs competition fun from what I can tell, which is good.

This whole discussion makes me wonder if it isn't time for the traditional pinball design/coding roles to evolve. It seems to me that pinball machines are made like classic video games (or smaller indie games), with a few key people responsible for desigining everything. This works well when you have "rockstar" people on the game (usually). But wouldn't it make more sense to have a team of really effective technical people working with really gifted game designers? You could seperate the shot design, mechanical design, art, and coding from the actual game design roles. Typically the coder ends up being responsible for a substantial amount of the rules in the game, but why? Why not put a rules genius in charge of designing the rules, scoring balance, etc. and free the coder to "simply" implement it?

This should result in better/funner/more interesting game rules and scoring, completed more efficently. Win-win!

Upvote for this part, meh on the rest

Keep in mind this opinion is from a coder (me)--coders are creative types by nature, I find. Most coders I know aren't just people who sit down and write code like Milton, or something--slide rule in hand. Most I've met in my career are also artists and musicians. If you're thinking of people who write code as just code monkeys or maybe offshore resources who get paid 1/3 of the going rate to write boilerplate code, then maybe that line of thinking works. At the end of the day, good coders are generally very creative folks.

I'm an old coder by trade as well, and manage coders now.

There is a big difference between letting the coders decide *how* to implement a solution vs. letting/making them define the problem as well.

Not saying that there aren't coders who are also great rules designers at all, but if you want to produce great games efficiently without code lagging months behind schedule, separation of duties makes sense. It's like producing a hot indie video game vs. the next AAA giant release that has to ship on a schedule, and has to be "good".

Of course.

Not saying that there aren't coders who are also great rules designers at all, but if you want to produce great games efficiently without code lagging months behind schedule, separation of duties makes sense. It's like producing a hot indie video game vs. the next AAA giant release that has to ship on a schedule, and has to be "good".

Not sure you're going to get the best coders on good projects if all you need from them is code. I would guess Lyman stays on as a coder at Stern not because he gets to write code; but because he gets to implement his rules. What I mean by this is that by separating rules writing from coding you potentially end up with people just looking for a paycheck type of coders, and a few guys with big ideas.

When a coder/rule writer has a good idea, it can keep him/her motivated to see the code through. Of course, we see that this can bog down for someone like Lyman (who likely has several projects in the air at the same time).

Keith has been testing Stern code updates for a while now (possibly years). A lot of the code improvements that have been released post-launch have been directly influenced by his feedback.

What the heck did Keith do for work before this? He had to have a pretty good and flexible job to get to all those tournaments...find it hard to believe that a designer starting at Stern is going to make much bank.....they already have a full enough roster to crank out more games than they can reliably produce at the moment...

He's an op and also a tech. He has a very good idea of what style of games work well on location (or don't), as well as any reliability issues.

I'm disappointed to see you posting here Hank, as I figured Stern would have hired you on for a job as well on account of all the great mods and expert tech advice you give to the community

He's grown to accustomed to the flip-flops & Hawaiian shirt style of life in SoCal to ever make it in the cold of Chicago winters!!!

Having coded almost 1 pin (since Archer didn't progress beyond playable whitewood) I have better appreciation how software evolves on a pin. Writing code for a pin is a challenge as you're incorporating multimedia with a mechanical device, while presenting an understandable ruleset to guide the player. There's many subtleties in shot timing, callout selection, LEDs, etc. that you never realized until you have to implement it. Like acting, get it right and players don't notice but have a good time.

Modern pinball by nature tightly incorporates many components -- I'm not sure how you could partition its gameplay software dev to multiple groups efficiently.

I also have industry experience and know how manufacturing lines demand their product pipeline stay full. I believe Stern's software folks are put in the same pinch as every other product dev team.

For example, you're given 6 months to incorporate animations/sounds/LEDs/callouts into a playable ruleset on a new whitewood. Meanwhile a new featured toy is undergoing reliability testing. So 3 months into your game design you've got all the basic shots working and some LED shows, a set of callouts, etc. In playing you verify if all the planned shots work or if there's any dead spots or "bricks" -- sometimes a playfield item has to be tweaked 1 or 2mm to go from a brick to a satisfying shot. And the factory's deadline remains...
Then the featured toy has to change due to reliability or cost -- this change then propagates thru your ruleset, LEDs, animations, sounds.
Any changes now need to be verified (playtested!)
Meanwhile the factory's deadline closes in...
2 weeks to go the whitewood plays solid, the mechs are solid, and the base code is solid. Good enough for routed games.
So if you're in charge of software do you push to squeeze in a few more rules and risk breaking something? Of course not!
You ship it and schedule a maintenance release.

Enough rambling! It's just pinball!

Hank is wise.