This is supper cool! Ever since I bought into the P3, I've thought they needed a game that had persistent goals with an RPG element. So excited to hear about this game.

So, is this a passion project you're creating just for yourself, or is this something that will ultimately show up in the P3 marketplace for others to buy?

It's only January, but I nominate this as an early entry for Dick post of the year.

Someone is creating a labor of love that will ultimately benefit us P3 owners, and he's taking the time to document the process. Then there's you bitching because there's too many words!

Before I read anything about your combat setup, I was thinking it would be cool if you used the scoops/walls. Glad to hear you are. I'm not envisioning how you win/lose in a battle, but here are some things that came to mind reading the detail you did have.

As you know, the scoops/walls can be individually colored. What might be cool is if they represented the enemy's armor. Hitting a wall would decrease HP on that segment of armor (stabbing). Hitting the side targets could be the swipe you describe and damages the 3 scoops on that side (maybe similar total damage spread across 3 segments?). Armor strength is represented by changing the color of the scoop/wall. When a segment is depleted, that wall drops and you win by hitting the open scoop.

You could even do different things for tougher enemies. Like maybe they have a shield, and this causes a couple walls to have higher HP, or possibly even be invincible. Could make for some cool variety and scalable difficulty across enemies.

Not sure what you're imagining as the playfield artwork during a battle or what's happening with the enemy sprites, but the scoops/walls could represent more generic "defenses" than specifically armor.

In terms of varying the fights, there's all sorts of varieties of what I described that could keep a similar fight dynamic with different requirements. Wearing down a segment is obviously one. Roaming targets is another as you mentioned. Whether that's hit the open scoop or hit the "vulnerable" lighted target, (like the enemy's achilles heel).

Can the scoop be lit a different color from the wall? Probably not, but if they can be different colors, maybe the left side targets rotate a lit scoop and the right side targets rotate a lit wall -- you need to match up the lit scoop/wall to open the shot for the kill. If they can't be done individually, maybe the same concept with a lit scoop/wall and an arrow in front of the wall bank.

Anyway, lots of ways to take these concepts and mix and match them to get tons of variety for the various enemies.

So, the left-most scoop has a different LED than the left-most wall that blocks that scoop? I kinda assumed each scoop/wall pair had the same light source, but obviously I don't know.

I'm an early adopter. I pre-ordered the P3 back when the "wireform" returns were PVC and the only game it ran was a vector graphic version of Barnyard. I was like customer #3 or something like that.

Other than some of the software-only games that didn't jive with me, I have all of the P3 games (and I'm eagerly awaiting the announcement/reveal of the new game and the Career mode for CCR). That's how I had feature-specific thoughts about the battles. Lots of capabilities of the platform that are sadly under-utilized. That said, I have not torn the machine apart though, which is why I didn't know if walls and scoops had independent LED sources.

Not sure if you have any modes or mini-games that would support this idea, but there's always been a type of mode I've thought would be cool since the introduction of color-changing LEDs. This would look coolest with something like CCR's playfield ramp LEDs, but could certainly work with the scoops (or any other lighted shots).

Anyway, I've always thought of it like a combination, where you need to get a pre-determined set of colors -- say left = blue, middle = red, right = green. All shots start as the same color, and each time you hit a shot, it cycles through a color set: red, green, blue, red, green, blue. The object would be to get all shots to match the combination. So, you need to hit each shot a certain number of times, and if you hit one too many, you'd have to cycle back through again. There could be a scalable difficulty by adding a 4th or 5th shot and/or a 4th or 5th color.

This would thematically fit with picking a lock, but could also be configuring / assembling something, mixing potions to a recipe, whatever.

Actually, a potential derivative of this would be recreating the old Mastermind board game where you need to guess a hidden combination of colors. In this case, you'd hit shots to select colors and then submit them as a guess at the combination. You'd then need to deductively figure out the combination based on your correct / incorrect guesses. Maybe something like this could weave into the riddles?

Anyway, not sure if this would fit with anything you're doing, but I thought it's a decent enough place to throw the idea out into the ether for potential future use by someone. I think it would be a fun mode.

Hmm...Interesting! Sounds like it's taking Lexy's Warehouse navigation to a whole new level. Very creative to use the scoops as a navigational tool through a labyrinth. How will you know which way you're supposed to go? Is there something that clues you to which paths to take?

I'm curious how you're viewing this game from a replayability standpoint. I used to love Sierra games like King's and Space Quest. They were super fun, but given their linear nature, they were more about figuring out the puzzles rather than playing them over and over to try and find better ways to do things. Is this more a figure out THE way to do things, or try to accomplish the BEST way to do things? I'm not judging either way. It's just that I've been following this thread from the beginning and I'm still not sure whether this is more of a Sierra game within a pinball machine, or a pinball game within a Sierra game.

Thoughts?

Again, don't take my question as critique. Having read the whole thread, I remember early comments where you talked about using your favorite game as a training ground to learn how to work in the P3 environment. As such, even if your response was "this game will be lame after you figure out how to get through it the first time, I just made it to have fun learning how to make it..." that would still be a totally understandable response. It's your labor of love and an introduction to the development side of P3. But from the sounds of it, it has some inherent replayability on a couple fronts; variety based on character class, and some efficiency measures (I got further or did X faster/better). Roadshow and Pinball Magic are both linear and that doesn't diminish them from being legit, fun pinball games.

As Gerry has said from way back when the P3 was just a PVC-based twinkle in his eye, part of the allure of the platform is being able to make such a wide variety of games. We obviously all like pinbally games, but part of the fun of having the P3 is being able to tack on less pinbally stuff to really round out the experience. I think it's super cool that you're potentially adding to that ecosystem.

How did you find the actual content of the bundle? It seems like the more you pay the more you get, but everything I looked at only said vague things like "includes games such as..."

Ah...so basically pay $12 and get everything shown on the page. I was reading it wrong.

{Sierra Blasphemy Incoming} -- as much as I loved King's Quest and Space quest, I have to admit that I never heard of QFG until you started developing the P3 version. So...ignorant question, what does your game cover? QFG1?

I want to get this bundle, and I want to play some stuff I haven't played before, but I'll probably avoid all the QFG at this point. Assuming you will make QFG available at some point, I don't want to play the cpu game before the pinball game.

Oh really?

Without spoiling anything, can you say which playfield module your new venture will use?

100%

But then, what fool that already owns a Lexy *wouldn't* download and play this for free?

I'm not totally clear what the alternatives are. It's been a while since I watched your stream on this game (I should do that to refresh myself on the full context here). In general, I'm not opposed to sharpshooter games. Pick your shot, hit your shot could be fun. In this context, your missed counter makes sense. I know a lot of games (including light gun games) that show your shooting accuracy at the end of an area. So, some contextual reference to your accuracy would be neat.

That said, I think I understand your concern in that calling all shots certainly slows everything way down. I get you need to balance playing QfG, with intuitive play, with a fun game.

There are so many choices and options, you almost need a more sophisticated user interface. Maybe gstellenberg could license use of the Pinbar!