We've posted another behind the scenes update. This one is about 3D printing and 3D Scanning and how it's been helping us with the prototypes.

http://www.circusmaximusgames.com/behind-the-circus-3d-models.html

Spooky Pinball uses several 3D printed items in their machines, such as the Ghost and the Door if I recall correctly.

They are still way too slow for any large scale production use. The snake took 1 hour and 40 minutes to print at the 200 micron layer height, which makerbot calls Standard resolution. If I bumped it up to 100 microns, it'd take slightly over 3 1/2 hours to print.

It's great to shorten the prototyping time, as we can make a change and print an new one instead of having to wait for a vendor to make and ship a new one to us. But for large scale production, it's not there and probably won't get there any time soon.

There are ways to reduce the wavy pattern depending on your print settings, but again, print time goes way up. There are also other methods of 3D printing that do not have that layered look.

If it was ABS you can also use an Acetone vapor to smooth it over.

In our case, this works fine for the first two whitewoods. Most of the time the layers are exaggerated in photos. In person it's not as pronounced.

Right now your best bet is to join the notifications list at our website, http://www.circusmaximusgames.com as any important notifications as well as ongoing updates will be sent out to that list.

Just a quick note that we will be speaking at the 30th Pinball Expo in a couple weeks.

I believe our talk is on Thursday October 16th at 8:30pm.

We will be bringing our Pinball Circus whitewood with us too! Come join us for stories about Python and the Pinball Circus project.

Hard to tell through the protective film, but the playfield is in the cabinet in the photo below.

After our talk we will be bringing the whitewood to our booth area.

We wouldn't want it to get scratched on the way to Expo now would we?

I'm not sure if it will be recorded or not. In the past Mike has had someone recording sessions for archival purposes. If he does this time, I will try and get a copy of it.

I'm sure will we be posting photos of the whitewood and other items on our website and facebook during the show too.

You can visit our facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/circusmaximusgames or the main website at http://www.circusmaximusgames.com

We can't wait to show everyone the whitewood!

Paul

I believe the announcement starts at around 55:45 in the video if people are only interested in that part of the talk.

But the rest of the talk has great information for people looking at creating their own arcade or pinball machines. I was lucky to share the panel with some great panelists that had plenty of great insights into "pimping" your own games.

Thanks Joel for having us!

We are getting our Holloween Costume ready.

See everyone at Expo next week!

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We showed the game off to the Pinball Expo Crowds at 9pm last night.

Jim from the Pingame Journal got a sneak peak earlier in the day and did a nice quick video about the game. You can watch it here:

The game is now in our booth in the vendor hall, so if you are at Expo and would like to check it out, please stop by and say hi!

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There were only two prototypes built. There was rumor of a third that went to Germany, but our understanding is that is also came back from Germany and was one of the original two.

We have a lot of the purchase orders for parts from the original game. Some things they ordered 15, some things only two, etc.

It's interesting ready all of the behind the scenes documents on the game and how it evolved, etc.

We took a couple week break after the crazy weeks leading up to Pinball Expo and showing off the game, but we are still progressing.

We are currently working on the remaining mechanisms such as the Wheel Wench, the elephant, the giraffe and the wire forms with our mechanical engineer George.

I'll try and send out an update to our mailing list and on our website in the next couple days with a recap from Pinball Expo.

We will be bringing it to one of the shows early next year to show it off again. Most likely Allentown, but that's still to be decided.

James did post this in the past couple days on facebook:

In the pinball industry there seems to have been a shift away from the traditional business model of a company believing in a product, making the product and then selling the product. The shift has been towards a model of a company not sure about the success of their product or not sure of their means to produce the product so they go the route of "pre-ordering" to get customers to buy something before it's made.

Pinball Inc. and now The Circus Maximus Group have never nor will ever take “pre-orders” for any product we make, including Python’s Pinball Circus (PPC). For over 13 years we've been making parts for the pinball community and we have never taken a single payment before the products were in stock and ready to ship, we have believed in these products and we stand behind them. It’s not the role of the customer to take the financial risks, it’s the company who stands to benefit from the financial gain that should take the risk.

We've been getting dozens of requests for pre-orders of PPC including requests to send us money as well, we refuse. We will only take orders for the games when they are READY. You will have the opportunity to see and play the game BEFORE you buy it. If we sell out, then we will probably make more.

We are enjoying working on the game and we are sure the end product will indeed be the game that deserves to carry it’s name.

Cheers,
James Loflin
Pinball Inc.
The Circus Maximus Group

We are not the first, Charlie at Spooky also did this this way, and is kicking ass I must say.

And Gerry from Multimorphic has done preorders in a more reasonable way with securing them and not using those funds for development from what I understand.

It's just the way James and I have always run our businesses. Bootstrapped and no debt. Is it the only way to run a successful business? Hell no. But it is the the only way James and I run our businesses.

We'd like to take it to every show, but it's probably not in the cards for this year as we are rocking and rolling on getting the game completed. Most likely 2-3 shows this year for us.

We'd also like to create a traveling museum of Python's games to bring with us to shows, but that is the ultimate goal. Right now the immediate goal is fulfilling our promise to Python to complete his game.

Python had one of those chameleon's in his apartment. The plastic part. He was pretty proud of that game, and it's still being sold from what I understand.

We are not really sure where it will ultimately end up price wise, but one thing that is for certain is that the 12 Sample games that get made will be more expensive than any of the production games.

As we've stated, Python and all of the team want it to be as economical as possible.

Our goal is to get as many of these out into the hands of fans as possible and pricing is part of that.

We are hoping to make it to Allentown and then in June we are speaking at the Southern Fried Gameroom Expo in Atlanta. And I'm sure we will be at Pinball Expo again this year.

It's probably unlikely that we would end up at Pintastic New England this year, but you never know.

All,

Just a quick video showing some progress on the wireforms and some of the mechs.

Paul

It's using the pinHeck system. ie: the board that America's Most Haunted uses.

We have permission from Matt at Planetary Pinball for the prototypes and the 12 sample games.

We are still working out the details for the production run, but the hope is to make as many production games as there are demand for.

Maybe. It's something that is on our radar.

I don't think there is anything mounting wise that will prevent something like a color dmd from being mounted to the backboard.

That is indeed the quote that is on the machine at the Pinball Hall of Fame. We think there is some truth in that.

We have found that from a BOM view, the game didn't seem significantly more costly than it's predecessors at about $200ish more than other games from it's time.

Not sure if that translated to $1000 more for the German distributor, but it may have.

The number of games that fit into a shipping container was also a concern for overseas sales, and that may have also contributed to an increase in costs to the German distributor if they couldn't fit as many games into a container as the standard pinball format.

The cabinet is a beast. No doubt about that.

If possible, yes.

We are fans/supporters of open source, so if we can do it we will.

We actually jumped the gun and shot the video before we installed the last wireform that the long wireform feeds into.

So it does have a more gentle egress to the playfield than is shown in the video.

We will have the game at Allentown in a couple weeks, and then again at the Southern Fried Gameroom Expo in Atlanta which we are speaking at in June.

I believe they make a bunch of jigs for bending and welding.

We have a copy of the purchase order for the original jig tooling for Pinball Circus and it indicated a cost of around 50k just for the wireform tooling.

We have 1 scale engineering drawings of the wireforms, so we were hand bending and cutting them and setting the wires on top of the drawings to check the bends/welds, etc.

Time consuming, but it worked out pretty well after we figured out the details of it.

Yep. It will have limited play at Allentown since we still have the playfields that were signed by Python in it, but at the SFGE we plan to swap them out for a different set of playfields so that it can be played much more frequently.

We are also speaking at the SFGE about the project during one of the seminars.

As LTG said, it's not as bad as you'd think.

We've taken this thing apart dozens of times while test fitting parts and tweaking things and it isn't bad at all.

It's just freaking heavy. When we transport it in the trailer, we transport the cabinet and playfields separately at the moment.

We rolled it through the corridors at Expo last year all together and it's not too bad, we just don't trust it bouncing around in a trailer yet until we finalize the playfield mounting brackets, etc.

Both.

It actually has some wheels in the back that engage when you tip it up on it's back a little. That's what we used when wheeling it through the back alleys at Expo this year. Worked pretty darn good.

Unfortunately not this year. After Allentown we are tearing it down and putting some new playfields in it prior to our talk at SFGE in June.

We'd love to take it to every show, but since we currently only have the single prototype, if we took it everywhere we'd never get anything done on it.

Paul

Here is our current show schedule:

Allentown Pinfest - May 1st & 2nd
Southern Fried Gameroom Expo - June 19th to June 21st
Pinball Expo - October 14th to October 18th

We may add another show, but that is the current schedule at the moment.

I do snore. George stayed with me last year at the ohio show and he put in his headphones and had to crank up the music as loud as it would go. And he could still hear me.

Said he had some crazy dreams with the music so loud.

I know, but then I wouldn't have had an excuse to tell the George story.

That's the one we'd like to add to our list if we can.

We'd love to do the Denver show too, but that's the weekend before our local Atlanta show and the logistics of getting our single prototype out there and back just doesn't lend itself to working this year.

Plus we are planning to do a playfield replacement between Allentown and Atlanta and having the game out of the workshop for a week before Atlanta really would hamper that goal.

We picked up the wireforms last night after getting their final touches. We can't wait to show these off at Allentown.

Our Engineer George did an awesome job on these.

For anyone that needs to replace a wireform that they can't find for sale somewhere, the Harbor Freight 240v Spot Welder really worked well for us creating new ones from scratch.

We originally were ordering straightened wire from McMaster-Carr. That worked well for the very straight ones, which we only had one or two of.

For all of the curved ones we actually found a coil of wire at Home Depot, the same stuff we were buying from McMaster-Carr but coiled and a lot cheaper.

We used that for most of the curvy forms. I'll get the details specifically of the wire from our engineer.

He also found some garden posts that are of the same material and already had a loop in them that were the same size needed for parts of them, so we didn't need to bend a lot of those loops.

Lets just say we are very familiar with the local Home Depots and Harbor Freights from this project so far.

I beleive it is a moderated Q&A session about the project at the SFGE. We haven't heard all of the details yet, but do know we will be speaking in some sort of capacity.

The honest answer is we are not even sure ourselves at this point. Right now we are focused on completing the prototypes, then we will start working on the BOM and estimated pricing.

All we can say is that our intention is to keep them priced fairly in order to get as many games out there in Python's honor.

Paul

We accidentally left "Lolita" in Atlanta. We had her overnighted but it didn't arrive until Saturday afternoon. We had her on the machine Saturday after lunch though.

Thank you to everyone that stopped by at Allentown and checked out our game.

We know it's risky to show off such an early prototype, but we enjoy every minute of it and like hearing all feedback.

The Circus will come to town again at the Southern Fried Gameroom Expo in Atlanta in June.

Paul

If you look at the side art on the game, Flippy the Clown is supposed to be Python, and the acrobat (ie: lolita) was rumored to be his wife.

There are several versions of the callout for her. Usually she's referred to as the Lovely Lolita.

Then of course Python had the Wheel Wench (ie: the girl on the wheel that get's knifes thrown at her used in the mystery awards).

No one ever has claimed Python was politically correct.

Paul

It was great to meet you Ted in person for the first time. As soon as I saw the crazy shirt I knew it was you.

Atlanta is actually her normal home. Much of the Circus team lives around Atlanta.

She will be appearing at the Southern Fried Gameroom Expo next month too. If we are lucky she may even have some clothes (ie: she wasn't painted yet at Allentown)

Paul

Did anyone who played Python's Pinball Circus at Allentown notice a slightly different display in it?

It's a prototype display from Marco that we are testing for them which has all discrete surface mount LEDs on it instead of the square led segments. So you don't get the misaligned segments that many complain about with LED displays.

It almost looks HD to us as you can see the shading/gradients clearer it seems.

Marco hasn't announced pricing yet but the Circus team is hoping it will be priced competitively with the xpin displays ourselves.

We just picked up a freshly CNC'd set of ramps for Python's Pinball Circus.

This is the third set we've done for the game. First set was hand cut with a bandsaw. The second set was done on a new CNC fixture but without many of the mounting holes. This third set has all of the opto and mounting holes machined by the CNC.

It pays to have the "Ramp King" as one of our founding team members.

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Giraffe should be working within the next several days.

I love being able to design bracket revisions and print them on our 3D printer for testing. So much easier and quicker than what was done in the past.

We haven't heard yet when our talk will be, but as soon as we do I'll update everyone here.

Last night we upgraded the sound system on Circus to a flipper fidelity system instead of the crappy boss stuff we put in their originally.

Can't wait to show it off again in a few weeks.

Paul

We'd like to take it to every show, but since we currently only have a single prototype, each show we bring it to means we pause most of the progress on the game for 4-6 days depending on travel.

James spoke at the Northwest show yesterday, but I'm back in Atlanta working on the game as we couldn't afford to pause progress.

Less than two weeks before the Circus comes to our local Atlanta show at the Southern Fried Gameroom Expo.

I'll bring some swag to give away. No problem.

The schedule has been released and our Update on Pinball Circus will be Sunday June 21st at 1:30 if anyone would like to come by and hang out and chat with us about the project.

We will also have the game there all weekend and have a booth selling swag.

Paul

That was actually discussed early on as a possibility, but it's very unlikely.

Al is slightly biased though, as he painted Flippie the clown for us.

Can't wait to show the game off later this week.

Stop by our booth and say hi, or buy some swag (we got a great new shirt) and remember to come to our Fireside Chat type talk at 1:30pm on Sunday. We will be giving away some swag during our talk.

Paul

Just picked up some shirts that we will have available at the Atlanta Show this weekend.

After the Atlanta show is done we will make them available for online orders.

They look really sweet in person.

Paul

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The one we had at Allentown was orange. Marco did mention that they would likely do different colors or explore doing a white color one that had different lenses to change the color, so it's likely they will eventually have something available to get multiple colors.

We will run more after the show if neccessary. We are bringing 150 total shirts with us to the show.

I think we got 25 2XLs or something.

Just a quick reminder that we will be at the Southern Fried Gameroom Expo this weekend with the game and our talk about the project is Sunday at 1:30pm.

Some of the Pinball Circus team are also involved in several other talks during the weekend such as the Creating Custom Games talk on Saturday from 4pm-5pm and From the Mixed Up Files of Pins and Vids at 5:30pm-6:30pm tonight.

We will have shirts and other swag available at our vendor booth along with the game.

We look forward to meeting and talking with people about the project.

The Pinbo shirts that we had at the show are now available for order online here:

http://www.circusmaximusgames.com/product/pinbo-shirt-charcoal

They are $20 + $5.95 priority mail shipping.

The website is setup for only USA based shipping, so if you want a shirt, and it will ship to Canada or some other location in this great big world, please PM me and we can handle that offline and figure out how to get you a shirt.

Thanks!

Python always maintained it was a Pinball machine, not a novelty game.

I've seen internal Williams memo's where Python and Williams were arguing over if it was a Pinball or Novelty design. The reason that mattered had to do with his contract. He was contracted to deliver X Pinball designs and X Novelty designs. If I recall correctly Williams eventually relented and counted it as a Pinball, but I think it also had a novelty number designation like Al said.

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I'm pretty sure that is Duncan Browns website.

Through the genius that is Jimmy (i.e.: Compy), we were able to convert several of those animations from that website to get the first game up and running.

Hell no.

We are just going to make some shirts, posters, and some other cool stuff available for purchase for people that want them. All the money from anything which is sold will go directly to support the project.

We have and will continue to do this with our own money. Purchasing any swag just lets us reduce the amount that comes out of our savings account.

Paul

Jonathan,

All reasonable points.

The best part is that Python agreed with you on the "If it doesn't work, it's not going in the game as-is." He said he trusted us to do what's right for the game.

And you are correct, the snake mech sucks in it's current form. We've tried it with a servo. We've tried it with a coil like it was originally designed, etc. This is one of the things we determined didn't work as-is and will be dealt in the next whitewood. Can't say too much more about the plans for the snake, but it will not stay like it is.

Paul

We have a few of these still. Not sure if we have any that are signed left though.

We also have these as 11x17 posters if I recall correctly. These are part of what we will have available soon.

My Lips are sealed!

nope. The ones that got sold at SFGE were a batch we had made for the whitewood we were showing off. The originals are still safe with someone else.

I think we have a few more sets we are going to make available soon too.

We had a small batch of the mini playfields blanks made to upgrade the whitewoods. These are exactly the same as the ones used in the game we were bringing to the shows. They are clear coated and pretty sweet looking. I need to get some better photos, but I've attached a few.

These were created with direct to play field technology using the original films. Please note, the letters on the Giraffe playfield inserts did not get printed on these sets.

I have two sets available for shipping to US addresses. You'll get one of the Pinbo, one of the Giraffe, and one of the Flippy playfields. These are $395 + actual shipping. Sales of these type of things go directly back into the project.

If you are interested, please PM me here on Pinside or send an email to [email protected]

Paul

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That's the focus of the second whitewood we are building. Getting it to play more like a pinball machine and less like a novelty game.

Python also laid out the framework for a very deep rule and mode set, which is quite different than the one at the PHOF.

There will be several whitewoods followed by 12 sample games.

Several of the sample games will likely be available to the public with the rest going to the team members.

Then if there is enough demand we will do a production run.

Sample games will likely be more costly that a production games, but we have no idea of pricing yet and won't until we are ready to build them.

Not yet. Currently the first whitewood has been deemed completed. It's essentially fully playable but with limited rules and molded pretty much exactly like the one at the PHOF except for adding the snake mech back in.

This whitewood is being used to determine what works and what doesn't and modifications are being made and more of python's ruleset and ideas are being explored and/or implemented in the second whitewood that is being produced now.

I'm looking at making a "State of the Circus" video that would explain all of this in a little more detail.

I believe James just gave away a position to be able to buy one of the sample games. The person that won it will have first dibs on a sample game, but would still need to pay for it.

I found one more set of Mini Playfields if anyone is interested. Better photo attached.

These are $395 + Shipping for the set. PM me here or email me at [email protected] if you are interested.

Paul

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Parts keep arriving for the second whitewood.

These slingshot assemblies from Pinball Life save us a lot of time lining up switches, etc.

Thanks to Scott Danesi's Power filter board, our coils should have some new spunk in them too. Anyone needing a PCB manufacturer would likely be happy with pcbway.com. I ordered these boards and they arrived here in just over a week and that didn't include any rush fees.

Paul

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Another Pinbo body has arrived. These are cast from a mold as previously the 3D scanner we had access to wasn't big enough to 3D scan it.

Since then we've built a 3D scanner that we will hopefully be large enough for this body to be scanned.

Pinbo kinda looks like a chicken from one of the angles.

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We've got a bunch of cool swag coming. I had a sewer backup at the house so had to deal with that "shit" over the past two weeks so the new items had to take a back burner for a bit.

But I'll definitely post here when they are available. Our store is currently setup for US shipping only, but James is experienced shipping to other countries so we can figure something out for the Aussies and other countries.

Paul

All,

I'm in a car with James heading back from a trip to Chicago.

Lots of fun merch in progress we hope to have at expo this year.

Lots of new pinball stories, of which about half cannot be repeated.

Anyways, we do have an item of on eBay that while not Circus related it is arcade related and a unique item being sold with the profits going to the Circus project.

If you are interested, please give it a look.

ebay.com link: itm

More updates on Circus after we decompress from this trip a little.

Paul

We will be there, but we won't be bringing a game with us this year. We will start showing some of the second white wood in the coming months.

The whitewood was a great proof of concept and we got to try a few of the things Python wanted to try, but it really doesn't play super well, so it's basically been retired from show play.

The next whitewood will play significantly better and will be brought to shows as soon as it's in a playable state.

We will have a couple sets of Mini Playfields for sale at Expo if someone doesn't snag them before the show along with some new swag.

Paul

The good news is that part of being true to Python's vision is testing the ideas, and if they didn't work, they either get tweaked so they do work or they get removed.

The second whitewood will have a different flipper gap. I don't want to say too much yet, but the bottom part of the main playfield will be changed in the next whitewood. The snake will remain part of the design, but will most likely get used in a different manner/location.

The first whitewood is not terribly fun to play, and that will be rectified.

Paul

The original was a coil. We tried it as a coil and as a servo in the whitewood. Neither worked very well. I'm not going to spill the beans yet, but the bottom half of the main playfield is being changed in whitewood #2.

Paul

We will be at TPF. We will have a booth. We will have something new to show. I believe we may even have some sort of seminar, but I'm not sure if that's confirmed yet or not.

Sleep is probably not an option for us between now and TPF.

But we will talk about Python's Pinball Circus, Game #2, and probably tell plenty of Python stories, to anyone that is interested.

Paul

This is a good short summary.

Basically Python's Pinball Circus needs much more work to get to production on it, so we've temporarily switched most of our resources to Kingpin, but once our new CNC machine arrives we will start cutting some modified whitewoods for Circus and be doing a little work in tandem until Kingpin is on the production line.

In general, the whitewood we built didn't play super well, so the next whitewood will correct that and continue the path of making it the greatest pinball show in the world.

Our primary objective is to get as many of these into collectors hands as possible to honor Python, but we really have no idea how big of a run there will be yet. We know it will be a smaller run than Kingpin though.

There will be 12 sample games made. After that it all depends on ultimately what the demand will be for the production run. 250 is probably the minimum sized run where the economies of scale make it more reasonably priced. And unless someone like Chuck E Cheese wants them for all of their stores, I'm not sure there is a demand for more than 250 of them at the max.

There are so many custom parts on a game like Pinball Circus that building them in small batches would probably make them significantly more expensive than we'd like them to be, but we will do that if that's what the demand determines.

Paul

We probably will do something to gauge interest. Not sure what yet though, and that's still probably a ways off as we won't do anything with that until Kingpin is shipping.

Yes