So, short story is that I've wanted a WPT for years. I love drop target games and deep rulesets. But theme and limited space meant it was a really hard sell in the house. We've always had games that we wanted to keep more, WPT rarely ever comes up for sale anywhere nearby. I had this really nice restored Xenon which was fun, but I just wasn't digging it enough to keep it, and knew we couldn't fit 5 games again in our available space with that monster. Big head games, we can have 2 and 3 Stern/WPC games. Crescendo and Farfalla aren't going ANYWHERE, so Xenon needed to go so we could have 3 modern games again. My wife and I basically "share" Crescendo and Farfalla, Metallica is definitely hers. Xenon was mine, so I made an executive decision to sell Xenon and try to pick one up from TPF.

Started poking around, and there was a WPT whitewood for sale here on Pinside. It has some extra holes and whatnot from test fits, but I can patch that, and it's a whitewood...I thought about it for a few days, I love wierd playfields (Have a Tron one that's missing all the keylines!), and I thought a bit about possible rethemes. I already wanted to do a custom pin, so a retheme as a first project seemed a lot more doable, especially with a design I already liked. I made a list of themes I'd be willing to put the effort into, and Voltron is the winner. Things I want to do fit well. The existing insert layout fits *exactly* what I need to do this theme.

I'm planning on salvaging as much of the rules as possible from WPT and adapting what I need to in order to fit to purpose, but I *will* be using P3 hardware and having to learn Python, and coding, and write everything. I don't think I can write better rules than Keith, but obviously, things like the LED block display and rules revolving around cards specifically aren't going to work. Probably the biggest change will be morphing the "Drop target poker" feature into some way to collect specific characters for qualifying a mini-wizard, and either changing entirely how the LED block display works or replacing it altogether with a screen. The DMD will be going away and be replaced with a video screen for sure.

I'm announcing this realizing that I have basically nothing done, because I'm a *terrible* self-motivator at times, and if I have this thread, I'm hoping that it will keep me pushing to have something to talk about! I'm starting with art. It's the smallest stretch for me, and gives me time to document all the rules in WPT and figure out what I want to keep and what needs to go.

Ultimately, when I'm done, I would *like* to open-source ALL of my work, so that someone else can take their WPT and turn it into Voltron if they like. My feelings may change on that, as I expect this to be a 2-3 year project because I'm having to fund a lot of expenses I normally would not have, and my personal money situation is pretty "meh" anyways. If I do go that route, I'll probably open some kind of way to make donations for anyone that wants to, but that will only be after everything is released. I'm not going to feel like I'm beholden to anyone to progress on this project other than myself. I work a lot of overtime. Updates will be pretty slow, and probably far and few inbetween, so I'm giving everyone notice: Stay the hell off my theme of choice, thanks!

Currently, I'm planning on pulling one episode from each season for modes, I'd love to have some feedback from diehard fans as to your favorite episodes!

I'll have a little bit more to post tomorrow regarding what I want to do with some of the art direction and sounds, and a basic insert layout, but for now, this is the first completed art (Well, okay, the Voltron logo is done for sure. I may tweak my "company" logo a little bit more.), but I expect that I'll likely have this art on all sides of the cabinet and the backglass, so it got done first. I'll be drawing everything in vector, using primarily Inkscape.

Logo (resized).png

Lion. I grew up with that, both of my kids have been addicts for either the original series or the reboots.

Where the hell did my picture go...*fixed*

Not using anything from the new series. I haven't seen any of it. Couldn't get to my computer to do anything today....got the day off work so I went to a tournament and took 3rd place after having a very rough start.

Oh, I'll get around to watching it, just have been and will probably continue to be busy.

It's unlikely the game will cease to be a little bit stop-and-go, because I like things like mode starts and physical locks. I know there's no actual physical locks on WPT, but I have some ideas on making that more possible while preserving the layout. Will definitely require adding some new things or moving existing things a bit. I do really like the option on most modern games to skip animations and long multiball starts, so if there's a way I can accomodate that, it will be a part of the code at some point. I want to make good use of video and callouts, but forcing someone to sit through them is kind of like.....why? Because it's easier to not program the "double flip out"? Meh.

Here's what I'm currently working with as far as insert layouts. I marked things I'm not sure what I'm going to do with just yet with what they do in WPT.

VoltronMockup (resized).png

Yeah, I'm going to play around with RGB stuff for sure. Even with colored inserts there's probably quite a bit that can be done that people just don't really tend to think about....kind of how like putting a warm white vs. cool white vs. orange vs. yellow LED under an orange insert will make it look like 4 entirely different colors when it's lit. I think there's room to use RGB even under colored inserts with enough tinkering, but those arrows that are used for the hurryups...90% of the time I see those as being mode shots. Just the basic hurryup functionality in WPT is kind of 'meh' from what I've seen of it...waiting on a bootrom chip to come so I can actually have it working again... pretty sure it's all for the "tricks".. I'm trying not to think about it too much until I can actually get into the last code release for WPT and take a look at what's going on, because all I've seen is code that was 2 years older than the last release. Game bricked when I tried to update with a modern thumb drive..

Guess the question is, when the hell will I get the bootloader chip. John Wart doesn't seem to respond to email, I ordered the thing and paid for it like last thursday, haven't recieved any kind of notification it's shipped... but I've still got a ridiculous amount of work with art to do so it can wait.

Because it's already in the game and I want something to play while I'm doing everything else? To me, there's no point at all to tear this game down until I have at LEAST a VERY solid ruleset in mind along with playfield art. I don't want to tear down and rebuild the playfield to make very minor changes. I don't have the time to waste my efforts like that. I'm not going to be using the original boardset in the end. But I am using it so I have a playable game in my house instead of a BRICK, and to see what rules I can salvage from WPT....

It's not like we can all just conjure 1200 bucks out of thin air for a set of PROC boards, and have the coding knowledge to get something flippable a few days later. I sold off a massive chunk of my game collection to try and fund buying the boards then life slapped me in the face and said "F you bro." and the money went to other things, as it so often does. /shrug

Slack is like online voicechat, right? If so, I very seriously doubt I'll be using that very much. I hate hate HATE talking on the phone. Talking on a 'party line' of sorts holds about as much interest to me as "teabagging" a drum of sulfuric acid. =P

That's good to know. Saves me a little bit of money at least!

What the hell is "BoS"? =P

And I seriously doubt I'm going anywhere. Not sure why anyone would care what anyone else would choose to retheme in regards to cost...obviously I already accounted for that. I got a good deal on a base machine and the whitewood, and I'm pretty good at managing costs in various ways.

What is your issue? You tore that guy apart on his cocktail project too. I appreciate the feedback, but just because you offer it doesn't mean that everyone is obligated to do things YOUR way, or even to use your site. I'll be looking through there once I actually get to more technical things, but why are you tearing me a new one when I've already SAID that I'm going to start with art and thinking about rules, and that I have so much to do before I even get to that point? I want to learn Python, I want to be utilizing the existing frameworks to cut down on the coding side of things as much as possible. I've never coded a single damn thing. I think it would be WISE to learn a bit before just throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks, yeah? I mean seriously...you're on here one minute posting your site and offering help, and then an hour later basically giving me the finger. I'm at work man. I wasn't even at my desk for half of that time, I was out getting my lunch. Come on.

I don't have the money for boards right now. None of them. So in your opinion...what....all progress should just come to a screeching halt because I can't start the way you'd start? Tell me again, how exactly, is doing cabinet and backglass art dependent on having circuitboards? So yeah, if all you have to offer is to throw out how you personally would do things, then get all butthurt when it's not taken as 100% MUST DO IT THIS WAY...then it's probably best to not keep reading here. I'll be happy to get feedback and information if you can keep it positive, but I won't continue to engage in this kind of childish crap...

In more related subject matter..sheesh...it's crazy how much Legendary Defender has drowned out the old series on Google. Even when you can find any stills or source art related to the old series, it's really low-rez and details are indecipherable. I'm predicting lots of time spent scanning things and doing my own screencaps, especially from the first volume of the DVD releases, to find suitable reference art that I can vectorize..

Well, it's "real" in that all the mechs, the cabinet, all the cabinet hardware and everything are going to be used for it, and that the original art on the cabinet is going to be lost? Sure, I'm using the whitewood playfield (assuming there's no horrifically major differences...I was willing to take that risk, because honestly, I like having odd playfields) and not the original one, but it's not like someone could take my original PF and just instantly reconstruct a WPT with it. When I get this thing to the point of near completion, I'll probably sell the PF and CPU boards to recoup some money, and hopefully someone with a trashed out WPT that needs a playfield will finally be able to replace theirs. In general, I'm more of a preservationist than a parting-out kind of person, but let's be honest here..there's plenty of other, nicer WPTs out there. I got what I paid for...a game that's seen some location play but was 100% functional, and barebones. No mods, no LEDs, upper playfield has clearly seen a good amount of play, etc.

If someone's interested in buying the cabinet from me when I'm ready to apply art, and there's someone that actually makes this style of Stern cabinet brand new, then I'd certainly be open to purchasing a new production cabinet and selling mine. It's yellowed and smells like smoke though.

You're one of two people that I've ever seen say that WPT is their dream theme, John.

Whatever man. See ya.

Back on track....

MysteryVector (resized).png

Details on this thing are killing me. I've had to waste a lot of time trying to figure out how to get Inkscape to fill things in correctly. Vector is so different from raster drawing programs.

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Calling it quits on this one. I can't get it any better I don't think. (Okay, that's a lie, I just feel like I've spent long enough on it and any further improvements are likely to be lost as it's not going to be 3ft. x 3ft. sized. Hell, even most of the shadowing detail I worked on today is lost even at this size..)

Coffin.png

Crap. Almost finished this one today.

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Done with that. Next!

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It'll be there in whatever state it's in, I'm sure....which most likely will be WPT with Voltron cabinet art and not much else. LOL. I think if I can keep the rate I'm going with art right now, and the Lions and main characters don't give me too many fits (Let me tell you how much I HATE HATE HATE drawing hands) I might have cabinet art and a translite done here in a few months. Learning python is not going to be easy, even with all the work the other guys have done for me with things like PyProcHD/SkeletonGame....I'm keeping a text file of callouts and rule changes that I've thought of as I go.

I'm still trying to get a stupid bootloader chip for my WPT so I can actually play with it and document the last revision of the rules. :\

I might be a dickhead, but I'm a pretty good learner. I was thinking something like that, still having the WPT rules playable in some way. I haven't really decided what I want to do with those LED block displays in the window. If I can salvage them with the Voltron rules in some manner, then keeping WPT playable would be a LOT easier. If I replace them with some kind of other display, that's going to be much harder. I would guess probably that Pinmame would have some way to just divert the emulated display to a LCD screen, but I'm not going to let that be a deciding factor in what the game ends up as. Since I won't be keeping the card references in the art, it'll make playing WPT kind of difficult I'd guess.

I'm pretty sure this game was already made and is called Jackbot.

Just noticed something odd as I was finishing this. My reference art for the pink one has no whiskers. Screencaps show it with whiskers, but for whatever reason that piece I had which was from one of the set boxes, doesn't? Odd. I may have to spend some time adding them to see if I like it as is or with whiskers. Oh well, here's the other one!

SpaceMouse2 (resized).png

They're robots in the paper comics series. Seems legit.

Probably won't have any updates this week. Death in the family today, looks like I'm spending the week in Louisville. Did manage to get the code updated last night so I can start studying the rules and figuring out what can be adapted and what needs to go.

Okay, I lied. Found some time today. This is a big piece... it's getting on my nerves but details details details matter. Will be really glad to finish the oulines on this one...argh!

torso (resized).png

Outline (resized).png

That's it until Saturday...leaving at 3am-ish tomorrow to drive.. man these eyes are killing me.

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Pickiness does have it's drawbacks. I'm sure I'm going to hell in the eyes of someone that actually knows what they are doing with a vector program by the time this one is done...

face (resized).png

awwww yisss....this is looking better and better. Boots are fully done. Ignore the colors for the most part...I just realized my monitors are jacked and they will DEFINITELY need tweaking before printing! One of my monitors looks purple, the other looks pink, and I have been working on the purple one and can't get the color profiles to match!

Allura-WIP-05-02-17 (resized).png

Finally done with her head...I hope. I'll have to do a final check for any transparency bleed after I finish coloring the rest of the uniform, but gawd. This took way longer than expected. Thankfully it's a major part of the cabinet art so I don't feel so annoyed with myself for taking so long with it.

Allura-WIP-05-04-17 (resized).png

Yeah, 5 'seasons' of Lion voltron on DVD, the vehicle Voltron is sets 6/7/8 if I'm not mistaken.

Allura is DONE. Finally. I think I'm going to figure out how to get a higher res version of this and attach it. I can't get it big enough on my monitor to fit the whole thing and have any kind of appreciable amount of detail, but let me tell you...it is ridiculous, and I'm very happy with this. To put it in perspective...all the other stuff up to this point I've been able to draw with around 2000 'nodes' or points that define the lines. Allura alone is over 8000....more than both mice, the coffin, and the Voltron logo *combined*.

Allura-Final (resized).png

Allura-Lines (resized).png

Quick update..... I could have sworn that Voltron original series had been on Netflix but perhaps I was mistaken. I decided to source the DVD sets I had passed on 10 years ago. Picked up seasons 3 and 4 off ebay for 20 bucks shipped...brand new. I'm kind of surprised nobody has pointed this out but I supposed I better cop to it before someone else figures it out...I'm using scans of the art from these DVD sets as my templates right now for the vector art. Even with that, autotrace in Inkscape doesn't even come close to being functional for me, so I'm drawing/tracing everything by hand. Would it be easier to just scan them at 300 DPI, rescale to fit, and then use them that way? Maybe...but it's kind of chintzy, yeah? My name is Frax, not Stern.

So anyways, when I get home tonight I'll be scanning the next few things I want to work on, which will be the full body shots (like Allura above..) of Pidge and Lance. Coin flip to see which one gets worked on first.

Yeah, I already have something planned that I want to do for TPF next year.

Life is busy! I've been working on one of the Lion heads that will probably get used for the front panel art, but I finally got some more scans to play with so the next main character is going to hit the pipe tonight, if things don't stay too busy..

Only a handful of select episodes picked by the people that work on Legendary Defender...feel free to prove me wrong, but I looked like a week and a half ago. It's largely irrelevant for me as I already own 3 seasons on DVD and will be buying the other 2 shortly. Ripping video and sounds off Netflix is not my idea of a good time.

At least got something going!

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Almost done with the keylines...if I did everything right once I put the final outline on and combine all the necessary paths then hit fill, I'll have solid outlines everywhere...

Pidge Keylines (resized).png

Unlike Allura, I didn't have any major glitches when I hit the fill button... learning is good? >=)

Pidge Keylines 2.png

Almost done!

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Have been really busy at work. Both good and bad, but here's Pidge, all finished up.

Pidge-FINAL-06-13-17.png

Oh and I figured out how to actually export things now so here's the finished Allura too.

Allura.png

Well, as I said earlier, I'm only vectorizing existing art, so I can't really take any design credit here. It's going to be interesting when I get to the bad guys side of the cabinet, because all I'll have to work with is screen captures from the DVDs. There's not any official high-rez art available for any of them. And I *suck* at drawing freehand, or creating anything new in digital. I'm going to have to get better though, because I don't want the left side of the cabinet to look like crap when the right side will look like the above. Things like adding shading...I can manage that. The question is going to be will I be able to get clean enough grabs to effectively vectorize, or am I going to have to come up with something original.

Don't blame you at all, it was pretty terrible, but it's a part of the show..so...

*edit* Oh, if anyone has complete copies of season 2 or 5 (Yellow and Black lions) in the metal tins, and the episode inserts are intact, I'd be interested in maybe buying them...for some reason they're selling for way more than 1/3/4 (which I already have in hand) on ebay/amazon. I'd settle for some scans, but ultimately I need them for rips as well.

Lance should be next up once I open up the box for season 4 and get scans.

Things have been moving slowly...haven't felt very good the last few weeks, and was off work on vacation at at Bat City Open.. I started this lion head for the front of the cabinet quite a while ago and have started TRYING to work on it again...supremely frustrated with it. The contrast *sucks* and without clear lines between some of these *actual* blacks and the very dark blues it's difficult for me to figure out where I need to draw the keylines. I *have* to have a closed path at the end of the day, but this is VERY convoluted compared to the stuff I've done so far... When you don't have closed paths, and try to go to fill, you get ridiculous results like what you'll see below here, but it's useful for knowing where your 'leaks' are.

There's so much to do on this before it's even just a barebones outline, but I feel like if I don't post something, I'm liable to just table it until later, and that's not really a luxury I have. Until my money situation improves dramatically, art and sound are what I CAN do....so gotta keep plugging away.

I'm going to have to make an artistic judgement call on this one, because some of these lines are just gone, man.

Lion1 (resized).png

Lion2 (resized).png

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So....I'm an idiot. This is one of those things we all knew like 20 years ago, but since we lost the fascination of playing with images on the computer a long time ago, we forgot? I can't )@#%&!&@)$# believe I just remembered this.

Colors too dark to tell apart? Invert the color(s).

Too late to be of much help with the Blue Lion, but if the other ones have issues at least I'll be able to get done with them MUCH faster. Not many things make me feel like I've done something completely wrong and feel like an absolute moron, but this is a prize-winner not having figured it out sooner. >_<

BlueLion7-9 (resized).png

Think I'm finally done with the outline. This was far more complicated than it looks. To put things in perspective, just the outline is more than half of the work that I put into ALL of Allura. Allura was just shy of 9000 nodes....this outline is around 5000.

Yes, the lines are supposed to look like that. The lion head closeups I have are the "weathered" lions from them sitting around for so long, and before the animators decided it was too much of a PITA to draw battle damage after they got fixed up.

BlueLion-Outline (resized).png

Thanks. I was thinking last night...why in the crap am I putting so much work into something (this lion head specifically..) that will be so small on the cabinet...

Then my wife asked if I could just do a palette swap and save myself some trouble, not realizing the lions all have different heads.

I do love a good Deadpool reference.

Incremental progess.....exponential amounts of time expended lol.

BlueLion-WIP-07-31-17 (resized).png

Monster misbehaving
Planet’s needing saving
Situation’s grave and
I’ll form the head

The enemy is clever
We’re smaller but whatever
When we put it together
I’ll form the head
Y’all can do the treading
Swing energy machete
If combination’s ready
I’ll form the head
I’ll form the head
I’ll form the head

Topper, anyone?

http://io9.gizmodo.com/an-old-school-voltron-set-is-officially-coming-to-lego-1797499994

Took a minute to get some screencaps to show more of the detail, because frequently, these small areas are taking me longer to do.. I'm adding details as I go, whereas with the body of the lion, barring one tiny patch, I still need to go back and add details to those..

8652 nodes is where this currently stands today.. had no idea this was going to be every bit as detailed and complicated as one main character's full body! Got screens of how it looks in outline view and node view.....

Lion-08-06-17 (resized).png

Lion-08-06-17-Nodes (resized).png

Lion-08-06-17-Lines (resized).png

I know I keep saying this is close to done but I keep finding more and more details!! This is really legitimately nearly done though....13031 nodes at this point! Detail level far far outstrips any of the previous pieces..

Lion-WIP-08-13-17 (resized).png

*fist pump* I've been biding my time...watching...waiting...

Finally managed to snag a copy of Season 5 (black lion tin) for 15 bucks shipped, as opposed to the more-usual price I've seen of 30-45. So I'll finally be able to get the scans for Keith and the Black Lion head. Only season I'm missing now is season 2 (yellow lion). I'm more comfortable shelling out more cash to finish the set, as opposed to overpaying for two seasons.

Okay... I'm calling this done. If anyone can spot anything glaring I missed...then you just caught something I just fixed. Oops. LOL. *edit* For anyone interested, this ended up being 13968 nodes. Crazy.

FinalCompare (resized).png

Ooh, thanks for pointing out the eyes. Looks like I missed the part that curves back down on the dark gold, or it layered incorrectly. I'll check it. I already fixed the cheek gouges and there is actually a spot at the very bottom middle that I fixed also, you can see that there'ss some shading that was missed.

Really...I try to be as close to the original as possible. Things like shading and matching colors are the worst part, because when you zoom in, these things are artifacted all to hell by the printing process. Halftones and whatnot...like this is what you see when you zoom into the main blue areas of the lion. Which blue is it? There's probably 15+ shades you're going to be able to pull out of this image with an eyedropper tool. The answer is "Whatever is closest to the average." You find the area between the lightest and the darkest and pick whatever is in the middle, and that's typically 'close enough'.

There's no dedicated way that I've seen to reproduce halftoning type shading like what's in those grey areas of the cheek. Inkscape is pretty versatile in how it handles flat gradients though, and I'm mostly satisfied with that. If I had a better understanding of how 'mesh gradients' worked I could probably make it a *little* closer to how the original looks, but I'm not really sure it's worth the effort, since I'm okay with how the flat gradients can look. Most of the other shading is accomplished by a combination of gradients and tinkering with the blur and opaqueness to get a smooth transition along the edges.

PrintingArtifacts (resized).png

Oops, just noticed I missed some dark shadows on the bottom of the cheek too. lol.

Apparently I had roughed out the shading I'd missed before...and then it got buried under a ton of layers. It was super poorly drawn too, not sure what the crap I was doing.. I just deleted it and redrew that part.

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Time for an update. Things have been kind of hectic at home, so haven't had much time to work. I do now, however, have 4 of the 5 boxed sets, so I've got PLENTY of art to keep things rolling for a while! Here's what I've been working on...big progress today, I basically doubled this one in size. I might be overkilling it in the details...it's already 5600 nodes..

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Today's progress...

GreenLion-WIP-09-11-17 (resized).png

Getting some more definition now.. I'm really looking foward to finishing this one and going back to do a few humanoids...it feels like this just takes forever to do one of these lion heads, and it's wearing me out. Finding motivation is difficult sometimes, but work continues... slowly..

Node count: 7035

GreenLionWIP09-19-17 (resized).png

I wasn't going to post anything else on the Green Lion until I was done with the outline, but I noticed I've reached a crazy point on this today..it's now just over 10000 nodes. Here's where I'm at as well as a closeup of the detail on the face. The source art on this lion shows a lot of wear and tear, so I'm trying to preserve most of that, but it's pushing the required amount of attention to detail through the roof. Clean lines take a lot less points to chart out.

GreenLionWIP09-23-17 (resized).png

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WRISE FROM YOUR GWAVE

Life has been busy, what can I say. I'm still not done with the Green Lion, but at least progress is still being made. This thing is out of control... it's more complicated than anything else I've done. I have a single path that makes up about 50-70% of what's drawn here, and this is 20649 nodes. YES. TWENTY. THOUSAND. NODES. And I'm still not done with the keylines! >_<;;

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Just gonna leave this here...

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I'm officially saying the keylines are done on this one. Time for some color...thank christ! 28455 nodes was the final count on this part..

Open at full size to see the details.

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I'm so lazy. =(

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I might be slower than glass flowing, but I'm persistent! Thanks for the kind words, appreciate it.

Alright...I've been tearing this up this afternoon trying to get as much done as I can because I know I won't get much done the next few days. Current progress....the pink is unfinished areas. I use a neon contrasting color to see where I might have missed gaps due to extensive use of blur and opacity for shading effects.

ColoringProgress03-15-18.png

Come back in 4 years. LMFAO!!

Building pinball is hard, but art is harder for ME. I knew this was going to likely be the longest part aside from learning Python...but no regrets. I'm happy with what I've done so far...maybe not the timescale...but the quality of it.