Good topic. But people like Lyman & Keefer have proven to me that code is more important; i.e. TWD, WOZ... these same guys take typical fan layouts that have been designed over and over again and make them over the top fantastic games; i.e. AC/DC & LOTR.

Another way to look at it; how many pins has Lyman Sheats programmed in the last 5 years depreciate in value? And how many non-Lyman stern games have. 'Nuff said. The sad part is these other programs are more than capable of doing what these 2 programmers can do, but either they don't have the desire, or their bosses do not give them adequate time...or perhaps it's both.

I gotta go with code. Can you add a poll?

Cash box.

For me, it never lies. Customers like a game or not.

LTG : )

Neither. I want my games to have hot voluptuous women pictured on them in striking poses, and I'm not talking some generic Playboy machine. The rest is just details.

A game to me has to have some kind of rhythm or rhyme to it, multiple choices is always good even if it's hard to figure out. So, I'd go with code over design. A game can be fun to shoot on, but if you can demolish it in a day, it doesn't mean a lot without decent code.

Design first and foremost bc a crappy ,clunky table with good code dont mean much if its not fun to shoot.... case in point avengers le has pretty good code now but it dont shoot very well unless its been modified and dialed in to not be so dam clunky.
Look at older pins (late 70s early 80s)that really didn't have alot of code but had great design and are just fun to shoot.

Design. . .code is nice but you can only shoot for the colored LED shot so many times.

Yes!

Code

They're inseparable and must compliment each other.

Code! It can make a good design terrible. Example for me was Metallica. Didn't like it at all at first, because of the code. Now I bought one, because the design & code is perfect.

Either one can ruin the other, but certain designs can't be salvaged by code. The Avengers could get amazing code, and it was always be a stinker. The Hobbit is boring, and code isn't belong much. On the other hand, many Data East games with decent layouts are held back by lame code, especially in their alphanumeric days.

But if I had to pick just one, I'll say that design is more important overall. I would rather play a lame code KISS than a clunky Avengers.

Code, all the day

When i bought my Batman (tdk) it had very early code, the game was a dud just out of the box
updating the code to the latest at the time made the game playable, but still not great

It took stern two years of updates to make it good

"Equality."
You cannot have one without the other.
Good design and bad code = bad game
Good code and bad design = bad game

Updated code does not save poorly designed games, EVER.
Enthusiasts praising singularity of code are forgetting the wonderfully designed games of the 80s with simple but solid rules (ie "the code").
EBD? Black Knight? Firepower? Eight Ball? Fathom? Centaur? Xenon? Vector? Paragon?

The list is quite long.
You don't need complex deep code to be "good", you simply need "good code".
What this simply means is everything designed has to actually work correctly, not "sort of right". Scoring, features, and modes no matter how simple or complex.
There is a reason classics are classics, long after other games fade.
People call old games code simple, but I can tell you that there are very few people on these forums that can decompile and rewrite code for any game from 1980-1999 and beyond.

"A poor pinball machine ends up in a landfill, a good pinball machine tells a story that is remembered every time you play it."

I don't think you can truly evaluate a game unless both code and design are together for newer pins. Old school eighties pins had simpler code but great layouts that were less dependent upon each other.

If you have a well-designed machine with bad or unfinished code, it can be improved amazingly with new and better code.

You can't change the physical design and layout later if it sucks.

Code is key, but code is fluid. Design isn't.

RM

DESIGN always. if it doesn't feels good, no amount of code will fix that.
Nowadays code can be re-jigged anytime

Both are important but I give the edge to code. A game can have a cool looking playfield but none of that matters if unique and deep isn't there. As newer games continue to cost more and more code support has become a lot more important to me.

I remember backing out of The Hobbit twice only to be sucked back in and purchased the game after seeing how much better it played with version .80x code. That was about 6 or updates ago and a ton has since been added to the game. Today it's one of my favorite games.

Also, code that is deep with unique rules is also very important. I think there's a big difference with a game loaded with mainly "super ramps", "super pops" and "super loops" type modes (hitting the same shot over and over again) versus a game that works the entire playfield in unique ways.

Design.

Code can be modified post facto and redeem a machine to some extent, but good code won't save an inherently poor design.

Design needs to be a certain level of 'not horrible', but I'd take a game with great code and meh design to a game with great design and meh code.

This!!!!!!! If either is bad the game has no chance of ever being a top 10 game. Great code can make up for a lot of things and can make old layouts feel fresh and new again but it cannot fix poorly designed shots or bad toys.

A perfect example to me is TWD. A lot of people love this game but I hate the layout and think there are major design flaws plus the toys all suck. The game has killer code though. The code wasn't enough for me to keep it and I don't miss it one bit.

Code can always be updated but a poor table design will never get better.
Mike

This is almost like what came before?... the chicken or the egg kinda of question. It takes good design and great code. It takes two to tango. If we take GB for example, the design really made the first impression and boosted sales even before a first code update. Even with code 1.10's poor reception, people are still buying in droves. Mind you design can only bring you so far. Eventually strong code has to be implemented to complement the machine or else the games turn into polished turds. Design is more important for operators because they want people to step up to the machine. For the collectors, code becomes more important as time goes by.

You can't have one without the other.
GOT Pro for example, suffers from poor graphical design, that backglass is absolutely horrible not to mention the look of the playfield. It was overall a miss. While code is good, I only played it once on location. I can't stare at it without feeling let down. in other words sales would have been better if the theme would have been darker and more in line with the look and feel of the show.

1. Design
2. Code

A bad layout with great code is a good game -- you want to play again to see more of what the game offers in terms of build up and modes. A great layout with bad code is usually an average game. But great code and great design. . . that is a great game.

Cargument coming... sorry in advance

To me that is like asking what is more important for a high performance car... the wheels or the engine. The answer is you can't have a high performance car without both as each is critical to achieving high performance. The same is true for an extremely fun pinball machine in my opinion.

Those games had good code for their day. If you sold a game today with code that simple it wouldn't do well. I think WNBJM & its Pabst redesign showed simplicity doesn't sell well today unless it has a price to match.

Code is king now but it's like asking if your heart or your lungs are more important. If either isn't good the whole package fails.

Yep!

Design is most important. That involves layout and theme. Once it's there, it's permanent.

Code can be changed, although we are at the mercy of the coder.

The more popular the game is, the better the chance for good code. (at least we hope).

There are a lot of elements that go into a game. Design, code, sound, dots, artwork....

Some games have one area that really stands out, but is lacking in others. Other games do fairly well in most areas, but are average overall. And a select few blow the roof off all areas and are just fun every time you step up to it.

Design,
it always comes first.
Look at the sketches that Harry Williams did.
For your cargument you are not going to slap high performance wheels and a engine on a body that looks like its a 1978 station wagon.
you are going to design the body first and then worry about he rest

--Jeff

I used to think design was king then I played TWD. Out of the box it was a crapfest. I hated it and honestly thought there was no saving it. The design, I thought, was beyond repair. After it got a code update, I now think it's one of the better Sterns made. The game is an absolute blast to play and I would like one in the collection some day. That clearly showed me the importance of code.

Sorry, can't add a poll after the fact. It needs to be added while you are creating the thread.

You're confusing art for design. GB has terrible design (flipper gap, droopy flippers, tight shots, airballs, drops too close, ramps that don't work right, Slimers that don't register) but fantastic art. GOT has an uninspired bit pretty good design - it's a fast and flowy Steve Ritchie game....but terrible art.

ah yes. The only thing I really hate about GB is the drop targets but mind you once you get the hang of it it becomes more of a challenge than a nuissance. Airballs definitely bad. Apart from that I get a kick out of it. And that flipper gap must be the best thing that has happen . I've learned to really nudge the game now and has made me a better player overall. Especially on other games with the regular gap, I tend to drain alot lesss now.

Bingo. Not only does the linear nature of the modes make the game less exciting, the modes themselves don't "mean" anything. "We Got One" ...so each shot makes the car turn corners? Zzzzz. "Who Brought the Dog" ...each shot makes Rick Moranis continue to run? Zzzz. "Spooked Librarian" ...each shot stops books from floating? Zzzz. There's nothing satisfying/cool/funny to any of the mode shot hits. Think of modes on any other game and how they work and react to the player. In LOTR, if you start the Warg mode...each shot is a Warg and you see them get killed on each shot. Or on the Ents mode, each shot hits a "wall" and then the Ent throws a rock at the wall. It all ties together for a more satisfying experience. Or on FGY...Ipecac mode - each shot to a character makes them puke with a funny animation, call out, and light show. Sexy Party, each shot gets a funny callout ("One sexy girl! Two sexy girls! Oooh, I'm so cheeky!" and more girls follow Stewie on the DMD. ..and of course, the modes are randomizable and stackable with other fun events. GB seems to be missing all this fun and personality, which is a shame considering how funny the movie is. More randomized events, loosely based on the films but augmented for satisfying pinball modes would have been the way to go.

A clunky design that has few smooth shots can't be saved by good code.

You need both.

But I thought that's exactly what LOTR is. Clunky shots with a few smooth ones and completely saved by code?

Just buy pins designed by Borg & coded by Lyman. Then you don't have to worry about either

I don't find any of the early DMD Sterns all that "smooth" and I don't really care for LOTR either, but that's my personal preferences. I came into this hobby playing smooth as glass WPC games so I am biased.

As someone who teaches design and architecture for a living... it's all design work. Good code doesn't exist without good design. A better way to think about this is systems (high level, holistic) design, hardware design and software design. Pins have one other facet that other products don't have called game mechanics (rules, scoring) - is also a design.

One other note... a pinball machine is a system of systems. That's where good systems thinking comes into play. So systems thinking is likely the most critical piece.

They're all related.

This is easy becasue you can't fix a bad design.

People have been calling LOTR clunky for years...and I've owned it for about 8 years...and I still don't see the "clunk". I guess it comes from some people hating missed shots hitting post sleeves instead of targets...but any shot made on LOTR is smooth as fuuuuuck - OK, the Gandalf shot has some clunkiness as sometimes the ball will loop and sometimes it'll rattle into the pops...but, it doesn't bother me as it never takes away anything from the player whether it goes to one place or the other. When I get in a groove on a multiball, I'm just like left ramp, right ramp, orbit, ring, flow flow flow flow...LOTR is a really great playing layout IMO.

That being said, mine did need some dialing in to get to this level of smoothness. Had to adjust the ring ramp to shoot the ball dead center, added the stronger PBL flipper coils, replaced the plastic Stern post sleeves with Cliffy sleeves - which definitely reduces "clunk" on post hits...but anyway, I love how my LOTR plays & the code rules

Code and layout could both be dealbreakers to me. One of them not right, no buy.

And if i buy a nib once, the theme has to be awesome also.

Not sure how many will get this. But....IMG_20161104_003835 (resized).jpg

Couldn't agree more.

If you gotta choose between code vs design, give me great code every time. TWD is a good example of this (although the design has grown on me a lot once I owned it vs playing on location).