Why not solve that issue by producing a finished machine for people to buy instead of relying on others to finance your game?

Clearly, the pre-paid system is totally broken. If you really believe in your game, why not do what CPR did - and every other business since the dawn of time does - and get personal loans, load up credit cards and borrow money from family to bring your vision to life?

If you don't want to take that risk, why should others take it for you?

Don't get me wrong - WOOLY is certainly one of the best homebrew games I've seen and could proudly stand next to a Stern, once it's totally finished. But asking others to risk their money is clearly a bad business model and it would suck if you got dragged down with all the others.

The point is, a customer shouldn't have to *trust* you. The list of people they've trusted so far have pretty much all failed them. Why is it the customer's responsibility to take *any* risk at all?

Perhaps the problem you're having in getting people to pony up a $1K deposit is precisely *because* they've been burned enough already on this backwards financing model.

Maybe you'd have no problems selling 100-150 machines if someone could just order it finished and ready to go, and not have to *trust* you.

If you can't get the seed funding together to make it happen, maybe it shouldn't happen.

Good point, maybe you only need 50 people at $10K each, then start regular production from that point forward and the first 50 get a piece of the company or something.

Can't imagine it's a high margin business though.

Yeah, I could get behind that model way more than "maybe we'll make it, maybe not, it's your risk to take".

Or, price the game based on single unit sales. It costs X to produce one game - if you want it, that's the price. No limited editions, no minimum units, just "give me this much and I'll send you a game in X weeks".

Like a custom couch!

The DP shitstorm will likely spill over into WOOLY. Maybe they need to get out front and look at alternative sales methods. At least that was my motivation.

Easy - get financing from investors, get bank loans, etc. Just like a regular company. Then sell the finished machines.

Price and pre-pay.

It's not easy to get that money, but it's as simple as what I said.

The days of pre-orders are over. Back to the old-fashioned method of making something *then* selling it.

My wife gets very professional voice work done for pretty cheap - $25/minute of audio on average - from elance.com.

They could get all the callouts done by pros with proper sound booths and properly recorded levels for less than a grand I bet.

I mean, they've taken it this far, why not go that little bit further?

Also, the "couch" method could work - charge more but build them on demand.

Put one in at SS Billiards and Modern Pinball NYC! With signs saying "Buy this game!"

But, building those 50 machines and getting them out there would probably do more to get the next 50 than anything else.

You mean a Cimarron? A Chevy Cavalier at a Cadillac price.

Cadillac_Cimarron_2_--_07-01-2009.jpg

Maybe you should polish up the virtual game and sell it as an iPhone game to help fund the real thing.

Well, to defend Stern, they're not a boutique shop working out of a garage - they are mass producing coin operated equipment that will be used by the public at large so they have a much larger liability issue to deal with.

They have to thoroughly test every aspect of the software to ensure the machine operates as expected, won't burn out coils or lamps due to fault, won't catch on fire, etc. Also, most operators will never update the software from what it came with, so engineering efforts on old games really only take away from new games in terms of their stated market.

I'm curious why a single drop target mech is such a big secret.

The new generation of pin buyers don't even want to take the glass off except to install dolls or retina-searing lighting, I can't imagine many would want to build a game from scratch.

I don't think assembly was the biggest expense here...

I played it at Expo and I wasn't exactly blown away - voicework was flat, display graphics lacked polish. Also the playfield artwork was fuzzy due to low-res printing. Shot well enough.

As a homebrew game it is unquestionably the king of the hill - by far the best machine made in a garage. But it's not exactly the second coming of pinball.

When I looked closely at the playfield I could see the dithering of the CMYK colours, and the keyline was visibly blurry. 300dpi is actually pretty low-res.

Unless there's been a change in the laws of physics and how light refraction works, there's no such thing as an ink printer that prints RGB colour mixes. RGB is a additive light (ie. your monitor which produces light) standard, not ink. Ink *absorbs light*, so it's not an additive process.

RGB is converted to CMYK and ink is applied as a multiplicative process, usually using a stochastic dithering pattern to fool the eye to believe the CMYK mix is a specific colour.

The only way to get true colour is to print spot colours that have been expressly mixed. This is possible when doing screen printing, but generally not with inkjet, which is what I'm assuming your playfield is.

On the WOOLY playfield I saw at Expo, those individual CMYK colours were visible and the keyline - the "K" part - wasn't vector smooth. When you look at 300 (and yes, 400dpi) up close you can see the line edges on curved lines. It's visible. That's why stuff gets printed at 1200dpi and higher, so you can't see the jagged edges. I'm sure the TBL playfields are printed at that res because they were perfect, even up close. Hell, they almost looked screenprinted.

I dont know what your agenda is or why you are so desparate to dump in my thread; but can you go shit in some one else's bowl of cheerios for a while?

Classy. Sorry for offering some constructive criticism to help improve your game if you manage to move forward and plan on making more playfields.

Now that it's in colour, people might be willing to pony up $8K for one.

1) The Pinheck design is open source - nothing stopping you from using it.

https://github.com/LonghornEngineer/Pinheck_Pinball_System

2) There is already a low-cost alternative board set available and working in games. I'm using it for my EM re-theme - it's called Open Pinball Project.

http://pinballmakers.com/wiki/index.php/OPP

That said, the P-ROC system is a mature, battle-tested setup that is much more advanced than either Pinheck or OPP and given the choice, is the go-to system to use. I'm using OPP because I like soldering and it's more cost effective for an EM conversion.

Off-topic, sort of, you seem hell-bent to comment with authority on things you don't really know much about, and do so with some vigor, to the point of trying to shut others down because you're so passionate about the subject. But, it might serve you better to either research the topics more, or realize that you might be out of your depth and comment within that context, rather than with such authority. I know you're a good dude in person, but you really kind of make yourself look bad when you let your passion get the better of you.

Send the Gerbers to one of any number of board manufacturers.

If you don't know how to do that, you have no business doing a custom game and should spend some more time learning about the process.

If you're doing commercial work, you'd be better off using the P-ROC or P3-ROC. Hilton was specifically referencing hobby work.

Probably less because a lot of those "mystery mechs" they didn't want to talk about (ie. single drop targets ) are more readily available.