Brendan's Pinball and Slot Machine Design Journal

1 week until G2E

2009-11-09T16:24:00.000-08:00

So I didn't think I'd actually get nervous, but it's just dawning on me that going to G2E is going to be the most important part of my career. My goal is to make as many connections as I can and hopefully find a game company that can use me after school. I want to succeed in the gaming industry more than anything in the world and will work as hard as I can to achieve this goal. That's a promise.

Meet me at G2E!

2009-10-08T16:15:00.000-07:00

I'll be attending the Global Gaming Expo and hoping to meet people in the slot machine design business. Please email me at PinballBrendan@gmail.com if you'll be attending because I'd like to setup some connections before getting on my flight!

My website is done!

2009-08-17T16:32:00.000-07:00

Check it out!

http://www.brendanbailey.net/

Where've I been?!

2009-07-25T14:12:00.001-07:00

So it's been a while since my last post... Well, it's because I had to finish up spring semester which got a little chaotic toward the end, but things have settled down now. I'm working on a website for myself that will display my graphic and music portfolios. I'll post a link when it's done!

I also got a new job designing flash games for education, which has been pretty awesome so far. Here's what my partner Mike and I made in our first few weeks (I did graphics and sound, he programmed). Keep in mind this is for education and there is an online lesson accompanying it, so it may seem a little ambiguous:

http://www.ekimgram.com/director/Floor%20It.htm

(You will need Adobe Shockwave player for this to run)

The Blue Vs Pink Soundtrack

2009-03-13T13:50:00.000-07:00

I was kicking around the idea of posting the music I wrote for Blue Vs Pink, and then someone suggested that I do it, so here it is:

Main Theme

Lock Is Lit

Multiball

Quick Multiball

High Score

Comments Welcome!

Where to download my Future Pinball Tables

2009-02-10T11:04:00.000-08:00

So I got an email from a fan of my games looking to download some of my older releases. You can find every table I've released for Future Pinball (as well the work of many other talented table designers) at this excellent site:

http://fprelease.free.fr/

Just click on "tables List" at the top, and then search for "Pinwizkid" under authors. This site hosts the files, but you will need to register with them to download (free of course). They also list links where you can download the files on other sites (some of which are dead, or also require registration).

Inspiration from Comic Con 2009

2009-02-07T18:56:00.000-08:00

I just got home from the new York Comic Con and it was amazing! I didn't buy anything, but I came home with something more valuable than any of the tangible goods that I could've bought - inspiration. It was so enlightening to be able to just talk to the artists about their process. I couldn't believe how friendly they were andafter seeing all of the different styles and portfolios, I just have to get back to drawing. Maybe I'll get back to drawing as much as when I drew this:

Metal Slug Super Vehicle 001 by ~Pinwizkid on deviant ART

Tools of the Trade: Renoise

2009-02-06T11:37:00.000-08:00

So I have a tendency to write music. I also have a tendency to use Renoise. I usually do these two things together because Renoise. is. the. greatest. thing. ever.

What is Renoise? Renoise is a piece of music software that allows users to utilize the same state of the art audio plugin technology that all of the $500+ music production suites boast about.

Wait, What's a plugin? A plugin is basically extra software that can be "plugged in" to enhance the capabilities of another piece of software, such as Renoise.

Wait a minute, what is Renoise? Oh yea, I didn't tell you what's different about Renoise... You see, Renoise is a music tracker.

Oh geez! C'mon! What's a music tracker?! OK, ok, let me start again...

Back in the late 80's when electronic music was being employed into nearly every video game and pinball machine, a new type of music composition method was invented called "Tracking". Basically, a tracker is a giant graph where music notes and effect notes can be inserted anywhere. When you hit play, a bar scrolls passed the graph from top to bottom and plays the notes when it hits them.

I could explain more about the history of trackers, but I want to skip ahead almost two decades and get back to explaining Renoise, which just happens to be the most highly developed tracker ever made. Ironically though, not alot of people know about Renoise, but those who have used it usually swear by it.

You can write any type of music on Renoise - whatever you input, it plays. Renoise also has tons of built in effects, like reverb and equalizers that you can apply to each track, all of which can be modified as the your song plays. The best part about Renoise is that you don't need anything else to create music, except for some samples (small audio recordings of musical instruments that are increasingly easy to find for free). I'm pretty sure Pro Tools REQUIRES that you have at least some sort of hardware, or you won't even hear anything... lame. As mentioned, Renoise is expandable, as it supports all of the latest form of audio plugins, such as VST instruments.

Now that I think about, there are alot of best parts about Renoise, but I think the BEST best part is that once you know you're way around, Renoise is fun! Oh, and by the way... I forgot to mention that it's free! You can get some additional features by registering the software for $60, which is about one tenth the price of some other "professional" music production software suites.

So, if you're musically inclined, I'd strongly recommend that you try Renoise. You can download it from their site:

http://www.Renoise.com

There's also alot of help files and great community to help you get started. Have fun!

A word or two about slots...

2009-01-26T14:18:00.000-08:00

So I've done a great deal of yapping about pinball, but isn't this Brendan's Pinball and SLOT machine journal? Well, I guess that makes this a good time to tell you about a little dilemma I have when discussing slots... I'm not old enough to play them! Luckily I will be in 2 months.

So how in the world could I possibly want to design slots if I haven't even played one yet? Well, for starters, I'm not being completely honest when I say I haven't played a slot machine before, I just haven't played any American slot machines. A lot of people don't realize this, but Japan loves slot, and when Japan loves something, they REALLY love it. There are believed to be millions of slot machines currently operating in Japan, and manufacturers have to churn them out at an alarming rate because of gambling laws that state that no machine can be operated for a period of more than two years (this law was designed to help the game manufacturers bolster the economy).

Japanese slots are also called "Pachislo" machines, or "skill stop" machines. They get the name skill stop because of the game play feature that distinguishes them from American slots - the player's ability to stop the reels when he or she wants by the use of push buttons underneath each reel. The good thing about pachislo machines is that they are pretty fun to play, even though there's no chance of winning anything once they're in your home. The bad thing is that almost every machine is identical as far as gameplay is concerned (save for a few high end models).

The other good thing about Pachislo machines is that they are DIRT CHEAP once they have served their two years of operation in Japan. I have 6 of them (purchased with the money that probably could have bought 1 old pinball machine). I love seeing people's faces when I tell them how inexpensive these machines are after they guessed that they probably cost thousands of dollars. Anyway, to get back to the point, this is how I have been able to play slot machines. These Pachislo machines offer a variety of beautiful artwork and outrageous bonus round music (no game is complete without this). Some games, like the SNK Metal Slug machine I have feature video displays that show incredibly detailed animated cartoons as you play. It's difficult for Pachislo designers to really innovate these games because they all must be the exact same size (in order to fit into the hundreds of already establish pachislo parlors) and have various other Japanese gambling laws that dictate their payout limits.

That's where American slots have an upper hand. There are no restrictions on a game's size, shape or content, and payouts are usually regulated by the state government (I'm not 100% sure about this, since it's a boring legal issue). I wish I could say more about American slot machines, but all I know is that IGT has been leading the way with design innovations that have made slot machines more popular than ever. I believe I read somewhere that there is more money in the slot machine business than in major league baseball! I think I'll eventually write a bit about IGT's Back to the Future slot machine that came out in 2004 because from what I've read, it clearly exemplifies the kind of design innovation that I would want to explore in designing a game.

Blue Vs Pink is done!

2009-01-25T12:37:00.000-08:00

So about a year ago I started to write some very retro sounding arcade style music using Renoise. I had written in this style quite a bit, but at the time I was primarily writing mostly modern techno sounding stuff. I just felt like writing something that you might hear in a system 11 pinball game, and what I wrote would eventually become the main play music of the most complex, and certainly most original Future Pinball table I have made to date.

I really can't explain why I named the game "Blue Vs Pink." I remember seeing a website that had a really 'techie' look to it with mostly blue on one side of the site and mostly pink on the other. I loved the design of it and it somehow inspired a pinball game design in my mind. The major design feature of the game is that there are two scores, one for whatever the player hits on the blue side and one for the points racked up on the pink side. I decided that since the game had been inspired by abstract web graphics that the game itself would also be completely abstract, containing no recognizable objects or characters.

I had one major goal with this table and that was that it be 100% original. I felt capabale enough to produce everything it needed to have, and since my previous Future Pinball tables were all based on video games, I wanted to break free from "borrowing" resources. During the summer of 2008 after having written the other 4 pieces of the soundtrack, I drew the design and created it in Future Pinball. In order for the game to be "fair", each side of the playfield had to be exactly the same, making the design almost perfectly symmetrical. The whole process of designing the table and the graphics took about 2 months.

While at work, I had learned to use a software called Boris Red, which is a special effects program used to make motion graphics. I used Boris to make about 20 video animations that would be played on Blue Vs Pink's playfield to alert the player of what to shoot at and what awards he had obtained. I hit a bit of a roadblock with some technical difficulties trying to get the animations to work in Future Pinball and after what amounted to be a few months of frustration, I decided to continue with the game and come back to the animations after the initial release.

Over winter break, I feverishly worked to program almost the entire game (I am NOT an experienced programmer, so the coding always takes longer than I would like it to). I released a release candidate of the table on January 1st, 2009 and it was VERY well accepted by Future Pinball players.

As planned, I returned to address the screen animation issues I was having. By cutting the frame rate of the animations in half, I was able to implement all of the animations smoothly without any frames being dropped (which was precisely what was going wrong earlier). A new version of Future Pinball had been released on Christmas day, so I'm sure the update may have fixed some issues as well.

I fixed a few bugs and made some general improvements based on player feedback and released V1.0 of Blue Vs Pink on January 24th, 2009. I won't be updating this table unless there is a serious bug or gameplay issue that needs to be addressed.

You can download the table at:

http://www.4shared.com/file/82342655/c5 ... plete.html

You will need to download Future Pinball in order to play the table, which can be downloaded here:

Http://www.futurepinball.com

Screenshots at:

http://s171.photobucket.com/albums/u303 ... BVPSS6.jpg

You can join the discussion about this table on the Future Pinball forums here:

http://www.futurepinball.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=3922

I hope you enjoy playing Blue Vs Pink, it was a lot of fun to make!

A Recount of My First Pinball Machine

2009-01-21T20:07:00.000-08:00

The two arcades near me that I used to be able to play pinball at had closed by the time I was 7 or 8 years old. It was actually quite devastating.

It was around January of 95' or 96' that I saw an ad in the newspaper with a pinball machine in it. It was for a home amusement retailer located in Riverhead NY, appropriately named "Amusement Warehouse." They were having an after Christmas sale. Riverhead was about 20 minutes from where I lived, so I was able to convince my dad, who also loves pinball, but not quite to caliber that I do, to take me to the store to see what they had.

We get there and it is a moderately sized white building off the main drag with some neon lights in the window that read "Pool Tables", "Pinball", and "games", so we knew we had found the place. We went inside and found the main showroom to be incredibly small, yet very full for its size. There were three pool tables stacked on top of each other (otherwise there'd be no room for anything else in this tiny space). There were about 4 pinball games setup. Larry, the owner, welcomed us and we told him we were interested in pinball machines. He showed us how to turn the machines on, which was an incredible new piece of pinball knowledge I had not yet acquired. The first game we played was either Devil's Dare or Gorgar. It had an evil devil theme and a single level playfield, but I can't remember which one it was. This was also the first time I had seen a pre-1985 pinball machine and was shocked to see the simplicity that the older games had. While I was playing, my dad made the comment that my mom would probably not like having a game based on hell in the house, and this is when I knew that getting a game was even a possibility.

We moved on to the next game in the row. It was a brightly colored game with a simple design. It had thick flippers with yellow rubber bands on them and inlanes that consisted only of a thin steel wire. It was called "Lectronamo" by Stern. It was just right. There was a price tag on the machine for $550. My dad asked if that was the sale price, and Larry replied "$400". Lectronamo was ours.

On the way home, we stopped to visit my paternal grandpa's burial site at Calverton national cemetary. We got to the site, and my dad said out loud, "Well Dad, we bought Brendan a pinball machine." I was ecstatic.

The game was delivered while I was at school one day, so when I came home I could hear it in the basement. I ran downstairs and just couldn't believe to see it there, even though I knew we were getting it for the last week or so. This was simply THEE coolest thing ever. Period.

So, I'm gonna skip all the details of how much I loved Lectronamo and how I invited all my friends over to see it so we can cover everything that went wrong with the game. Not after a few months (or it may have even been weeks), the game started to blow fuses, which of course meant that the game would not work at all. My dad was actually able to find the blown fuse and replace it, but we were burning through fuses at an inconvenient rate. We put a stronger fuse in it the notorious socket, which may not have necessarily been the best thing to do, but it worked, and the game played pretty well for a while. This was until scary things started to happen...

Lectronamo started to "freeze", just like an old NES game. What I mean is that at random times during the game, the game would cease to operate and would play a hideous droning noise, coupled with all of the displays lighting up "888888". It would terrify me everytime it heppened too. The last straw came a year or two down the road when another fuse blew that killed all of the solenoids in the game (it would still boot up, accept credits, and start games, but that's it). I didn't know that a fuse had blown when this happened, and my dad and I gave up on it for a while.

I got very big into video games around this time, with games like Star Fox 64 and Zelda: Ocarina of Time showing up on the Nintendo 64. Lectronamo sat in silence for quite a number of years. In 2000, I bought Microsoft's "Pinball Arcade" software, which featured excellent recreations of 7 Gottlieb games from 1930's to the 1990's. Pinball Arcade almost instantaneously revived my interest in pinball. I went downstairs, opened up Lectronamo, and began to search the game's backbox and playfield for something that have become unplugged or burned out. I found it within minutes. There was a dead fuse underneath the playfield that I didn't know about. I replaced it and Lectronamo was alive once again. Of course, the "freezing" problem still existed, so it still wasn't 100% yet. Nor would it be, until about 2 or 3 years later (after there were many more games in the basement) when I bought a new pinball product called "The Ultimate MPU Board". This was a replacement circuit board for early Bally and Stern games, and Lectronamo was (thankfully) on the list of supported games. My dad and I put it in and to this day, Lectronamo operates perfectly.

Games have come and gone in my collection, but Lectronamo has been a mainstay in the basement since it was first delivered. Some pretty unique games have come and gone in my collection, like Banzai Run, Hyperball, and Twilight Zone (I will post an entry about the other games I've owned soon), but I'd be lying if I said it weren't a sentimental attachment to Lectronamo that has made it impossible for me to part with it. That and the fact that is a wonderful relaxing game to play from a very exciting era in pinball history, the dawn of Solid State machines.

A Thorough Introduction

2009-01-20T15:33:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone! My name is Brendan Bailey and I have been meaning to make a design blog that focuses on pinball machines and slot machines for quite some time now... Well, I'm finally doing it, and I'd like to start things off by telling you a little bit about myself, followed by a discussion of my perspective on the pinball and slot machine industries.

I'm a little confused as to why I am so in love with pinball. You see, I grew up right smack dab in the middle of the greatest video game rivalry of all time... Super Nintendo VS Sega Genesis, so it seems logical that I, like everyone else in my generation would be far more interested in video games than in pinball machines, right? This, however is simply not the case. I do love video games, and will even admit to being brought to tears by some (Final Fantasy Tactics to name one), but pinball has always been a far more fascinated type of game in my eyes than any of those complicated illusions you see on the screen.

How did this happen? None of my other friends played pinball when I was a kid (which in most respects I still am). I think I was 3 years old when I played my first pinball machine. My dad used to take me to a Nathan's restaurant that had a big arcade attached to it. This particular arcade just happened to have a row of at least ten pinball machines in it. Keep in mind this is around 1991 - 1993, so games like T2 and The Getaway were raking in quarters by the tens of thousands. I'm not sure what game I played first, but Cyclone sticks out as the first game I remember playing.

I was simply enchanted by it. Even at such a young age, I can remember appreciating even the slightest of details, such as how the game's flippers were the fingers of the clown painted at the bottom of the playfield, or some of the memorable lines the barker would shout at you. I can't explain why I loved the game so much, but all I can tell you is that I simply wanted to see the ball interact with the game's features. I wanted to see it ride the ramps, I wanted to see it go on the ferris wheel, and I wanted to see it disappear into the spook house. I don't know why watching a little ball like this was so amazing, but it was.

If we skip forward to 2008, you'll see me hunched over my computer working on "Blue Vs Pink", an original computer pinball game that can be played using the brilliant Future Pinball software. What I can't believe is that I was able to somehow design the game, write original music for it, produce a complete digital art package, and even program the thing to work all by myself. I'm not bragging here, I'm just pointing out that it was my passion for the art, design, and music of pinball machines that somehow lead me to develop enough skill to actually make a complete game on my own (well, at least a virtual one).

So if pinball is so enchanting, so beautiful, and so inspiring, why is it dying? I will tell you why...

People don't care.

When the average person walks up to a pinball machine (assuming they can actually find one), they see 3 things: A shooter, flippers, and a ball. To them, every pinball machine is the same because it has these 3 things. To them, the goal of every pinball machine is the same. To them, the machines don't have a personality - they are simply methods to kill time. My friends in high school were well aware of my pinball hobby, probably because I would never shutup about it. Comments about pinball from my generation ranged from "it's the same everytime" to "pinball is too oldschool" to "I love pinball... on my computer" (a comment that was probably referring to the 3D space cadet pinball game that comes standard with Windows XP).

I was always more than willing to let anyone come over to play my machines (I will make a separate entry detailing my collection, past and present) and would often have random parties where everyone I knew would be invited to come play pinball. Would you believe people from a video game generation who once knew nothing about pinball walked out of my house saying game specific comments like "Man, I love Banzai Run" or even direct quotes from a game's voice overs, like "Own it all" from Monopoly? They did, and what this always meant to me was that pinball can still be adopted by the home game console generation - they just need an outlet to play.

Python Anghelo, a legendary pinball artist/designer responsible for creating some of the most outrageously creative and original pinball games ever, including my personal favorite, PinBot, phrased it perfectly when he spoke at the 2008 pinball expo. "Pinball is not dead," he said. "It's just in a coma."

So, here I am. An aspiring pinball designer in a country that has abandoned one of its greatest creations. If pinball does wake up out of its coma, I want to be a part of its revival. If it doesn't, however, I believe the creativity and innovation that took place in recent pinball history can, and should take place in the slot machine industry.

Joe Kaminkow, a pinball designer from Data East eventually joined International Game Technology (IGT) and took what he had learned from designing pinball games and applied it to designing slots. I won't bore you with the statistics, but IGT flourished under Kaminkow's design expertise. What did Kaminkow do? From my perspective, he changed the goal of a slot machine player from trying to win to trying to be entertained. Kaminkow wanted to make sure that players got a full gaming experience out of the money they spent on playing a game, so that even if they walked away with nothing, they had still been entertained.

Think about the connection between this idea and pinball. In pinball, you put in your money knowing that you will without a doubt not get it back, you get to a play the game, and walk away with nothing but the satisfaction of being entertained. Slot machines should follow this exact pattern, simply with the added bonus that one might actually walk away with something other than satisfaction. I don't believe slot machine designers should focus on jackpots, prizes, or money. They should use these things to heighten the urgancy of gameplay within the game's theme and rules. The main goal of a slot machine designer should be to entertain a player using lights, sounds, music, display animations, game-specific gadgetry, and most importantly, player interaction.

Like pinball machines, every slot machine needs to have a personality so that players will grow attached to a particular machine. Back when I was little, I would look forward to playing a specific machine when going to an arcade. I wouldn't say "I'm looking forward to playing pinball," I'd say, "I'm looking forward to playing Funhouse." THAT is the kind of response that players should have to slot machines. They should walk into a casino and be able to seek out the title they love, and not just any slot machine.

Well, I've rambled on enough for now. There are many topics in here that I will return to in greater detail. Perhaps I'll write some more about my pinball collection through the years, or the other virtual pinball games I've created. I will also definitely be sharing some of my slot machine ideas so that Bally and IGT will call me up one day :)

Thanks for reading my first entry, I hope you enjoyed the read and will come back again!