Digging into the pinball world

OK, we all know what a pinball is, don’t we? That shiny & flashing big table standing into the bar corner, waiting for you to break that record a guy did 10 years ago. Damn. But still, everyone always get really fun time playing pinball — youngsters as elders. BINGO! Here was the starting point of the whole R&D phase: what makes a pinball so cool?

Here at Merci-Michel we always discuss, debate (sometimes struggle) about everything, especially when we start a project. So everyone joined these sessions with his/her own ideas about what a good pinball game should be — the client & us — and immediately we had a first challenge to deal with: the vocabulary.

While discussing, we were all using different words for the same stuff. For example, in french (yes, we are french if you didn’t notice 🇫🇷), we call a pinball “un flipper” but a flipper is a different thing in english. Actually, a flipper is a pinball item and a flipper in french is also “un flipper”… What The French!

The first job has been to dive into dozens of Pinball’s design documents and different Pinball games, in order to find out how to design a cool pinball for beginners as well as tryharders:

Missions to complete

Jackpot & multi-ball (must-have)

A good ball flow around the playfield, meaning a good geometry

Sound design, sound design, sound design!

The dot matrix display

Bonus everywhere

Ramps

Then we mixed them up with what had to communicate the OUIGO — Let’s play Pinball experience: 5 destinations to be highlighted based on print ads and a TVC (work by Nikopicto).

Here was the starting point! We might start designing a pinball now.

Benchmarking

How to design a pinball? What makes it cool? We had to test several pinball games, in order to feel how the flippers should react, how the ball should bounce against the walls, how bumpers should kick the ball and so on.

Schematics from Apollo 13 Pinball manual

Best parts in the pinballs we played, real or virtual, were:

Having a ball saver — being a noob has it good parts 😇

Taking a ramp 🎢

Kicking balls everywhere in multi-ball mode 🎊

Achieving a mission 🎉

Winning a jackpot 💰

Discovering modules as the wizard — FINAL BOSS! 👹

Designing the layout

Ok, the research work is done: we have a precise set of cool features in mind. Also, at that moment, Rosapark told us what key visual elements would be in the TVC, so we had to integrate some of those.

To keep going, we gathered the features and the key visuals into a design document. We were inspired by existing pinball manuals and schematics.

Then we wanted to have the big picture. So we started to draw a layout like the draft 7 (the first acceptable draft). And after discussing about the elements to integrate, we had this almost final layout draft 12.