Thanks Herbert. I appreciate you taking the time to basically give me a full review! I feel honored to have my game compared to actual retail pinball games. I own Devil’s Crush and it’s amazing - I love that background music! Also, if you haven’t played it, you should check out William’s Pinball Hall of Fame (or something like that) - it’s the best pinball simulation that I’ve seen - and it features real-world pinball machines.
I will give some more specific responses to your feedback below, but I want to say that I’m done working on this project (at least for now). I already have another project that is now my main focus. That said, I would be willing to partner with someone (you?) and improve many of the points you bring up. There are at least a few other things (mostly internally) that could use some improvement also, but at some point I had to call this project finished and move on. Devil’s Pinball was only my second blender project and half of the reason I made it was to learn more about the bge - the other half was just because I enjoy game development and programming. The fact that I ended up with a decent final product is a bit of a bonus. Anyway, enough rambling.
The ball, once it slows down, does not speed up fast enough for me. At times I am waiting for it to get back into play. This kills the game play in places.
But I do like the control - feels good.
The ball does not feel heavy enough, though.
The table was a bit too easy for me to play, mainly because the control feels very tight to me, yet slow in places.
I know what you mean by the ball going too slow sometimes, or not going near a flipper for a long time - this does start to dis-engage the player. I spent a LOT of time tweaking this and that and the physics are the best I’ve had them yet, but I’m sure there are still improvements that can be made. The gravity is actually more than 3x normal gravity and I believe the mass of the ball is 100.
I had it happen that the ball bounced back into play via the right outlane, when it should have been lost via the bottom. This should be avoided with a gate
Actually, I noticed this happen when I was testing it and I decided to leave it. It pays to never give up on a ball until it goes down the hole!
the plunger feels very slow, and could be sped up a bit.
I played around a lot with this too. I was kinda throwing around the idea of having a skill shot, so I wanted a lot of control in the plunger. I couldn’t really think of a good skill shot idea though and I was busy enough working on everything else. It is annoying when the ball doesn’t quite make it all the way up the lane though. Speeding up the plunger would be an easy edit.
You stick to a pure ‘physically’ correct pinball table design - which is a shame, since Devil Crash and Metroid Prime Pinball show us how much more involving a digital pinball machine can be.
You mean, except for the (unexplainable) upward force on the right side of the table and the fact that the ball can catch on fire? I guess I’m not sure what else I could have done. I haven’t seen Metroid Prime Pinball, but on Devil’s Crush you must be referring to the enemies that march around the screen and can be destroyed with the ball?
there does not seem to be much of a point to the habitrail in the center of the table.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to here. The main ramp? The hole in the main ramp? The doorway to the 3 red bumpers?
some interesting challenges - but I want more.
Thank you. Are you saying you completed them all? I thought some of them were quite tough. You didn’t complete them all in a single game did you? If you did, that’s amazing! A buddy of mine did that…his score was over 50 million for that game.
textures need more work - looks a bit campy in places
By campy do you mean they all kinda look the same? I think texturing is one of my weakest areas in general.
the bumpers at the bottom look too sharp to me
Yeah, I really should’ve softened those corners a long time ago.
that ball desperately needs a convincing chrome look and feel. And a shadow for more depth. This is very important in a virtual pinball machine: the dull-looking grey ball just doesn’t “do it” for me. Check other virtual pinball machines - they all try to get the look of the ball exactly right.
I know, it looks generic and bland. I never really worked on this past the basic Material settings. One of the things on my list of things to figure out is how to do a mirror texture in the bge. If I figure that out, I think the ball would look much more realistic.
sound needs a lot of work. Some sort of music playing in the background would help as well.
Yeah, sound design is definitely an even weaker area than textures for me. This is actually the most work I’ve done on sound design in a project. I know there’s a lot of room for improvement when it comes to the sound effects in this game. I thought about having background music, but I just didn’t know what to use.
I did get that "one more time’ feeling.
Thanks! You just made it all worth it!