Pinball Jammin
Competitive Multiplayer Pinball
Pinball Jammin is a two player mix of pinball and Foosball. Each player plays on the opposite side of a pinball table and attempts to get the pinball into their opponent's goal. Experience everything you would expect from a pinball machine including paddles, bumpers, gates, and all the flashing lights and sounds.
The Work
This game was pretty fun to play, and I think had a great idea behind it, but I did make many poor choices during it's development. I do think though that the core idea of this game is something I can expand upon later and improve upon.
The things that went well for this game was the VS gameplay in a pinball/Foosball fashion that hasn't been done before. Adding the sliding paddles gave players more agency over the ball and sometimes more of a competitive edge. I think the use of tilts was also a great decision because it pulls inspiration from pinball, but it also gives the player agency over the ball even if it isn't near one of their paddles. I never wanted a player to feel idle for too long and feel like they couldn't influence the game.
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There were a couple of poor choice I made in this game however. The first was the choice of Red and Green as the player colors as these for one don't look that great together, and two are part of the most common color blindness. The way the screen was split was also a failure as it makes it very hard to read what's going on, it probably would have been better to not split the screen at all. The UI as a whole is not that fantastic other than the main menu. I did like the way that turned out. The scoring didn't have enough fanfare or time for the players to recoup before the ball was reset and the next bout began.
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There were a couple challenges I faced when creating this game. One was my understanding of the Unity physics engine. Because this was a very physics based game I had to rely on how it would behave. One of the issues I had was the pinball itself would sometimes tunnel through the paddles if had gotten enough speed. This didn't matter if I had continuous detection on or not or if I extended the thickness of the paddles collision. I ended up having to limit the ball's maximum velocity to prevent this behavior because it felt really bad when someone sent that ball to your final blocking paddles and the ball went right through them and your opponent scored.
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This is one of those games that I've done that I occasionally look back on and think about remaking now that I have improved my skill set since I made it.