Two pinball tables, no image files: Paddlewheel Royale and Nova Foundry
VoltCade now has two full pinball tables, drawn entirely in code. This is what is on them, how their modes share a leaderboard, and what it took to make pinball work on a phone held sideways.
Pinball is an odd fit for an arcade whose games are drawn from rectangles and lines. A table is a physical object: wood, chrome, plastic, lamps. We built two anyway, and they were made to look as different from each other as we could manage.
Paddlewheel Royale
The first table is set on a Mississippi riverboat casino at midnight. It is the one game on the site drawn with realistic materials (wood, brass, chrome, felt and lit plastic inserts) instead of neon. The layout is a full one: three pop bumpers, slingshots, the A-C-E lanes, a bank of drop targets, four suit targets, a scoop, two orbits, and a wooden ramp that feeds a spinning paddle wheel. Locked balls ride in the wheel until multiball releases them.
The rules are real pinball rules, not a score counter with bumpers. You light the lock with the suit targets, lock two balls on the ramp and start All Aboard multiball for jackpots and a super jackpot. The Royal Flush drop targets light missions at the scoop. There is a skill shot, a bonus multiplier, a kickback, an outlane save and extra balls. A panel beside the table, the Captain's Log, always shows what each shot is currently worth, because a pinball table you cannot read is just noise.
Nova Foundry
The second table goes the other way: a deep-space star forge lit in cyan and magenta, with a white-hot star held in spinning rings at its centre. That star, the Core, is the main toy. Its containment field turns shots away until something is lit there, so the table is about setting the Core up rather than aiming at the middle and hoping. Light the lock, trap two balls inside, and it releases them for Ignition multiball. Four missions start at the Core, and finishing all four forges the star.
Three modes, one leaderboard
Each table has three modes. On Paddlewheel Royale they are Classic (three balls), Blitz (three minutes, unlimited balls, double scoring) and All In (one ball that starts in multiball). On Nova Foundry they are Classic, Blitz (a three-minute clock with endless balls) and Meltdown, where shots feed the Core's clock and heat raises the multiplier.
Every VoltCade game has a single leaderboard, so modes that score on wildly different scales would make the board meaningless. Nova Foundry's three modes are balanced to land in the same scoring range for that reason. It is a constraint worth designing around: a mode is only worth adding if a good run in it can sit fairly next to a good run in the others.
Pinball on a phone held sideways
A pinball table is tall and a phone held sideways is not. Shrinking the whole table to fit makes the ball a few pixels wide. So in landscape the camera follows the ball, and a small map of the whole table stays on screen so you know where the ball is about to arrive. Held upright, the table fits, with its lamp columns beside it. The controls are the obvious ones: tap either half of the screen to flip, and hold the right half to launch.
Flashing lights, within limits
Pinball is the genre most likely to flash at you. Event lighting on Paddlewheel Royale stays within two flashes a second, and the table turns off shake, flashing and spinning effects when your system asks for reduced motion. Nova Foundry honours the same setting.