Transcript
Speaker: Thanks for tuning in to the Loser Kid Pinball Podcast.
Speaker: We are on episode 116.
Speaker: I am Josh Roop.
Speaker: With me, my co-captain as always.
Speaker: Scott Larson.
Speaker: And Scott, did you see on Facebook that Zach Menny is promoting a share and win post?
Speaker: If you take a picture of something you've bought from him and you put it in his comments, even if you haven't bought something from him, he's giving away free stuff right now.
Speaker: And who doesn't want free pinball stuff, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No, absolutely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I shared it because even though we're, we're sponsored by him, I still want to win and there would be no conflict of interest whatsoever.
Speaker: Definitely.
Speaker: I'm going to take a picture of my Foo Fighters because that's what I got in the last week or so.
Speaker: But yeah, check them out, flipping out pinball with Zach and Nicole.
Speaker: Many awesome, awesome company.
Speaker: We love dealing with them.
Speaker: Scott, we have some awesome guests on today.
Speaker: Will you please tell us who is joining us today?
Speaker: Well, first off, I would like to say part of my pinball memorabilia display, I'm going to pull out two of my favorite things that I have.
Speaker: And the first one is my cassette that is Total Nuclear Annihilation.
Speaker: And the best part about it is when I packed it,
Speaker: to come home after Scott gave it to me, it got crunched a little bit.
Speaker: And so it has the crack in it, which is that is anybody who grew up in the eighties.
Speaker: That's every single one of your cassettes.
Speaker: And I also have this one too.
Speaker: So I do love that.
Speaker: This has the retro feel and our guests are,
Speaker: Definitely rule the eighties vibe.
Speaker: This is Scott, the Nisi who hit in his day job, he works for pinball life and in his Batman nightlife, he actually designs games.
Speaker: And along with him, we have Michael ocean who has done a lot of coding for games, especially,
Speaker: these homebrew type games and these other games that it's basically anything that's not Stern and Jersey Jack, like the high volume people, this is our area here.
Speaker: And so we are super excited because they are doing a reboot.
Speaker: Well, not a reboot.
Speaker: They're doing a soft relaunch of a game that we have heard about, but now it is time to push it to the front.
Speaker: We are talking about Final Resistance with Scott and Michael.
Speaker: Anyway, clap, clap.
Speaker: Yay!
Speaker: Ready to put an applause in there for you?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Hey, thank you guys so much for coming on.
Speaker: So first thing, we are going to talk about Final Resistance a little later, but I still want to get the background a little bit.
Speaker: Let's start a little bit with a recap from Scott, because people are familiar with what you've done.
Speaker: You, you not only do music on the side, but you also did total nuclear annihilation.
Speaker: You did Rick and Morty, and now this is your third iteration.
Speaker: So yeah,
Speaker: Tell me about like working at Pinball Life and then saying, hey, I just want to build my own game.
Speaker: Like, oh, yeah, that seems like where it started, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it's so Pinball Life is kind of separate than all this stuff.
Speaker: So I go to my nine to five.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And it's just, you know, it's just in the same genre of what I like to do outside of work, which is crazy.
Speaker: So, you know, I, I just, you know, in 2015 or something like that, I, when I first started doing, like when I first started building that homebrew, I had already been part of that homebrew community and this homebrew family that we had for many years at that point.
Speaker: And, you know, there's specific people in our little homebrew family that are like, Scott, just build a whole game, like do the whole thing.
Speaker: Like you can do it.
Speaker: Like all of us are doing it.
Speaker: Like, look at this.
Speaker: Let's just do it.
Speaker: And it was at that point, and I'm like, you know, I could probably do this in my spare time.
Speaker: Let's see, like, when I get home.
Speaker: So, you know, I just started attempting – I just did it.
Speaker: I just set myself a deadline for a year and said it has to be playable, like, even in its basic state, a game playable at Expo in one year from right now.
Speaker: And that's – that would happen.
Speaker: And there's – if it wasn't for that homebrew community, honestly, I wouldn't have made that –
Speaker: one year mark.
Speaker: So if at all, I might have given up, who knows?
Speaker: But yeah, so that's kind of where it started.
Speaker: I've done a ton of different stuff than leading off of that and just kept with it, designed a couple more games.
Speaker: And now I focus a lot.
Speaker: A majority of my time is now focused on audio and just sound design.
Speaker: Which you actually got to do for Weird Al, right?
Speaker: I did.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: So I get to take... Weird Al was cool, actually, because I got to take the audio that we already had and...
Speaker: From all of his different albums from all over the years, right?
Speaker: Every single one of these things is mastered differently just because technology has excelled.
Speaker: Well, he started in like the late 70s.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, we had the oldest songs.
Speaker: I mean, Michael, what was the oldest song that we had in Weird Al?
Speaker: I don't really know which one that is.
Speaker: I'd have to go back and look through.
Speaker: I think it's My Balona.
Speaker: My Bologna?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, I mean, I had to go through all of these and just remaster all of these songs.
Speaker: And then, so they're all equal in how they sound loudness-wise and equalizer-wise.
Speaker: And it's just, you know, so that was really fun to do, actually going through and remastering something that someone had mastered that actually went to school for that kind of thing.
Speaker: Because I did not go to school for mastering audio.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that was great.
Speaker: And then doing all the sound effects for it was a lot of fun.
Speaker: And coming up with everything from scratch on it was just really, really, really rewarding.
Speaker: Scott's being super modest.
Speaker: About what?
Speaker: It's not easy.
Speaker: I mean, you know, that game is nuts, right?
Speaker: You've got a, we've got so many different songs and so many different environments.
Speaker: And we just kept saying, Scott, can you make a sound effect that totally works in when it's played on top of this one song, but it could also be played on top of a different song and the mood might be completely different.
Speaker: You got this, right?
Speaker: And Scott would be like, yeah, yeah, no problem.
Speaker: I've got this.
Speaker: And then he did have it.
Speaker: And it was awesome.
Speaker: Well, that was when I learned that you have to make sound effects in key.
Speaker: So sound effects, you got to kind of know where they're going to play, because if they're not in the right key, that with the background music playing, it could sound really terrible.
Speaker: Have you considered using like the Batman things where it's like pop, bow, zing, and you can just put a, you know, something up on the screen?
Speaker: Maybe you can just put it over everything and it doesn't matter?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, sure.
Speaker: Slingshot sounds.
Speaker: No, I think he's saying the pop, bow, and zing have to be in key.
Speaker: So if you're in the key of C, your pow has to be in C as well, you know?
Speaker: Okay, so I do want to bring in, this is your first full game for Multimorphic, which is a different philosophy than building an entire game where you have control over the entire play field.
Speaker: Because the whole point of Multimorphic is that you buy, in some ways, it's like buying a game console where you buy the main system.
Speaker: And the whole point is you can buy these modules that are
Speaker: more affordable.
Speaker: You don't have to buy like a whole $10,000 game.
Speaker: You can actually get it for a reasonable price and you can swap it out.
Speaker: So how did that affect your design process?
Speaker: Oh, it's a big time, big time affection.
Speaker: So here, so listen to this.
Speaker: So
Speaker: When I originally was talking to Jerry about this game, and we can go into detail about this now.
Speaker: We're going to probably talk about this later when we dig into Final Resistance a little bit deeper.
Speaker: But when I went to him with this idea of a game that would convince some of the people that just couldn't
Speaker: that just latched on to certain little things about the P3 being different than a wood, like a wood play field pinball machine.
Speaker: I said, well, we can, the things that disturb people or that are putting off people on this thing are easily fixable.
Speaker: Like it's not anything wrong.
Speaker: It's just, they're not used to it.
Speaker: So things like inserts being persistent, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: A big thing in Final Resistance because those inserts that you see on that LCD are there all the time.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: It's pretty great.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Things, you know, things like I just, I brought back the two flippers.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: just using the two lower flippers, right?
Speaker: Just to make it easy, like for someone so they don't have to think about an upper flipper at that point, right?
Speaker: Stuff like that, just to try and make some traditional pinball people more comfortable on the platform.
Speaker: Because I think once they actually play this thing and give it a chance, they'll realize that there's so much more to it and they'll start going back and looking at the other titles and saying like, this totally makes sense now, you know?
Speaker: I'm hoping, that's the hope anyway.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: So that was like, that's the ultimate goal that I wanted to do as a challenge to myself is make something where someone who just won't give the platform a chance yet actually does.
Speaker: And if it's one person, then I feel great about that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, before we get further down final resistance, Scott, I want to talk to Michael actually real quick.
Speaker: And why don't you tell us kind of,
Speaker: how you got brought in on this project and how long you like, how you even got to P3.
Speaker: We don't, I feel like the community doesn't know you very well.
Speaker: So let's, well, outside of homebrew, but bring us in on that.
Speaker: Enlighten us.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: So way, way back when in the, in the era that Scott was referring to, when we were, you know, a small, you know, homebrew community,
Speaker: there were a few of us who felt sort of empowered by, you know, we said Jerry, you know, Jerry Stellenberg's P-Rock board, right?
Speaker: So that P-Rock board, the pinball remote operations controller, basically lets you take the CPU out of a traditional Williams or Stern game, drop in this new board that has a USB port, then you plug that USB port into a computer, and now suddenly you can make the game do anything you want.
Speaker: You could drive the coils and you can light the lights and you could write your own logic.
Speaker: A bunch of us were just blown away by this.
Speaker: It's like, oh, I always wanted to make a game do something other than it was doing.
Speaker: A lot of people light up to this idea like, oh, I would love to tweak this one tiny rule of this game that I don't love.
Speaker: That's not what this is.
Speaker: This is instead, no, you've got to do everything yourself from scratch.
Speaker: And so a lot of us were out there sort of just kind of feeling around, figuring out what was possible, but then also trying to like push the boundaries of what was possible.
Speaker: So at a time when most games were still, you know, DMDs, we were trying to figure out, could we do full screen color?
Speaker: Could we actually like make this work as just a bunch of, I don't know, ragtag weirdos and, you know, people building machines from scratch.
Speaker: And so my background is,
Speaker: predominantly software with very little hardware.
Speaker: I teach computer science by day.
Speaker: And at the time I talked to my dean who was super cool about this.
Speaker: I was like, you know, if we got a pinball machine,
Speaker: in the common area, we could like, I could teach students how to program pinball and it'd be really cool and real time systems and embedded system.
Speaker: And I was expecting this was gonna go nowhere, but we got a T2.
Speaker: We have a T2 in the CS lounge.
Speaker: And for a number of years, I've had students like learn to program and make their own rules and do that stuff.
Speaker: But, you know, I was involved in this group because I was helping
Speaker: Dave Nelson with his Buffy Pinball project, which I wound up writing all the code for, and I was helping Scott.
Speaker: And we were all kind of like trying to figure out how to get the software right.
Speaker: And I decided that since my skill is largely software engineering, I wanted to help sort of build another layer on top of the software that was already there to make it easier for people to make their own games.
Speaker: That became Skeleton Game.
Speaker: A bunch of people, a bunch of games, a bunch of companies actually wound up using Skeleton Game in-house.
Speaker: TNA runs on Skeleton Game.
Speaker: It was super cool.
Speaker: But I, you know, in talking to Jerry and, you know, he was like, you know, you've done amazing stuff for the P-Rock and your help that community has been huge, you know.
Speaker: do you want to help with a P3?
Speaker: And I was like, I totally want to help with a P3.
Speaker: I just felt weird.
Speaker: Like I didn't want to, you know, cause I, I joked that we were all Jerry's kids, but also it was, you know, it's like, Oh, he's the guy who's made all of this possible.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And Jerry for multimorphic is who you're talking about.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yes, exactly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Not Jerry Lewis.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, uh, you know, and, and then I got on board doing some P3 stuff and that was super cool.
Speaker: Um, and then yeah, wound up working on Canon lagoon.
Speaker: I worked on a lot of framework stuff behind the scenes.
Speaker: Cannon Lagoon is super cute and super fun.
Speaker: If you haven't ever played it.
Speaker: I liked it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It definitely like scratches an itch where you're like, okay, just one more game.
Speaker: Like this game is obviously not for me and I'm too cool for it, but just one more game.
Speaker: And yeah.
Speaker: And then,
Speaker: the Weird Al opportunity came around and I was lead developer on Weird Al and got to work with Scott again because he was on sound and, you know, Scott was pitching this game.
Speaker: And I think we very, very quickly had a conversation that was like, yeah, I would love to program a game.
Speaker: Like I would love to program Scott's P3 game, whatever that game is going to be.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And I think that's everything.
Speaker: I think now and now it's now.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I've caught up now.
Speaker: He's also being very modest.
Speaker: Also, Michael has done a ton for the community.
Speaker: He's helped people all over the place, not even just people building homebrews and people who have built homebrews.
Speaker: He's also helped just the random P-Rock people that hop in on the Slack forums or the Slack group.
Speaker: You know, they may just want, they don't even have a PROC.
Speaker: They just want questions answered or something like that.
Speaker: Michael's going to hop in there and say stuff.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: And Michael knows hardware stuff.
Speaker: He knows what H-bridges are.
Speaker: You know, he's good.
Speaker: I don't know what H-bridges are.
Speaker: It's a joke between Michael and I. They make motors spin both ways.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Scott was shocked when I knew that, by the way.
Speaker: Scott was like, why do you know what an H-Bridge is?
Speaker: I was like, I know a thing or two.
Speaker: It's a thing that not many people know.
Speaker: I was this year's old right now when I found that out.
Speaker: And I guarantee there were people who would be listening that just learned that too.
Speaker: Grab your kid's remote control car.
Speaker: Tear it open.
Speaker: There's an H-Bridge in there.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They won't be happy that you tore apart the car.
Speaker: I mean, you won't really.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, it might not go back together, but it's fine.
Speaker: At least it's in there.
Speaker: Kids needs kids need something to talk to their therapist about.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: It's a good point.
Speaker: You'd rather it be that you took apart the car than whatever it's going to be.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: What's your, what's your biggest regret in life?
Speaker: Oh, my dad took apart my electronic car.
Speaker: Or mom.
Speaker: What an H bridge was.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Oh my goodness.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's funny.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So this is interesting now developing also.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Scott, I see your games behind you.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And you obviously have a lot of the games that you have been directly involved in.
Speaker: What about you, Michael?
Speaker: Do you have any games of your own at your home?
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: What do you, what do you got?
Speaker: What do I got?
Speaker: I got a P3.
Speaker: I've got a Star Trek Next Gen, which is a family favorite for theme and for layout.
Speaker: And maintenance.
Speaker: You get a lot of practice.
Speaker: Yeah, it's running.
Speaker: It's running.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: I own a bunch of games.
Speaker: And the reason you own a bunch of Williams now just so that way you've always got something to play.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You'll have something that's working.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So I'm walking down the line.
Speaker: So I've got the P3.
Speaker: I've got next gen.
Speaker: Got Stern Monopoly.
Speaker: Lawler games.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Super fun.
Speaker: Roadshow.
Speaker: Also super fun.
Speaker: Also Lawler.
Speaker: What's next?
Speaker: Oh, Buffy.
Speaker: So the custom Buffy pin.
Speaker: Then.
Speaker: Oh, Revenge from Mars.
Speaker: I feel like I might have another game.
Speaker: Is it weird that I forgot?
Speaker: I've forgotten a game.
Speaker: I forget games all the time.
Speaker: Oh, I have a Judge Dredd that is running custom code because it was part of a project that I sort of abandoned.
Speaker: But yeah.
Speaker: OK, that's cool.
Speaker: A lot of wide bodies.
Speaker: Yeah, that has a surprising amount of wide bodies, yeah.
Speaker: So you heard it here first.
Speaker: The next P3 release is going to be a wide body.
Speaker: It's going to be an expansion module that pushes the back out a few inches.
Speaker: Yeah, the good news is the module box is huge and heavy and hard to lift.
Speaker: But the better news is that you can't physically fit it in your base P3.
Speaker: Oh my goodness.
Speaker: Okay, now Scott, I see your game's behind, but quickly go down what you have right now.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: And so this is, man.
Speaker: So the P3 is first.
Speaker: Let me see if I can do this without looking.
Speaker: Cause we have a, we have a camera running too right now.
Speaker: P3.
Speaker: I've got a TNA.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: The Rick, Rick and Morty.
Speaker: It brought a pin bot 2.0.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: A Tron that only runs Powerballs, and if you put anything other than Powerballs in your Tron, you are an awful person.
Speaker: And a brand new Cactus Canyon LE.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: That's actually a thing that's a little bit out of character for me, but I can explain.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, I actually I just barely completed my Chicago Gaming Company collection in that I just barely committed to buying a monster bash.
Speaker: Oh, so now I'm going to have at least all four of those.
Speaker: The classic ones, I not planning on getting Pulp Fiction, but the four classic ones because I my kids love playing those.
Speaker: So it's and I like playing them, too.
Speaker: I mean,
Speaker: I'm trying to wrap my brain around the fact that Scott just said, I have nothing but power balls in my Tron.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Tron's already brutal as is.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: What else could we do to just make it a little, just a little more kick in the teeth?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Now Scott was involved.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Scott, you are at least partially involved in the pinball Olympics.
Speaker: Am I right?
Speaker: Partially, yeah.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And so if anybody knows about the Pinball Olympics, these are the crazy people who decide to hook up a treadmill and you're supposed to run as fast as you can while playing Junkyard.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I'm just glad I didn't fall and scrape my face off.
Speaker: Well, we change the game every year, so it's not always Junkyard.
Speaker: So don't worry about that part.
Speaker: So it's fine.
Speaker: This time it's going to be Tron with Powerballs.
Speaker: It might be.
Speaker: You never know.
Speaker: I think the only games that don't rotate are Black Hole because it's always going to be inside that
Speaker: that carnival, whatever it is, the spinning tunnel.
Speaker: Spinning thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's, it's orbiter one actually it's in there.
Speaker: I think orbiter one's in there right now.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Make me a liar now.
Speaker: And then I don't know, maybe, you know, it was swap things around.
Speaker: Are you guys going to the Olympics this year?
Speaker: Well, I cannot make it to expo this year because it falls right with our fall break and everybody wants to take that off.
Speaker: And so I could not get the time off.
Speaker: I think I am.
Speaker: I'm taking my son with me.
Speaker: So the agreement is, is if you go, you cannot go in the red room.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Do not go to the back room.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The red rooms.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So you said you were going to sign up for the treadmill challenge.
Speaker: So I'm actually, I wrote your name down here, Josh.
Speaker: Yeah, Josh.
Speaker: Okay, I did it last year.
Speaker: I did it last year.
Speaker: I about died.
Speaker: Like legit, I'm surprised you did not have a defibrillator right there because... Yeah, it's the most intense Olympic event that goes on.
Speaker: Glenn Wechter, a friend of the show, Glenn Wechter, actually...
Speaker: practiced yeah for like two weeks before because he he specifically wanted to win that medal last year and i think he ended up taking second right it was close yeah i i'm not gonna lie to you i actually started a multi-ball but i was out of gas and so i just pretended that i didn't know that i started a multi-ball and so i let it drain that was on the that was on the speed challenge because i am not a speedster so yeah that's that's great
Speaker: It's an incredible experience.
Speaker: We usually get, you know, a few people get sick doing it because, you know, that's just the nature of the beast when you're running at full speed trying to play, you know, whatever game we throw on there.
Speaker: And you also design the medals, right?
Speaker: I do.
Speaker: I design the medals every single year.
Speaker: They're very interesting medals.
Speaker: I'll put it that way.
Speaker: Oh, you mean the one from last year?
Speaker: Well, see, what we do...
Speaker: If you notice the medals, if you go back in time and look at all these medals, the image that's on these medals has something to do with something that happened that year.
Speaker: Family friendly.
Speaker: I'm just saying it's just something to do with something that happened that year.
Speaker: I don't know what that would be.
Speaker: I actually have a medal for the past two years.
Speaker: Do you really?
Speaker: Did you like the one from last year, the house?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Oh, really?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Last year's was easy.
Speaker: It was really family friendly.
Speaker: It was a house with a setting sun behind it.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Very friendly.
Speaker: That was a Chinese logo, right?
Speaker: That was for a Chinese restaurant.
Speaker: It's like a Japanese house with a sun setting behind it.
Speaker: Mixed with the Deep Root logo.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, not necessarily.
Speaker: You see what you want to see.
Speaker: I mean, you can see what you want to see when you look at stuff.
Speaker: The year before that was like a – it looks like a wrestler to me doing like a front flip off the top turnbuckle or something like that.
Speaker: That was actually a picture of Jay, who is the main guy behind the Olympics, flipping, doing a front flip off of his Russian swing boat that he built.
Speaker: So he's got a pontoon boat with a Russian swing.
Speaker: I don't know if you've ever seen one of those before, but it's got a flat bottom on it.
Speaker: Two people hop on it.
Speaker: It's on a rigid structure, like an A-frame.
Speaker: And two people, one person in the back pushes, the other guy pushes back the other way and they get going really powerful when the person's ready to jump off the person on the other side, push it really hard as they jump off and you can launch somebody like an ungodly amount of feet away from the boat.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: I jumped off of it twice and I'm, you know, I'm not really scared of anything, but.
Speaker: You're still in orbit?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm kind of done.
Speaker: You know, I'm not the strongest swimmer on the planet either.
Speaker: You know, I can swim pretty well, but not, you know, when you launch really far away from the boat and you got to swim all the way back, you know, I'm all right.
Speaker: You don't want to do a mile swim back.
Speaker: Yeah, no thanks.
Speaker: That's great.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Now I want to pivot now and I want to talk about Final Resistance.
Speaker: So give me the pitch for Final Resistance.
Speaker: I am familiar with Scott Denisi games.
Speaker: I have certainly played games that Michael has coded.
Speaker: Give me the pitch.
Speaker: Tell me about it.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So I will start and then Michael is going to fill in all the gaps where I just completely drop the ball on the little details.
Speaker: So the pitch.
Speaker: Ready for this?
Speaker: The pitch is, I'll talk about the storyline.
Speaker: The storyline really quick is I wanted to make a game that was based in the future in a cyberpunk dystopian future.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: That, you know, where an alien spaceship is coming to invade a city.
Speaker: The city is already sort of, you know, it's a dystopian style thing where the government has, you know, not really paid attention to the city anymore.
Speaker: They're not really helping out.
Speaker: But the people of the city have kind of kept it alive and kept everything working themselves.
Speaker: And now there's an alien spaceship coming in and invading this city.
Speaker: And it's up to the people of the city to actually save it and kill off these aliens and make them leave.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that's the high-level storyline of this thing.
Speaker: And what you are from a player perspective is you are one of these members of the city.
Speaker: And you're going through different types of waves in order to take out these aliens and take out these alien spaceships that are landing in.
Speaker: So that's the high level pitch of the storyline.
Speaker: Now, when it comes to final resistance being on the P3 platform, this is where it got really interesting for me.
Speaker: The P3 platform is much different than a wood traditional playfield, right?
Speaker: Pinball machine.
Speaker: the bottom third or bottom two thirds of the play field on a P three are, is an LCD screen.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So that to me, I look at this platform and I look at it like as a, as something as like a challenge, right.
Speaker: Can I go in and make a game on this thing that can convince players,
Speaker: people who are very, very traditional pinball people who have not really given the P3 chance yet.
Speaker: Can I convince them to come over, take a look at this game, play some games on it and actually fall in love with the idea that of this platform, right?
Speaker: High level goal on this thing, which is a very, very tough ask because traditional people, traditional pinball people really love
Speaker: the wood playfield, static inserts, everything that we grew up on.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And, you know, they may not give something that looks like something from the future a chance right away just because of that.
Speaker: You know, some people look at it and they think that it's a virtual pinball machine, which it's absolutely not.
Speaker: It doesn't.
Speaker: However, I will say it does have a little bit of elements of like the like the Zen pinball games that I have played before that it has almost like a static play field.
Speaker: But there are animations that jump out at you.
Speaker: And so it's it's kind of a it's a nice bridge to to video games, but it's still pinball.
Speaker: And so I I don't I don't mean that to sound demeaning.
Speaker: I actually think that's a positive thing, especially for younger players who are used to playing video games more than they're used to playing.
Speaker: But that's what, when I looked at your, your game, that's what made me think about those other alternative things.
Speaker: I'm like, actually, this is amazing because a lot of times those Zen pinball games, you can't, you can't do them physically, but this is, this is a way you can actually get a lot of those elements, but still have a physical game.
Speaker: Correct.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We can do anything we want on that lower screen, which is really cool.
Speaker: And with the early P3 games, the teams did do some crazy, crazy stuff on there.
Speaker: And that may, that's a very positive thing for people who will go and play the, and just go and play the P3 and have a good time with it.
Speaker: But very traditional people who don't give it a chance can look at that really quick and go like, oh, there's too much going on.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And then immediately like not go like try and play something else.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So that is something I wanted to break.
Speaker: And I wanted to get those people to actually go and give it a chance.
Speaker: So things like on Final Resistance, the static inserts, things like the score displays are in the back glass on this game, just like in TNA and just like in all these other 80s games.
Speaker: You look up, you see a TransLite, and you see your scores going across the whole bottom there.
Speaker: And they're always there.
Speaker: Michael's even done some really cool stuff with the refresh rates of those scores so that they roll.
Speaker: If you ever stick a camera on a
Speaker: on an old display or something like that.
Speaker: And you can see it kind of rolling because of the shutter speed.
Speaker: He's emulated that so that when you look up at the screen for your score, you can see the rolling effect going.
Speaker: Oh, really?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I didn't realize that was emulated because I'm in the background while I'm interviewing you.
Speaker: I actually have your...
Speaker: your play thing in the background.
Speaker: And I noticed that I'm like, hi, I wonder if those are real like alphanumeric numbers.
Speaker: Oh, thank you very much.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Legitimately.
Speaker: I thought those were just, okay.
Speaker: So they must have laid a translate over.
Speaker: So that's really impressive.
Speaker: Yeah, it's really cool because speaking of the back glass, and this is just something that I talk about a lot, but the LCD that Multimorphic uses in the back box of these things has such deep color depth and really such good contrast that you cannot tell when it's sitting in a line of these games behind me.
Speaker: You cannot tell that that's not a back glass.
Speaker: Hmm.
Speaker: It's so strange to me because I always think of LCDs as gotten like the blacks are kind of faded.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, the colors are a little washed out.
Speaker: And if you look at it at weird angles, it changes and stuff.
Speaker: But that's not the case with this LCD.
Speaker: And it's crazy.
Speaker: That's so that's very surprising and awesome that you thought that those were actual, you know, displays in there.
Speaker: And yeah, thank you again.
Speaker: That's really cool.
Speaker: So, Michael, that was you.
Speaker: Well, I mean, it was we had a really good we have a really good team on this game.
Speaker: Rory, Rory Sanuda, who is responsible for a lot of the visual effects, you know, produce the alphanumeric displays.
Speaker: And then I went nuts programming them as if they were real physical alphanumeric displays.
Speaker: So that way we could actually control all of the segments individually.
Speaker: And, you know,
Speaker: I, my, the first game I play, I remember playing pinball in the arcade was my, my dad, uh, was cyclone.
Speaker: Uh, and I was just like, well, I know what system or yeah, system 11 segments look like, and they've got a role and you know,
Speaker: Skyrim was copying like, no, you don't have to beat yourself.
Speaker: No, no, it looks really cool.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so I was like, I'm going to beat myself up.
Speaker: If we're going to do it, we're going to do it.
Speaker: And technically you could turn it off, but I don't know who would turn it off.
Speaker: Why would you turn it off?
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: You're going for retro.
Speaker: It's new retro.
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: It's great.
Speaker: So going back to the conversation about video game nature of things like this, me personally, I like video game style.
Speaker: And I'm going to explain what that is in a second.
Speaker: But video game style rules in pinball machines.
Speaker: If you take a look at TNA the way it is, it's a very linear rule set.
Speaker: It's kind of almost like you are...
Speaker: it's almost like a Mario Brothers style thing.
Speaker: Going through these levels, you're getting to the end, you're beating the end of it, and then you move on to the next thing and you keep going, right?
Speaker: I like that style.
Speaker: Not a lot of people do.
Speaker: Maybe they do.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I don't know how many people actually like that, but it turns out it was more than I thought when I created TNA because I didn't realize, I didn't actually expect people to like it as much as they did.
Speaker: because it was just some kind of wacky thing that I made.
Speaker: But we did the same sort of thing with Final Resistance.
Speaker: It is sort of like a video game, but very, very pinball.
Speaker: So there's elements of that video game style that you'll see in there.
Speaker: And this was this style of wave, the structure, that wave structure.
Speaker: It was pitched to me when Bowen and I were talking early on about...
Speaker: about what would make a really good rule set that really hasn't been, you know, put down too much on pinball, right?
Speaker: We don't want to just keep going through start mode, collect thing, you know, start next mode, collect thing, right?
Speaker: You know, we want to make it a little bit different with things like power ups and stuff and wave battles, just like in a video game.
Speaker: So Bowen helped you with these rules, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So Bowen came up with the initial concept of the rules and was with us the whole time while we were going through this.
Speaker: And I leaned heavily on Bowen to come up with all these other details.
Speaker: And then...
Speaker: All the little stuff that wasn't filled in all the way, Michael took care of and was recommending things for all these other areas, right?
Speaker: Which is actually one of the most important parts because of how polished this whole thing is now because of that.
Speaker: So they worked a lot on rules.
Speaker: I mean, it's basically a Bowen and Michael combination at this point.
Speaker: And those are two people I trust greatly in that position.
Speaker: So it's like, yeah, this thing turned out just absolutely amazing.
Speaker: But yeah, the software is a huge thing that this thing is, it's going to make it stand out a lot.
Speaker: Definitely.
Speaker: Oh, sorry.
Speaker: No, go ahead, Michael.
Speaker: No, go for it.
Speaker: Oh, I just, right.
Speaker: So Bowen Bowen Karens, right.
Speaker: I mean, he, his knowledge of pinball is so encyclopedic and amazing that, you know, he can tell you what's going to be fun to shoot.
Speaker: He can tell you that might be too easy.
Speaker: People are probably going to abuse that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So he can, you know, he, he can tell you, oh, I,
Speaker: A very typical Bowen interaction for me is, oh my gosh, what if we do this?
Speaker: I mean, has any game ever done this?
Speaker: And he can just tell you immediately, yeah, you're not clever.
Speaker: These two games have done this and here's exactly what they are and when they came out and how they executed it.
Speaker: But he would do it in the, I mean, Bowen is like the nicest guy.
Speaker: In a nice way, sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Oh, in a super nice way.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But it's like, but I mean, but it doesn't mean it's a bad idea.
Speaker: And just, you know, sort of like, well, this is what I had in mind for the rules.
Speaker: But if you want to change it, if you want to do something different, you know, go ahead.
Speaker: It's like, well, no, I don't.
Speaker: I want to start with what you made and then we'll, you know, we'll see what happens.
Speaker: And, uh, no, super awesome, super awesome to have Bowen sort of stamping out.
Speaker: And the Bowen Scott dream team is, is, is very real to sort of see them work together and the, the respect and the deference and the way in which they work, which is sort of like,
Speaker: you know, well, Bowen, if you've to watch Scott be like, I want this and I don't want to back down on it.
Speaker: Bowen's like, no problem.
Speaker: Bowen, I want this and I don't want to back down on it.
Speaker: No problem.
Speaker: And then collaborating in ways and then just sort of like, you know, seeding the, you know, I don't know, whatever, whatever the item is to each other.
Speaker: It was really, really awesome.
Speaker: And yeah, I mean, I've worked with Scott a bunch, but working with him in this capacity was really, really cool.
Speaker: I mean, I think what we made for the P3 here
Speaker: I think you could trick people, right?
Speaker: I think you could look at it and think like, oh, this is a regular wooden play field.
Speaker: The inserts are flashing.
Speaker: Nothing.
Speaker: Wait, how did the message come across the wood like that to tell me that I've got a tilt warning?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So it's very right.
Speaker: Those effects are very subtle.
Speaker: Well, there's also a physical like there's a physical ball lock.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, it's all physical pinball, right?
Speaker: But yeah, like there's a, it looks like, it looks like a game that like a standard game.
Speaker: If there's a physical ball lock.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What's your physical ball locks in the game?
Speaker: Oh, there you go.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's the, there's the, uh, the cannon.
Speaker: I'm looking at the spaceship.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Oh, but then there's also the Denise lock, which are we not supposed to call it the Denise lock?
Speaker: No, you have to call it.
Speaker: My shirt that I have, I don't have it on says Denise lock on it.
Speaker: So I think that's what we call it.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: But yeah.
Speaker: It's official.
Speaker: It's the Denisey lock regardless.
Speaker: You know who made that up?
Speaker: Do you know who started doing that?
Speaker: Who?
Speaker: It was Matt from the homebrew community.
Speaker: One of the guys, Matt Bonema, who actually, he built the dead pin.
Speaker: And then he built, what was that other one?
Speaker: Doom.
Speaker: He did that one.
Speaker: If you track down a video of Matt's Doom pinball machine, his homebrew Doom, it is the meanest thing you've ever, like it returns the ball, like practically straight down.
Speaker: Like it's not straight down the middle, but he's got, he's got ball returns that are so viciously fast.
Speaker: And every time I played it, I was like, how do you do this?
Speaker: And,
Speaker: yeah matt's got a way of being like well i don't play better i don't know yeah yeah he's crazy speaking of brutal because tna definitely kicks you in the teeth and and rick and morty has that like 1980s you told us scott that it has that homage to like system 11s and and it's got that that 80s clunk that's still like it's great but it also is like very challenging with final resistance this is a two flipper
Speaker: kind of like a fan layout.
Speaker: I mean, this is as close.
Speaker: It is a fan layout.
Speaker: You have two flippers by definition.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, yeah, I hate to, I hate to break it to you guys, but every single pinball ever made as a fan layout.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I get that.
Speaker: Depends on where the fan is.
Speaker: But, but my point being is, is,
Speaker: It becomes a challenge of this is more of a casual, this style is more of a casual play.
Speaker: You usually get more longer ball times, but you're not known for that.
Speaker: And so how did you approach like the brutality?
Speaker: Speaking of brutality with the Doom homebrew, it's like,
Speaker: I know that the ball launcher, so what, three balls and under a second, right?
Speaker: Something like that?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it's interesting, actually, because brutality is a big thing that I harped on a lot.
Speaker: And Michael, he can actually, he'd probably just nod in the camera for us while we're talking about this.
Speaker: Nod knowingly.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: It's something I pay very close attention to because of how important that is to me.
Speaker: And that was one of the things when Michael brought up earlier, like, you know, if I say, hey, I really do need this to happen because of, you know, the level of hardness that this game needs to portray.
Speaker: My team did a really good job of going along with it and working with me on that.
Speaker: But when I was designing the play field, there's a number of return shots to the flippers that are high speed.
Speaker: And there's a number of shots that are dangerous.
Speaker: So I think it was a good balance of flow versus danger in this one.
Speaker: Things like the high-speed shots that come back at you, there's a diverter on the right side, on the right orbit.
Speaker: So the right orbit will sometimes act like an orbit, or most of the time act like an orbit, to try and trick you and make you feel comfortable.
Speaker: And then when you're least expecting it,
Speaker: That diverter opens up and it's a Yagov kicker, which kicks the ball back.
Speaker: You shoot it up the right orbit.
Speaker: It'll kick the ball back at you at full speed faster than you shot it in there.
Speaker: And that's underneath the ship there on the right side.
Speaker: The ship itself has a mechanism that I drew this mechanism up in SolidWorks, just kind of a mock-up, just to show TJ.
Speaker: TJ is the mechanical engineer over there and does all this really great engineering, by the way, which this game wouldn't even be possible without him.
Speaker: It's insane what he did to this thing.
Speaker: But I have this mock-up that I showed him where the balls will stack vertically so you can see them.
Speaker: So I'm a big fan of locking balls where you can see them.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: And these things are stacking vertically on top of each other.
Speaker: And at the bottom ball, there is a knocker assembly.
Speaker: So that knocker assembly is...
Speaker: actually hits the bottom ball out right at your flipper.
Speaker: And the next, the two balls that were above it now dropped down in position and that knocker assembly can fire again, knock out that second one.
Speaker: The last ball falls in position and knocks that one out.
Speaker: And we discovered, I said that it could do it.
Speaker: I said it could launch two, it could launch all three balls in one second.
Speaker: And TJ looked at me and went, like, you know, I think you're, I think you're underestimating the mechanism.
Speaker: I'm like, okay, well, what do we got?
Speaker: Let's see.
Speaker: You know, so he fired it up and, uh, fired the, uh, fired that mechanism back at us.
Speaker: And he was able to get all three balls out of that mechanism in 500 milliseconds.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Which is the fastest.
Speaker: We looked it up and we're trying to find it.
Speaker: We're like, it's the fastest ejection of three pinballs done to date.
Speaker: I have not seen anything faster.
Speaker: I can't think of anything faster.
Speaker: Owen can't find anything faster.
Speaker: So I think we're safe to say that one's the fastest right now.
Speaker: There's machine guns that shoot slower than this game.
Speaker: That's probably true.
Speaker: It's funny, when the stream went online, rather when the first video went up, people couldn't track what that was in the video.
Speaker: When the ship's cannon fires, they were like, did a ball just skip over the what?
Speaker: The P3 has this wall of scoops.
Speaker: The big glass wall.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And
Speaker: Wait, did the ball just ricochet off that?
Speaker: No, I think that's the cannon.
Speaker: It's a great mechanism.
Speaker: It shoots up and over the walls.
Speaker: The wall assemblies can be up and it will shoot it at the flippers.
Speaker: That right there makes it really brutal on the offensive side.
Speaker: So there's other shots too.
Speaker: On the left side, it's a lot safer, right?
Speaker: There's a ramp that's always open.
Speaker: It's not blocked by anything.
Speaker: There's a scoop there.
Speaker: That scoop is...
Speaker: Pretty safe to shoot, but when that scoop ejects, that is coming really fast at your right flipper again.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So we've got crossover shots coming back at you from all over the place here.
Speaker: You got a spinner shot?
Speaker: Nice spinner shot, which is beautiful.
Speaker: Those inner orbits there, I'm going to call them inner orbits.
Speaker: So the spinner shot and the drop target lock over there, those two are actually inner orbits.
Speaker: So when those shots are open, those will loop around.
Speaker: The right one loops around to the left orbit, and the left one loops around to the right orbit.
Speaker: They cross each other in the back.
Speaker: You can't see it, but it's a little magic trick of them crossing each other.
Speaker: So that's a super cool, interesting part of that layout.
Speaker: What else makes this game really brutal?
Speaker: And I can actually safely say this is the most brutal game for the P3 platform as of right now.
Speaker: I can't think of anything else that is more angry at you than this.
Speaker: That ship has a ramp underneath it, and it also has a ball lock, an actual subway entrance underneath it as well.
Speaker: But the ship has the ability to drop down a shield over those two shots.
Speaker: And technically it's over five shots because it blocks three stand-up targets as well.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: And when that shield is down, it bounces the ball back at the same speed as you shot it at it.
Speaker: It's a ricochet, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, it's very, very uncontrolled when you have to shoot that shot.
Speaker: And the software makes you shoot that shot.
Speaker: Yeah, and we know which side you hit it at, and it's brutal.
Speaker: I mean, that's when you have to shoot that shield.
Speaker: It's unpleasant.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: I like to, yeah.
Speaker: The style of this game, it actually, you definitely captured the 80s vibe, especially with the artwork.
Speaker: It actually makes me think of, there's like a role-playing game called
Speaker: What's it called?
Speaker: Shadowrun.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This looks like a Shadowrun on a package.
Speaker: No, it doesn't.
Speaker: Never heard that before.
Speaker: I don't know what you're talking about.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Hold on.
Speaker: I'm looking.
Speaker: I'm on my computer right now, so I'm going to double check.
Speaker: Let's see.
Speaker: Shadowrun images.
Speaker: Turn safe search off.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Here we go.
Speaker: I would grab my copy of the book, but I obviously still don't have one from when I was...
Speaker: playing it when I was a teenager yeah but no okay but it's that that futuristic cyberpunk yes dystopian yeah yeah you definitely have to have the mohawks in there because it's the 80s and Mr. T was uh was the rage back then I mean that still is right yeah so I I do I I love the vibe I I dig it and uh who did your art package
Speaker: So Johnny Crap.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: So the gentleman that did Jurassic Park.
Speaker: Jurassic Park.
Speaker: He did Jurassic Park for Stern.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: So he is an incredible artist.
Speaker: I actually traveled to Montreal where he lives and met up with him before this whole thing to kind of pitch it to him.
Speaker: It wasn't the sole purpose of the trip, but...
Speaker: It was a very good part of that trip.
Speaker: I was able to meet up with him.
Speaker: He was actually in the middle of painting a mural on the side of a building, an absolutely incredible mural on there.
Speaker: Uh, when we met up and, uh, yeah, I just wanted, I pitched him the idea.
Speaker: I pitched him the art style and he, uh, he just, uh, he said, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: I'd be interested in doing this.
Speaker: I think I can capture absolutely exactly what you want.
Speaker: And, uh,
Speaker: Without much back and forth, he nailed it.
Speaker: Like the cabinet art on there is amazing.
Speaker: The translate art is amazing.
Speaker: The play field art, everything.
Speaker: Like he got all of this, like, he had to look great.
Speaker: Having the art capture the vibe of the era is so important.
Speaker: And this is thematically consistent with an 80s style game.
Speaker: So I love it.
Speaker: But not the 80s themselves.
Speaker: There's not enough brown here to be true 80s.
Speaker: Yeah, so that'll be good.
Speaker: No, no, the pretend 80s when everything was neon.
Speaker: The pretend 80s.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: I grew up in the 80s and everything was brown and like that for some reason everything was that smoked glass ashtray look.
Speaker: Yeah, that was a little leftover from the 70s too.
Speaker: It had a little bleed over from that.
Speaker: But yeah, this is the more fake retrofuturism thing style, right?
Speaker: And since the story is actually based in the far future, they're actually looping back around with the trends again.
Speaker: So that's where we're at.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: Okay, so I've been watching this radio.
Speaker: Talk to me a little bit about these power-ups because I'm seeing like right above your flippers, you can gain some power-ups and then they ask you if you want to use them too.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: So the easiest way to explain this is it's just like a smart missile, right?
Speaker: And it's actually fired off the same way as a smart missile, right?
Speaker: They slam in the launch button.
Speaker: And all you do is collect these power-ups in various different ways throughout the software and throughout the game experience.
Speaker: And when you collect these, they go into your little inventory down there with those four little slots you got.
Speaker: You can cycle through those with a secondary flipper button.
Speaker: Uh, and then you just leave it on whatever power up you want to, you want to hit.
Speaker: And when you're ready to go, you hit the launch button while you're playing and it, uh, she's in that power up.
Speaker: So power ups just do different things, right?
Speaker: So some of them slow down the time, right?
Speaker: So slow down everything, right?
Speaker: So your boss, they will slow down your, uh, shot counter or your shot timers will count like slow way down.
Speaker: The actual music even slows down, which is, uh, something Michael and I were working on and, uh,
Speaker: I didn't know if it was going to be possible, but Michael did actually make it happen.
Speaker: So it's pretty cool.
Speaker: It's cool when you hit a time slowdown in the music, like literally like boom.
Speaker: Yeah, it's great.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Have you put power balls in this game?
Speaker: I can't afford to put Powerballs in this game.
Speaker: Okay, you can buy the cheap ones, the fake ones, not the... No, man, you can't.
Speaker: No, no, man.
Speaker: You see this?
Speaker: Okay, all right.
Speaker: I actually have, for some weird reason, I have a Powerball in my hand.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: These are the real ones.
Speaker: Why not?
Speaker: Everyone has a Powerball sitting on their desk, don't they?
Speaker: So I cannot afford 17 Powerballs to put into a multimorphic game.
Speaker: There's 17 balls in this game?
Speaker: Oh, we've got a mode.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, we've got a mode that at max balls is 10.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: It's a sweet mode.
Speaker: That increases the weight of the game by 50.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So there's a mode.
Speaker: The balls do add some weight.
Speaker: It's true.
Speaker: But I mean, you know, it's called pinball.
Speaker: You should have some, right?
Speaker: Yeah, we have this battle wave called Trapped where the walls go up and the ball gets served to you from the cannon very, very politely.
Speaker: A ball gets flung at you very fast.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: And if you get the ball into the scoop within the allotted time, the game rewards you by shooting two balls at you very quickly.
Speaker: And if you clear both those balls, the game rewards you by shooting three balls at you very quickly.
Speaker: But if you don't get rid of those balls very quickly, it's still going to keep shooting balls at you.
Speaker: And as soon as you drain, then you have to tidy up the mode, basically.
Speaker: You've lost your opportunity.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Because like some other awesome Scott games, the more balls you have in play increases your play field multiplier.
Speaker: So if you can manage to keep all those balls alive while this horrific cannon is firing.
Speaker: So it's very funny to watch someone try to cradle up balls, and then the cannon just, whoomf, nails the flipper.
Speaker: And you watch all the balls go, it's still good.
Speaker: But yeah, you need it.
Speaker: I mean, you need those balls.
Speaker: You need them.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, I think also, so there's a, there's a mode in here too.
Speaker: And Michael, you're going to give me the actual details of this one.
Speaker: Cause I don't know the exact number, but yeah,
Speaker: There is a swarm multiball in this game.
Speaker: And what it does is it will put up all of the wall assemblies again.
Speaker: And from the backside of the playfield, it starts dumping balls out behind the wall assembly.
Speaker: And I don't remember how many it dumps at the beginning.
Speaker: It's a lot.
Speaker: I don't remember how many exactly, but when it's done unloading all these balls behind the wall assembly, that wall assembly drops all at the same time and just unleashes the entire multiball at you.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: It's very crazy to see all of the balls from a multiball headed down towards your flippers all at once.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: It's a wild... And like heading evenly, which is weird.
Speaker: Like, it's just like, yeah, they're all just kind of...
Speaker: Like a tidal wave of balls.
Speaker: Yeah, kind of.
Speaker: We've seen the balls do that similar behavior in Stern Indiana Jones.
Speaker: Indiana Jones 4, I guess they called it.
Speaker: Or 3.
Speaker: I don't remember what it was.
Speaker: The Ark.
Speaker: The Ark.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And then they also did it again in Aerosmith.
Speaker: And then it was also in Gottlieb Waterworld.
Speaker: Oh.
Speaker: Remember the sink the D's thing.
Speaker: But it was only like up to four balls, right?
Speaker: So I think Aerosmith maybe went up to five, maybe.
Speaker: I don't remember exactly.
Speaker: So these details I don't retain.
Speaker: But yeah, they kind of all dump there.
Speaker: But I think...
Speaker: Yeah, I think the swarm multivolum is a significant amount more than that.
Speaker: I just don't remember the exact number.
Speaker: It's at least eight, and I'm definitely not opening the code now to verify.
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: But it's at least eight.
Speaker: It's at least eight.
Speaker: At least eight is a great answer, though.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: That still seems crazy.
Speaker: You have to buy the game to find out just how many.
Speaker: There you go.
Speaker: Yeah, there you go.
Speaker: Speaking of which, this game is shipping right now, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, this game is shipping now.
Speaker: There is... We've got a new... When this pack's released, we've already shown another teaser video.
Speaker: just basically the same, just a more accelerated version of the teaser video again.
Speaker: We're going to have people streaming this very soon, and it's going to keep rolling off the line, which is great.
Speaker: It's really cool to see this thing happening.
Speaker: I cannot wait to get mine.
Speaker: I don't have one yet, but I'm waiting for some customers to get theirs, to be fair, so I don't feel like I'm hogging the thing or getting special treatment at all.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I am so excited.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's pretty rad when you get a, when you get, if you own a P3, if you own a base P3, when a new game comes out, you know, you just break, you don't,
Speaker: You invite people over to play it, but you don't need them to haul it down to your- Right, yeah, that's the problem with a box opening.
Speaker: It's like, hey, do you wanna lug this 300 pound thing down the stairs?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You just walk the box downstairs and you pop out your module and you pop in the new one and you load up the software and yeah.
Speaker: It's pretty awesome.
Speaker: I remember a bunch of the people were joking when Sorcerer's Apprentice came up.
Speaker: It was a whole new game for the Cosmic Kart Racing module.
Speaker: Everyone was trying to figure out which cars would fit the USB drive so that they could put the USB drive in the trunk or in the back seat, where it fits.
Speaker: It turns out every car actually can fit that game in it.
Speaker: That was quite the discussion.
Speaker: Is it true too?
Speaker: I remember when this first came out, didn't, didn't they say final resistance sold more units than weird owl?
Speaker: I am not sure on that.
Speaker: Um, I know.
Speaker: Yeah, I don't know for sure.
Speaker: Hey, it's a great game.
Speaker: The bottom line is if you have P3, it makes sense to buy all these modules because it's not the same as by even like a home pin, like a pin designed by other companies that are designed to be just home use only.
Speaker: That's still more expensive than this.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And also a really cool thing too, which I've done is like my buddy's got a P3, but can't afford to just buy all the modules.
Speaker: So he's like, well, I can just lend you one of mine.
Speaker: Like, yeah.
Speaker: I'm just like, here, you can just borrow my Lexi light speed.
Speaker: I don't have that one in at the moment here.
Speaker: Just use that.
Speaker: It's old school cartridge swapping.
Speaker: It's cartridge swapping.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: It's not really, it's not inconvenient to throw these modules around because they just go in a backseat of a car, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's also super well built to like you guys have some of these on display at the expos and whatnot.
Speaker: And I was I was dumbfounded with how solid these things are.
Speaker: They're pretty sweet.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: TJ does a great.
Speaker: TJ, the mechanical engineer, does a great job just packing these play fields full of features.
Speaker: If you're if you've seen the Weird Al Museum of National Hilarity play field like on its side, it's astounding.
Speaker: It's stacked.
Speaker: Yeah, it's crazy.
Speaker: It's stacked.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So if someone wants to get one of these games, how can they get it?
Speaker: They can just go to multimorphic.com and they can order it directly there.
Speaker: It's right there on the website.
Speaker: How much is it going for?
Speaker: Let me double check.
Speaker: I think it was $34.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I have to double check it again really quick just to just to be sure.
Speaker: So I'm not telling people, you know, that's the module price.
Speaker: If you already have a base P3.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They're hitting up like we heard Scott on loser kid and I know I see.
Speaker: I see.
Speaker: I'm on your website.
Speaker: The full game kit price is $3,400.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And with a $500 deposit.
Speaker: So like, and so that adds to it.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: But if you want to buy just the base machine, that's $8,300.
Speaker: Like if you don't have the, if you don't have the Nintendo yet, that costs $8,300.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You don't want to be, you don't want to be the, you know, the parent who comes home holding the Zelda cartridge and we're like, well,
Speaker: But I don't know.
Speaker: I just bought the cartridge.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Did your parents ever do that to you guys when you were kids?
Speaker: Did you get a Nintendo for Christmas and they give you the game first and you're like, I don't have any way of playing this.
Speaker: And they're like, but wait.
Speaker: But wait, there's one.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I feel like that's like a thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I feel like that's a thing all parents like used to do, like to mess with their kids when we were kids.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We were all confused.
Speaker: What the heck is this?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Parenting seemed to be a lot more creative when we were kids.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You could just try something.
Speaker: Who cares?
Speaker: They also didn't get spoiled because we all like all kids nowadays, they're like, Hey, watch this video on YouTube of these parents and kid interactions.
Speaker: So there, there's no surprises anymore.
Speaker: Like kids know what's coming.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They do know what's up.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Well, we appreciate having you guys on.
Speaker: Is there anything else you want to talk about with Final Resistance?
Speaker: Maybe something the public doesn't know about it or set right a rumor that might be floating around and you're like, that's just not right.
Speaker: Oh, is there, are there rumors about Final Resistance?
Speaker: That would be awesome if there were incorrect rumors, but no, I actually haven't seen anything that what's, what's great is it's, it seems to be getting really good reviews from the people that have played it, which I'm very, very happy about.
Speaker: The team that we had on this thing is just, it's just crazy.
Speaker: It was, uh, it wouldn't have been as good with, without the team, obviously.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But it's a, it's a really great experience working on a team like this with people who are that skilled.
Speaker: at least for me, like I'm able to say like, okay, I've got this idea.
Speaker: I want to do like all this crazy stuff.
Speaker: Usually I have to think about how exactly all that stuff has to be done.
Speaker: But in this case, like mechanically TJ goes, oh yeah, we can make that happen.
Speaker: Give me like a day or two and I'll have some, like something mocked up in 3d.
Speaker: He sends me over like some solid work drawings and I'm able to like look through everything.
Speaker: And then I go to Michael and I'm like, well, how are we going to get the audio to slow down?
Speaker: What are we doing with that?
Speaker: And Michael's like, oh, yeah, we'll just do it this way.
Speaker: It's really great.
Speaker: And it just goes with the graphics, too, and everything.
Speaker: It's awesome.
Speaker: So that was a lot of fun.
Speaker: Honestly, there aren't any rumors or anything that I know about with Final Resistance.
Speaker: It's TNA 2.0?
Speaker: Well, okay.
Speaker: So yeah, people have said that, actually.
Speaker: But it's not.
Speaker: But it's not.
Speaker: It's not.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: So this is pretty funny, though, because we're...
Speaker: Bowen understands how my brain works in a way that only a friend would understand, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And he knows, like, when I'm coming up with these crazy creative ideas, he sees me trying to, like, pull away from, like, oh, that's too much, like, TNA.
Speaker: Like, you know, let's stay away from that.
Speaker: He sees that happening, and he goes, oh, no, no.
Speaker: We're going to put the little homages in here to...
Speaker: We're going to put in, you know, we will put the score display stuff in there.
Speaker: We will have all this other little thing like the play field multiplier should run the same way.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So it's familiar.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So he kind of he understands that a lot.
Speaker: And, you know, so you'll people will notice a lot of similarities, little subtle similarities to TNA.
Speaker: And I think that's nothing but positive, honestly, but it's not TNA 2.0.
Speaker: It's a completely different story universe thing.
Speaker: The art is sort of similar, maybe, but a lot less pink.
Speaker: Oh, yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: The music is awesome, definitely.
Speaker: The music?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Are you going to be able to listen to the music online?
Speaker: Eventually, yes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So there is that coming.
Speaker: The music, unfortunately, takes a very long time for me to finish because if you don't know how game audio works, game audio itself is written specifically for...
Speaker: for, you know, modes in a game or incidental music or something like that.
Speaker: It's not actual music you can listen to.
Speaker: It's creating a song from something like game audio is very difficult and long process.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: So that, you know, it may take a little bit.
Speaker: I wanted to release it when production started, but, you know, the time didn't line up.
Speaker: So it's going to be a little bit, but it's coming.
Speaker: Are we going to see this game here at Chicago Expo?
Speaker: Is there other other places before that you'll see it as well?
Speaker: I'm pretty sure we will.
Speaker: I'm hoping, let's see, it's October.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, there's going to be a lot of games out there.
Speaker: Yeah, there's rumor that there's going to be one at Pintastic over here in Massachusetts very soon.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: At that show.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, for sure, check it out.
Speaker: Check out, I don't know when it's going to air relative to the stream that's coming out, but this is the first time that I think people will be seeing the full 1.0 release code.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: you know, more modes, more multi-ball stuff happening, more audio tracks because there's more modes.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: you know, the thing about the power ups and the thing about like the video game nature of it is that Scott very much, we all felt this way.
Speaker: A person who walks up this game and doesn't understand the power ups should be able to play this game and enjoy it and do well.
Speaker: And it should be a super normal pinball experience.
Speaker: But it's sort of like when you start to realize like, oh, lane management matters.
Speaker: Like I can get a cool thing.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So it's sort of like, oh, if I can just
Speaker: kind of understand what these power-ups do, I might be able to get like a little bit of a boost.
Speaker: I might be able to make stuff easier.
Speaker: And there's a bunch of them.
Speaker: I don't think we spoiled them.
Speaker: So I think people can still sort of discover them and figure out what they do.
Speaker: There's only one where you'd use it and be like, oh, come on, really?
Speaker: What, Scott, why is this in the game?
Speaker: Is that the one that I talked about in that panel?
Speaker: That is the one, yes.
Speaker: That's the one.
Speaker: Okay, okay, right.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, here's a rumor.
Speaker: The person who made this game might actually want to give you a power-up that causes you to lose your ball.
Speaker: Oh.
Speaker: That causes a nuclear explosion that destroys... I mean, you technically collect points for everything that's lit, but also your flippers go dead, and there's a sweet earring that coincides with it because you just had a nuclear launch.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: But the sales pitch for it is actually super dope.
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: The sales pitch for it.
Speaker: I mean, I don't want to steal it from you, Scott.
Speaker: Oh, go ahead.
Speaker: No, you do it, Michael.
Speaker: Do it.
Speaker: You got it.
Speaker: So Scott's like, you know, Bowen, I'm never going to beat you at pinball.
Speaker: But imagine, just imagine, like, you know.
Speaker: you know that all I need are this many points to win this two-player game.
Speaker: I'm going to fire my nuke, I'm going to collect the points, and I'm going to walk off.
Speaker: That's like, well, yeah, how do we not implement that?
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: Dun, dun, dun.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's great.
Speaker: There's some big stuff, there's some small stuff.
Speaker: It's cool, but it's just seasoning, right?
Speaker: Sure, yeah.
Speaker: Literally, you can walk up to the game, not know anything about the theme, and you can play it just like...
Speaker: Coin drop on location, anything.
Speaker: I shoot the stuff that's flashing.
Speaker: Got it.
Speaker: You could try really hard to not read things off the screen or read inserts, which is somehow how we all approach brand new games.
Speaker: You wait in a line for a long time at a show.
Speaker: You finally get up to it.
Speaker: And then you don't read any inserts.
Speaker: You don't read anything.
Speaker: You just shoot what's flashing.
Speaker: And you're like, oh, that was fun.
Speaker: You can still do that.
Speaker: You can still enjoy it.
Speaker: And even though it's not TNA 2.0, the TNA vibe, the TNA vibe still there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Which is good.
Speaker: That's a great thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Much like, much like Bowen, you know, I did the same thing.
Speaker: Jerry did the same thing.
Speaker: It's not bad if, if it feels like TNA, if this is how TNA solve this problem, that's a good way to solve the problem.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it's super, it's super fun.
Speaker: I hope it's the next level.
Speaker: It seems like it's a next level because it is a, it is a different game in that there are locks, there are vertical, there are habit trails there.
Speaker: There's all this kind of stuff in there.
Speaker: So it is, it is a completely different game, but the, the feel of it feels very consistent with the vibe that you got from your first one.
Speaker: If you're a purist who hates ramps, this might rub you the wrong way because it has some.
Speaker: But those folks aside, it's pretty dope.
Speaker: I think if purists are stuck on single level play fields, then they vary back in the past.
Speaker: They're certainly buying games for less than we are.
Speaker: Yeah, that's true as well.
Speaker: Well, cool.
Speaker: If you want someone to get a hold of you, Michael or Scott, how do you want them to get a hold of you?
Speaker: Oh, that's a cool question.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Scott answers that question first.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: If you guys want to get ahold of me, ask me questions, give me a high five, whatever.
Speaker: Easiest thing to do is just go to scottdenisi.com and you can contact me through there.
Speaker: But if you see me at a show, that's ultimately the most awesome way to get in contact with me because, you know, physical high fives work in reality, which is really great.
Speaker: And come to the pinball Olympics.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: And we'll do that.
Speaker: You guys will watch me blow my voice out every single year.
Speaker: I rarely make it for the award ceremony without having to pass the mic off to my buddy because my voice completely shuts off.
Speaker: So it is worth it.
Speaker: So hopefully I'll see a bunch of you guys soon.
Speaker: I am very friendly, so you can talk to me anytime.
Speaker: Yeah, have ticket sales gone up for that yet?
Speaker: Not yet.
Speaker: They should be going up five weeks before the event.
Speaker: Like, I think exactly five weeks before the event.
Speaker: And schedule the party bus because that is so much easier.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Okay, Michael, how can they get a hold of you?
Speaker: I was going to say I'm not on social media, but I guess it's not totally true.
Speaker: If you have questions about making your own pinball games, you could join the pin dev Slack for people who are interested in making
Speaker: making your own pinball games.
Speaker: If you're not interested in that, if you're interested in P3 stuff, like so owners and fans and enthusiasts, there is a there's a discord server that was set up by some P3 owners that I lurk on pretty frequently to sort of answer questions and help people get started programming if they're interested in that or just hang out there.
Speaker: Where else?
Speaker: I do go outside so people can find me outside.
Speaker: Sometimes it shows.
Speaker: I try not to.
Speaker: I prefer to be inside.
Speaker: That's where I keep my computers and my pinball.
Speaker: But yeah, I don't know.
Speaker: There are ways.
Speaker: Will you be at Expo as well this October?
Speaker: Maybe.
Speaker: Maybe.
Speaker: The answer is maybe.
Speaker: It's a tough one because familial obligations.
Speaker: Expo is typically right around when my wife's birthday is.
Speaker: So it's hard to be like, happy birthday.
Speaker: Happy birthday.
Speaker: Got you a pinball Expo.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Come on.
Speaker: Who doesn't want that?
Speaker: Let's go to Chicago.
Speaker: We can hang out with Scott.
Speaker: I'd take it.
Speaker: It's not all bad.
Speaker: I'd take it.
Speaker: Thank you guys so much.
Speaker: We really appreciate it.
Speaker: Best of luck to this.
Speaker: I cannot wait to play it.
Speaker: And certainly at the next show that I will be at, I'm definitely looking forward to playing it and get on.
Speaker: It does take a little bit of time for these things to come out.
Speaker: So definitely if you're interested, go and place your orders so they can, they can start making these things more to the demand.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: If you want to get a hold of us, you're welcome.
Speaker: If you want to get a hold of us, we are LoserKidPinballPodcast at gmail.com.
Speaker: We're also on all the socials, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.
Speaker: Well, X. That throws me off every time now.
Speaker: Twitch, YouTube, all at LoserKidPinball.
Speaker: So subscribe to us on YouTube if you haven't already.
Speaker: We do have some content on.
Speaker: You can see our beautiful faces on there.
Speaker: But like last episode, you didn't get to see it.
Speaker: I had the pinball wizard home decor from Hobby Lobby.
Speaker: You can only see that on the video.
Speaker: It was, it was wonderful.
Speaker: So, but check us out and Scott, do you have anything else before, for us, before we head off?
Speaker: You know what?
Speaker: Just be excellent.
Speaker: Make sure if you have kids, make sure they're safe going to school this year.
Speaker: And we cannot wait to see you guys at the next show.
Speaker: Definitely.
Speaker: All knocked, ship attack multi-ball initialized.
Speaker: The enemy has prevailed.
Speaker: Join the resistance.
