I've been building my own pinball machine from scratch on and off for the last several years. What I love about pinball design is that it combines so many disciplines: woodworking, metalworking, CAD, electronics, low level & high level software, game design, storytelling, blinking lights, and competitive fast action play.
Neat! Building your own pinball game is 90% mechanical, 90% electrical, 90% artwork, 90% software, 100% labor intensive! Good luck in completing it, and maybe take it to a pinball show that features home-brew games.
Hey Randy! Love your work on Archer and wish Stern could have kept that theme instead of Iron Maiden. I was able to play Archer at some festival (maybe Pin-a-go-go?) and could tell it was something special right away.
Tell your brother to stop being so good at pinball :-) I guess it's okay though since he keeps on popping out amazing designs, especially with Jurassic Park.
Lol! I'm reminiscing about Archer on Twitch this Saturday ( https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/archer-homebrew-tabl... ) with some obscure video and other crap. I taught KME all I know about pinball, right around his 10th birthday! All hail the GOAT!
Hey freezy! I'm amazed at what you've been able to build with VPE and appreciate the consistent push to bring Visual Pinball into a modern era. Seriously great job with untangling that legacy codebase and keeping the good bits (physics, existing tables), and replacing everything else.
I also appreciate how you interact with the community. Every time I see a new post from someone announcing a new project to replace VP, you're there to gently point out all of the details they haven't encountered yet and why VPE is solving them a certain way already. Nice!
I do think there's a big need for vpx-js to make visual pinball more shareable in a browser, even if Unity offers a webgl export. Hopefully I can help with that soon!
I still want to bring vpx-js to a level where people can actually play a WPC table in the browser. That'd be really awesome and hasn't been done yet, at least not that I know of.
I've got some old photos of my build progress here: https://jherrman.com/gravity-pinball-public-build-log