Nickels and purplestuff, you guys both do such amazing artwork for your software. I have code that runs 10ish games and controls my LEDs, but the actual games look like you are playing a fancy Excel spreadsheet If either of you ever are willing to release some of your artwork, please hit me up. If I was gonna start over now I think I'd control the whole thing from a Raspberry Pi.
Haha thank you for the kind words! I've been very quiet on here, but actually I have been pretty busy on the software side of things. Starting in late 2022, I have been rewriting my software from scratch in Unity/C#. Flash's ActionScript2 was pretty much a dead language when I STARTED writing the software years ago (in retrospect, veeeerrrrry bad decision on my part haha). Adobe killed Flash long ago and now you can't even download Flash Professional CS6 to update things anymore without jumping through hoops, so I figured I was on borrowed time and it was time to either do a complete code overhaul or scrap the project altogether.
Getting proficient in Unity has been a pretty brutal learning curve for me, but there are at least enough similarities between C# and AS2 that it wasn't like starting COMPLETELY from scratch. The hardest parts haven't really been getting the games to be functional, it's been animating the graphic elements and getting everything up to a beautiful 1080p @ 60fps (Flash version was 720p @ 20fps). I've grown to appreciate the way that code ties together in Unity, but for 2D animations it's significantly clunkier for me than Flash was.
Below are a few screenshots of the games I've gotten to be playable* in the last few weeks, there are 23 game modes total that need to be recreated and I've gotten 16 pretty close to done so far. *Playable meaning that the code and animations are done, but no hole LED functionality for the actual machine yet... that shouldn't take too long, I just need to pull my scoring area out of the machine and hook it up to my laptop while I make sure all of the LEDBlinky animations are linked up correctly. The endgame is to include the ramp, ball return, and possibly plexiglass "net" area in the LED animations as well but right now it's just the holes themselves.
Main menu, very happy with how it turned out and I just finished coding it so that I can add/remove games quickly and easily. Before, I would be left with a handful of prototype/half-working games in the menu because adding/removing required adding a bunch of code.
My take on the dart game X01... still needs a bit of polish, but very happy with the way this is turning out. You can select between 1/2 player and 310/510/710/910. The surf music, waves, clouds, bg islands, and player animations really make this one come alive.
Flux capacitor, rain, and lightning effects are pretty cool on this game... one great aspect of Unity is the built-in particle generator as opposed to having to manually code them from scratch in Flash.
Basically both players start with 150 points and go back and forth trying to steal points until one player gets all 300.
Self explanatory, but the bubbles and changeable beer logos make this one fun to look at.
Blasting snot on other players is surprisingly satisfying.
Stallone is gonna sue somebody. Again, Unity's particle generator makes the snow easy-peasy.
Overall I'm not sure about an ETA or frankly whether I will ever release it publicly, as I've incorporated quite a bit of personal flourishes/copyrighted music/images-that-are-pretty-close-to-actual-Skeeball-graphics that I wouldn't feel comfortable releasing. This is truly a labor of love that I'm just not sure what I want to do with once it is complete.
I would definitely be open to sharing some of my assets, specifically the ones that are more traditionally "Skeeball" related if that could be helpful to get Skeeball running on things like the Pi. Will hopefully have more build updates soon once I get the software to a place where it can replace the Flash version in the actual machine!