That's How I Roll! (Skeeball build)

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nickels:

--- Quote from: nickels on March 14, 2022, 04:31:31 pm ---Glad you are still going! I gave up on creating new games for my mini copycat build. Flash is dead and I am not starting over from scratch. Mine is where it is, and it has enough playable games to make the build worth while.

--- End quote ---

I LIED! I'm back. I found Flash software for my Laptop so I made a new game for my Skee Ball build called Ice Ball. It is basically an Ice Ball clone using Mortal Kombat as the theme:

At the end you get an audio clip of SubZero saying something random based on how much you scored. It's basically original skee ball with the scores x1000.

I just upgraded to a full LEDWiz from the +GP so I am going to rewire all my LEDs to be full color instead of just red/blue (and purple). I'll have to post a video of all of my games as I've added saved scores and have improved my lighting effects greatly. I thought I was done, but I guess not!

Entropy42:
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.

thatpurplestuff:

--- Quote from: Entropy42 on August 09, 2023, 11:11:15 pm ---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.

--- End quote ---

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!

netlohcs:
Its awesome that after all this time, you are still going at it! I think I said this originally, but reading your post was one of the biggest inspirations to making my own tables. Speaking of.... my journey has continued also. I should update my post soon.

thatpurplestuff:
So if you've read any of the early pages of this thread, I've made some absolutely terrible rings along the way and struggled to come up with rings I was happy with. I ended up using a solution of coiled vinyl baseboard which looks fine from a distance, but the overlapping look has always bugged me a bit and I always felt like I was missing something obvious in making the rings.

I've spent the last few months toying with an idea to make the rings more substantial and able to maintain their shape on their own... the original plan was to use 1 inner layer vinyl baseboard, a middle layer of rubber (I've always wanted some contrast on the edges of the rings), and then an outer layer of vinyl baseboard all held together with metal brackets and Chicago screws rather than rivets like I had done previously.

Skeeball ring sandwich

Sandwich ring next to coiled ring

Chicago style screws added

I honestly love this look and sorta settled on making all my rings using this method but decided to stare at it for a while before I went ahead and did all of them (this wasn't cheap, the rolls of rubber were $150 total before the vinyl and hardware was factored in). I literally just plopped this ring on to my work desk just so I'd be forced to look at it a few times a day. I'm planning a complete rebuild of the scoring area with hopefully brighter LEDs, and at some point I think I went insane and thought that LEDs INSIDE the rings themselves was a good idea. I posted a question about "neon" LED strings on the main forum, and forum member lilshawn was kind enough to offer helpful feedback. After a week of playing with the idea I scrapped it, mainly because the neon LEDs I could find had way too large of gaps where you could cut them so using them in rings would potentially have large gaps (plus I was nervous about the idea of solder points being whacked by Skeeballs).

Fast forward a month and I couldn't get the LED idea out of my head, so I did some digging and found some random online LED shop in China that sold the empty silicone "neon" LED diffuser and LEDs that have cut lines every inch rather than every 3".... this makes the concept much more feasible so I convinced the wife to let me drop another $200 on parts that may very well end up getting wasted on a terrible idea haha.

I decided to trim the inner rubber by the exact height of the silicone diffuser so I could just slip it in the top. It seems to work great, and once I get this all dialed in the vinyl baseboard actually has adhesive on the back that I can peel the paper off of and make everything really attached nicely... between the adhesive and the brackets these things should be very sturdy.

Neon ring next to black rubber ring

Neon ring with LEDs installed and wired up

White

Red

Blue

Fired them up with LEDBlinky and I'll be damned if it doesn't look awesome. This ring is still a pretty rough prototype, I'm going to adjust the spacing of the brackets to more closely match the original rubber one since there are some spacing issues that I want to fix as best I can. Overall I'm ecstatic about the look of this, now I just need to start making the final rings and then get everything installed on the machine. This could still be a complete disaster, as I have no idea what the longevity of these LED strips will be once they are on the receiving end of Skeeballs, but I'm optimistic since I did recess them just a bit and the vinyl/silicone diffuser offers sort of a double barrier for the LED strip.

Once I determine if these are a realistic option for Skeeball machines, I will detail the parts and process I went through to make them... it's deceptively harder than I thought it would be to get everything to fit nicely with each other but so far I'm thrilled. I will mention that this is not for the faint of heart, as I'm at least $500 into this after RGB amplifiers, power supplies, rubber, vinyl, LEDs, silicone diffuser, metal braces, and the Chicago style screws are factored in. I'll be absolutely gutted if this doesn't work haha

Will update as more rings get finished!

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