u/HomebrewPinball

Grand Illusion will have five different skill shots to choose from at the beginning of a ball.

1. Mode Start

If you complete this skill shot you will start a mode of your choice and skip having to lite the mode start shot.

2. Advance Level

This skill shot if completed will advance your level within the game allowing you to preform more advance tricks and will help unlock abilities to help you complete the game.

3. Lite Lock

If you complete this skill shot it will lite the first lock to "Trunk Multiball".

4. Advance Bonus X

Completion of this skill shot will advance your bonus x. Currently the amount is undetermined.

5. 1,000,000

The easiest to complete of the five skill shots. Only awards 1,000,000 points however it will not help you advance in the game.

Skill Shot Selection

Players will chose what skill shot they would like to go for by using the right and left flippers to select from a fanned out hand of cards with the different skill shots on them.

Once the player has selected which skill shot they would like to go for they will have x amount of time to complete that skill shot. If the player fails to complete the skill shot there level advance bonus will go down by one making it slightly harder to advance your level for that ball.

Code

I currently have all of the code completed for selecting the skill shots and what happens when you fail the skill shots. The LCD for now is not programed other than displaying the name of the mode. Once the coding is all done for the game I will focus on the LCD display animations.

My next step with the code is to code all of the successful skill shot completions. This will take sometime however once I am done with this I will be working on the drain and ball save feature of the game.

Getting Started:

What fun is a pinball with working flippers and a working plunger but no ball? In the step we will learn how to create a ball and how the drain works!

What You Will Need:

Two Kickers Named: BallRelease, Drain

Basic Code:

For the code in this second step we will be focusing on the "createball", "destroyball" and "kick" feature. This is what is used to create new balls and remove unused / old balls.

We will first create a line of code to create and release the first ball of the game to the plunger!

BallRelease.CreateBall

BallRelease.Kick 90,5

"Kick" is the code used to kick the ball out of the kicker. The first number (in this example, 90) is used to tell the kicker which direction to kick the ball in. The second number (in this example, 5) is used to tell the kicker how much power it should kick the ball out with.

Our second step is to code what happens when the ball drains. For now we will have a game that will go on forever and not have a ball count.

We will need to create the "drain" sub. We use the "_Hit" to give an action to the sub basically saying when this kicker is hit do this.

Sub Drain_Hit()

Drain.DestroyBall



BallRelease.CreateBall

BallRelease.Kick 90,5

End Sub

Results:

When you get this code into your game you will now have a working ball system that will allow you to play your game. This code is a very basic version of the code for the ball. In later parts we will be talking about how to add a ball count so that there are only three balls per game.

Once you get this code working you are ready to move onto step three. If you have any questions feel free to comment down below.