Bling for the rings!

Found these on eBay and had to get them.
No keys belonging to my BioShock machine should come without its own bling! 

1) BioShock keyrings. I was just wondering what to put on the keys when these showed up on eBay!

Thank you for the tango, Irrational Games!

I'm sad to read that Irrational Games are closing down their business as we know it. Without them there would have been no BioShock and most definitely no BioShock pinball.

"Seventeen years is a long time to do any job, even the best one. And working with the incredible team at Irrational Games is indeed the best job I’ve ever had. While I’m deeply proud of what we’ve accomplished together, my passion has turned to making a different kind of game than we’ve done before. To meet the challenge ahead, I need to refocus my energy on a smaller team with a flatter structure and a more direct relationship with gamers. In many ways, it will be a return to how we started: a small team making games for the core gaming audience."

This is by no means a death sentence for the studio as it is reshaping its core. Hopefully they'll keep making awesome games, as I'm sure they'll do!

You can read more about it here:
http://irrationalgames.com/new-featured/a-message-from-ken-levine-2/


P.S 
This does not affect my pinball machine, in case you're worried!

Snapshots

Quick update.

1) Side view. Spotted any of the new features yet?

2) Below the 1959-sign there's supposed to be a splicer mask... but I've misplaced it. Hopefully I'll find it.

State of the Machine

The past few days I've been able to focus a little on the machine, which is always nice.

I've added three switches that were missing - top drophole, upper shooterlane and the last ball through switch. All three very crucial switches that were somehow forgotten to be added or simply to complicated to setup.

1) Upper drophole switch. Not the nicest setup in history - but considering I forgot to make room for it during design and it's extremely tight to work in that area, it looks all right and is not visible from a players perspective. (I really need to clean the board before putting on the glass!)

I'm about to rewrite the ball handling code now that I've got more (and more accurate) ways of detecting the balls so instead of "it's probably launched now" I can actually know for sure if a ball has been launched successfully. 

I've also added a little bit of decorations here and there and the machine is almost 100% physically complete. What's left is a couple of switches that needs to be tweaked after a couple of games to make them behave reliably and easier to read titles on the inserts. I have printed out new titles in white that needs to be applied before putting the glass on. Preferably.

A message system has been added to send the player small messages (or large) to hurry up or if a ball gets stuck, failed to launch and so on. The smaller one is more informative and overlays the current screen while the bigger one covers the entire screen and is meant to present more mode-related messages such as "JACKPOT!" etc. I've added a couple of modes as well such as EVE, Rapture, DNA / ADAM frenzy, JACK in order to get the game programming started. It's nice to have the machine "talking" back to you while testing!

Here's the current state of the machine.
Those of you who's been following the blog for a while probably notices a few new pieces...

2) Current state of the pinball machine.