My immediate thought on this week’s theme of narrative design was ‘How on Earth can I apply this to a pinball game?‘ After all, it’s just a case of knocking down targets and hitting ramps whilst trying to get a new high score. Hardly the next Assassin’s Creed or GTAV where the player undertakes a journey as the game play unfolds.
But I was wrong.
The more I played different pinball tables, the more I came to realise this genre takes the player on a series of mini quests or missions that could be considered a narrative. For the most part, the order of completion is unimportant but the player would need to complete a set of initial quests in order to unlock the “Wizard Mode”, the pinball equivalent of a Boss Battle.
For example, in the Attack From Mars game (Figure 1), the player needs to first defend the Earth by destroying an alien flying saucer in five different cities. This unlocks the Attack Mars mode which the player needs to complete along with several other quests in order to unlock the “Rule The Universe” wizard mode . This can be better visualised in a rule set diagram such as the one I’ve created in Figure 2.
I stumbled across the idea of a pinball rule set quite by accident whilst researching playfield designs when I found a document by Jean-Paul de Win on the International Pinball Database for The Hobbit (Figure 3) together with the table design (Figure 4).
This was when I had my epiphany: finding these two documents was akin to finding the Rosetta Stone of pinball design. Suddenly I could see not only the importance of narrative but also how I could create the narrative and then use it to drive the playfield design, artwork and ultimately the game play as well.
Conclusion
At the time of writing, the narrative for my game is still evolving as I see overall design as being very iterative rather than a waterfall approach. I have the main elements of the narrative and now need to make sure these work/fit with the playfield layout before adding more detail. Figure 5 captures where I am at this point in time as I embark on the layout and artwork activities.
The biggest learning point for me from this exercise was gaining an appreciation that narrative can be applied creatively and used to drive design, even for genres where, on face value, it would appear irrelevant. In essence, do not discount something because you cannot see how it fits initially; stick with it and you may be pleasantly surprised at the outcome.
List of Figures
Figure 1 THORN, 2022 Screenshot: Attack from Mars — © Williams Pinball
Figure 2 THORN, 2022 Attack from Mars Ruleset
Figure 3 DE WIN, 2016 The Hobbit Rules Flowchart
Figure 4 DE WIN, n.d. The Hobbit Playfield Design
Figure 5 THORN, 2022 Pinball Narrative Design, February 2022
References
Photo by Faye Cornish on Unsplash
