![]() He plans to enlist a professional video game artist to design the screen graphics, as well as a local artist to draw the art for the playfield, cabinet and translite. The computer used in Pinball 2000 games is now pretty much a museum piece, so Linolium plans to provide new computing hardware as well as a playfield, cabinet art and translite with his Haunted Cruise kit. “There is much more to do with a screen than there is with a traditional DMD, but working with screens and 3D is what I do every day in my job,” he says. He uses C++ to write the software to drive the Pinball 2000 hardware, and C# through the Unity 3D game engine to write the software for the Pinball 2000 screen. Linolium says he enjoys the physical aspect of designing and building the playfield, but writing the software is where his real skills lie. “If you design a game in software you find that there is a big difference where the balls actually go (on a physical machine.)” “I have used visual pinball to make rough mock-ups but the physics is never quite right,” he explains. He prefers to build the game old school style: using multiple sheets of paper and a light box. He says he has learned quite a bit from working on that and designing one of the tables in the game, but he’s resisted the temptation to design Haunted Cruise as a simulation in software before turning it in to a physical game. His day job is developing console and mobile games, and he has already worked on virtual pinball projects like the PS3 game Pinballistik. There’s lots of people starting pinball projects, but Linolium certainly has some impressive credentials. Linolium worked on the PS3 game Pinballistik He has been in touch with Rick from PPS, and they’ve agreed that he can keep designing and then worry about licenses if and when the game finally goes into production. That of course brings up various licensing issues, because Planetary Pinball Supplies (PPS) has the rights to Pinball 2000’s Pepper’s Ghost effect as well as various other hardware designs, Linolium says. “But Pinball 2000’s screen is a pure Pepper’s Ghost effect, so I decided to use that instead,” Linolium says. He invented a system that projected images from a playfield apron, but found that it only worked in very low light conditions. (Pepper’s Ghost is the name of the technique that allows images to be projected – often used in haunted theme park rides.) “When I first started working on Haunted Cruise I wanted to have a couple of spirits on the playfield using Pepper’s Ghost,” he explains. Revenge From Mars uses the Pepper’s Ghost illusionīut Linolium (the handle that Manuelian prefers to go by) has his reasons for choosing Pinball 2000. ![]()
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