Ground rules before the first flipper

Before touching the table, two kinds of groundwork came first: a glossary, and two decisions about how the work gets done.

A glossary with a list of words to avoid

Pinball and Plants vs. Zombies each come with their own vocabulary, and a project that mixes the two drifts fast. The glossary pins down one name for each thing and lists the names not to use. A few examples:

• Whitewood is the table with its shots in place and no art or rules. Not “prototype” or “blockout”.
• Shot is one of the fourteen numbered features the ball can be sent to. Not “target”, because a target is only one kind of shot.
• Hit spot is a fixed place on a zombie’s path where the ball can strike it.
• Assumed value is a rule number nothing confirms, filled with a standard pinball value and marked so it can be checked later.

Six of the shots have glossary names, like the Flower Pot, the Sun Hole and the Zomboss Ramp, so every note, test and post calls them the same thing.

Decision 1: every change to the table can be seen

Visual Pinball normally saves a whole table as one sealed file. Change a post or move a ramp, and all you can tell afterward is that something changed.

So the table is kept broken out into its parts, one piece per playfield element. Every change shows up as exactly what moved, and a tweak made by hand in Visual Pinball’s editor comes back into those parts the same way.

Decision 2: the rules get checked without playing

On most tables, the rules (“three hits lights the Shop”) are tangled up with the playfield (“flash this lamp”). The only way to check them is to start the game and play, which is far too slow to do after every change.

Here the rules are built on their own, deciding score, awards and progress from what the ball hit, without knowing anything about the table itself. That means they can be checked in seconds, over and over. The table just tells the rules what was hit and lights the lamps they ask for, and that thin layer is the one part checked by playing.