VP8 SS Original Table Mini Cooper Motorin' (Original) VP8 by Stevan Flores v1.1

[stevan]

I created this original table and I tried to give it a "real" feel. I designed with a MINI Cooper theme because I love my Coop and "High Speed" is one of my favorite tables.

I started with Chris La Mantia's excellent Table Skeleton Version 0.1. Once I got it so it played well (IMHO), I spent a long time making it look more realistic. I was inspired by Bob5453 (bob) and his original tables (esp. "Three Stooges").

It features an original song, a special u-turn kicker, car upgrade bonuses, and colored balls. This is my first attempt at making a table. Comments and critiques welcome.

http://www.pinballnirvana.com/UpDownload-req-getit-lid-1304.html

VP8 - SS - Original Table - Mini Cooper Motorin' (Original) VP8 by Stevan Flores

Mini Cooper Motorin' (Original) VP8 by Stevan Flores v1.1 Oh my, this is a real beaut' of a first-time table effort. It plays fast and excitingly, and the cow targets and special metallic balls are almost addictingly fun to play around with...

pinballnirvana.com

 

[bob]

Wow! That's an awesome first table! I played 3 games and everything seemed to work great. I like the colored balls and the car upgrades, it makes the table very original. I like the gray color scheme and you seemed to add just enough graphics to make the table look great. The rpm and mph gauges are really cool. Excellent job. How long did it take you to make the table and tell us a little about your background, because you seem to have some graphic and programming skills. My first table was so bad, the new table in the editor was a better game. :)

Thanks for the kudos, but I just copied those bumpers from JPSalas. :)

 

[stevan]

Thanks for the kind words, Bob.:)

It took me almost 40 hours to get the table to play right. I did that first before I really even had an idea for the theme. The "u-turn" is what made me think of using a "driving" theme. Actually, I was probably subconsciously thinking of driving anyway ("High Speed"). I had the Upgrade kicker in place already so when I started designing the graphics and I used a car, it gave me an idea to put lights on the car during play. The idea for "painting" the ball came from your using colored balls in "Three Stooges".

The graphics took me way long, probably over 80 hours. That includes redesigning the table elements (making the walls double-layered with posts, adding screws, putting "rubbers" on posts, adding decorative rails and supports). Also, I "messed up" on my first attempt in that I didn't have enough space on the bottom edge of the table to add the "lockbar" to make it look more real. When I stretched the table, I had to re-layout all the graphic elements so that took a little more time.

As far as my background, I am an elementary school teacher. However, I have dabbled in graphics and programming for a long time. I've taught myself (beginning back in the 1980s) BASIC, PASCAL, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Perl, and PHP. Once I understood the conventions and concepts (subroutines, linear processes, logical operators, object oriented programming), most programming was easy to understand. So I just dug into the code of other tables and figured out what each line was doing. Then I figured out how to make it do what I wanted it to do. A few websites were helpful in uncovering the subtleties of a few concepts (timers, collections) but mostly it was me taking apart code.

For the graphics, I used an old version of Photoshop and an old vector graphics program called DrawPlus. I am not an artist, but back in the days before No Child Left Behind, I used to teach drawing to my students. Some people say I'm artistic and have an eye for color. I guess that helped make the graphics more appealing. I tried to put a lot of information on the table. I notice that real tables have art EVERYWHERE, so I tried to make it work, though I don't know that it's busy enough for a "real" table.

Thanks for asking.

 

[bob]

Thanks for the info.... It's unfortunate, but you'll get more feedback if you create a release thread at VPF also, I wish it wasn't so, but many people only post there.

 

[stevan]

Will do. Thanks.

 

[Neo]

Very nice work. I like how you did the gauges, and I also like the different-colored balls.

Way better than my first table.

 

[TedB]

Looks and plays great! Very nice original, thanks for sharing.

 

[JonPurpleHaze]

Thanks for Motorin'!

I finally had a chance to play it and it's a lot of fun, i really suck at it right now but hope I'll get better after playing a few more times.

(Thanks for the smiley bob)

 

[stevan]

Ike Savage updated Mini Cooper Motorin' by Stevan Flores with a new update entry:

Added a bunch of notes, fun facts, images, and directions...

...in the resource entry.
Enjoy.

Read the rest of this update entry...