Thelooca - Pinwall

(for lack of a better name)

When I was in Belgium in early September of 2018, I met up with my friend Thomas Delbeke. He runs the company Thelooca which specializes in video mapping. Video mapping basically comes down to projecting video onto any surface that's not an actual screen. The wackier, the better.

He had invited me over as he'd accepted a job for an event in early October for which he'd been requested to create a 5 to 10 minute video to be mapped onto a building. At the same time, he knew that the organisation making this request would be open to any counter suggestion, as long as it all ended with video being mapped onto said building.

He told me he hadn't started creating any content yet, but he had an idea and wanted my opinion. He opened up his browser to a pinball creator in the Unity asset store, looked at me and said, "What if we project a pinball machine onto that building and people can play with it?" I understood very well that what he was really asking was, "Do you think you can build this pinball machine?" I replied, "When exactly in October are we talking?" There were about three weeks left until the event.

There were about three weeks left

I didn't commit to the job right there and then, but promised Thomas to try out that pinball creator and get back to him in a few days with my thoughts. Turned out that my tinkering with Unity in the past paid off. After a couple of hours playing around with the well documented asset and trying to create a board that wasn't shaped like your typical pinball machine, I felt confident enough that I could pull this off.

I gave Thomas the green light to start building the hardware that would house the physical push buttons for people to interact with, and the rest is history. The event happened. People played pinball on the front of a building. People were happy. Thomas was happy. I was happy, but above all I had some fun.

The real challenge for this project was actually creating a board layout that was fun enough to play and where the ball wouldn't get stuck, or switches wouldn't be reachable. Next to that, I added the ability for the game to send out OSC signals for game events so Thomas would be able to automatically overlay extra graphic effects on top of the actual pinball.

People were happy. Thomas was happy. I was happy

Things I learned

• It's pretty amazing what you can find on Unity's asset store, and without it, this project simply wouldn’t have happened within the available time frame.
• When building a project in Unity, be careful not to become too dependent on assets. Maybe that's me, but I wouldn't be comfortable using fully fledged 'creator' assets in more serious projects without seriously delving into the guts of those assets. This would take time, probably a lot of time, so maybe some things are worth building from scratch?
• Trying to fix a problem when you're 6000km away is not straightforward. Luckily the only minor issue we had on site was losing the input from the push buttons when the game was not in the foreground.

Future plans

• I have this weird feeling this might not be the last time I've built a game to be projected onto a building, or anything really...