Game Overview

Game Overview

Before discussing the game play and the rules, let's take a look at the pinball table and the terminology associated with its various parts.

When a game begins, the ball falls from above the plunger down onto it, bounces a few times, and slowly comes to rest. When the ball has stopped bouncing, you can retract the plunger by holding down the spacebar. When you release the spacebar, the plunger accelerates toward the ball, hitting it upward. The ball bounces off the launch bank and into the main table area. The ball's trajectory is affected by its collision with any number of objects. If the ball approaches the trap, you can attempt to deflect the ball away using the flippers. The left flipper is controlled by the Shift key, and the right flipper is controlled by the Ctrl key (Windows) or Command key (Macintosh).

In this basic game of pinball, the object is to score as many points as possible. Points are gained by bouncing the ball off the bumpers, the flippers, and the inner edges of the left and right triangles. Here's how points (and bonus points) are awarded in this game:

Table 16.1. The Pinball Award System

When you do this:	You get:
Hit the ball with a flipper	150 points
Bounce the ball off a bumper	300 points
Bounce the ball off the inner edge of a triangle	200 points
Earn 2000 points	500-point bonus Special sound played
Earn 19,000 points	1000-point bonus Special sound played An extra ball

One other thing to note about this version of pinball is that it has a high score list. This game uses the High Score List movie clip developed in Chapter 10, "Using a High Score List." There have been no ActionScript modifications to that movie clip, only slight graphic changes.

The Skinny on Pinball

Before building any game I didn't invent, I research it. I try to get information on the specific rules and terminology, and in some cases the dimensions, weights, or colors of the objects used. I found that I�probably like many of the readers of this book�had a misconception about pinball. I thought it was simply a game in which you launch a ball and then try not to let it fall down the trap by hitting it with the flippers (and making a lot of lights blink along the way). Well, it turns out that pinball games are much more complicated than that. The goal of the game is to get the highest score possible, but you knew that much. In a full game of pinball (not the one created in this chapter), there are many gadgets, slides, holes, and sensors that the ball can interact with. The object is to send the ball into various locations on the table in a certain order. If you do this correctly, you are rewarded with a lot of points and possibly extra balls. Also, on some tables, by hitting a certain sequence you can open up other secret areas of the table that were previously inaccessible. The basic game in this chapter plays more like the average person's expectation of pinball: You smack the ball around to gain points. That's as complicated as the game play gets.