Mediocre game technology

This might be the first time I reveal something about an upcoming title on this blog, but here it is – we are currently working on a pinball game. Not a classical pinball game, it has a pretty cool twist, but the basic mechanic is still very similar. As a physics programmer this sounded easy at first. Hey, it's just a sphere. What could possibly be easier to simulate? I wouldn't call myself a pinball player, but I've always enjoyed it and spent a lot of time with the old Amiga games Pinball Dreams/Fantasies and even more with Slam Tilt. It's an interesting challenge to create a pinball simulation because it is quite the opposite of what physics programmers are usually facing – forget stacks of boxes, thousands of objects, streaming geometry and convex decomposition. With pinball it's all about detail and accuracy. We are not aiming for maximum realism in this game, but I think realism is a good place to start and then tweak the parameters to fit the gameplay. L