Heighway Pinball: Part 3

I have recently completed seven days of work experience with Heighway Pinball between March & April 2015.
See part 1, part 2 or continue to part 4.

Testing Full Throttle

Games tester is one of the job titles that fall into the category of dream jobs. So it was quite exciting to be tasked with testing a version of the Full Throttle software on one of the prototype machines.

Andrew playing while Balint watches on

The best thing to do here is to work your way through the different sections (or modes) of the game, and doing this actually helped me understand the structure of a pinball game a lot better.

It’s quite hard to keep track of what is going on sometimes, especially during a multiball situation when everything is quite frantic!

Test games in the prototyping room

So after a few rubbish attempts at working my way through the game I eventually managed to get through most of the modes getting a score of around 150M. Still not as good as some of the guys that work there, they are very good players!

Alas, games tester is not a job suited for me, I blame myself for poor game play before I blame the machine, which I’ve found is not a common characteristic for a pinball player! (I’ve seen swearing, shouting at and hitting the machines at most of the pinball tournaments I’ve attended)

Work harder bitches! (And the testing error list above)

During working through the modes we found a few errors which we recorded and will be fixed in the game rules. Although it’s important to make sure these errors don’t exist, the good thing about the game code and the setup of these machines, is that updates can be downloaded and installed via USB by the owner.

Slightly related here, is that one area I did not touch on at all during my time was the huge area of software development and writing the rules in code, but given my limited experience in that area and the time restraints, it was best that my focus was on the physical parts more so than the software.

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I have recently completed seven days of work experience with Heighway Pinball between March & April 2015. See part 1, part 2 or continue to part 4.