Heighway Pinball: Part 4

I have recently completed seven days of work experience with Heighway Pinball between March & April 2015.
See part 1, part 2, part 3 or continue to part 5.

Media & Game Production

Although due to my limited time I could not get stuck in and help out in this department, Russell Speak, Media & Game Producer kindly gave me a tour of his work at Heighway.

Heighway have been quite ground breaking as a pinball manufacture in many ways, but in this case the games are first designed and built as digital versions, which can be played before the huge expense and time required of building a physical prototype.

Early release of visuals of the second game Alien from the Future Pinball software. Source.

This expertise comes from Russ, who has many years experience using the Future Pinball software to design his own (or remake) digital pinball machines. I’d really like to get into building machines using this software and Russ thoroughly recommended getting into it, saying that some people have gone on to build one-off physical versions of their own designed machines from the digital versions. Of course there would be some physical restraints transferring a digital version to reality, but that’s quite interesting.

One of Russel's many Future Pinball machines - Jaws

There are plenty of tutorials for working with the software, which would be a great place to start.

I like the idea of Heighway producing digital games or apps of their real life machines that could be released to the public.

Russ was working on assets for their second title Alien, this is a licensed game so I can’t give anything away from what I have seen otherwise I will be chopped up into tiny pieces!

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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, part 3 or continue to part 5.