State of Play Inks

It's not everyday you open your email and find a message from a BAFTA winning games company telling you how much they like your work.

It's times like this you just have to jump on an opportunity.

State of Play got in touch as they had seen my digital pinball pints online. By coincidence they are currently working on an iOS game based around pinball

The reason they found me is not by chance. The very day before the email, I bought their game Lumino City. Lumnio City is truely wonderful game and I urge you to play it.

When playing I took a screenshot and tweeted just saying how much I liked the game.

Lumino City is beautifully made - this puzzle game was constructed with paper, wood, lights & motors #LuminoCity pic.twitter.com/NqbnNd0YEH

— Jono Sandilands (@jonosandilands) February 8, 2016

To cut a long story short they effectively want to commission me to make a print for their new game in the style of the embedded digital print. We decided to meet, plus a trip to London could be beneficial for dropping by a few exhibitions that are related.

On meeting we speak about how the prints could develop and be playable. This is really exciting! There are a few ideas how this could be done, but we made a bit of a plan before I went away to do some gallery visits.

When I got back to Bristol I got right on with sourcing USB keyboards to hack apart for use as possible game controllers. Instead to buying expensive controllers we can just use the simple switches and the USB keyboard interface.

We're having problems working out how to get the prints to be playable. We're a bit restricted with Apple devices so USB is eventually ruled out, so we are being 'creative' (hacking) including trying out Dan's idea of using a pair of Apple headphones as the controller.

Great idea but there is no hold feature, needed for pinball!

In the end we realise due to time constraints we''ll have to stick with a looping video as the original pinball print.

Information about the game is starting to get released:

Now I get to jump onto making artwork and get supplied the assets to design the cabinet.

As well as ordering the parts, I prepare for screenprinting, once thats done it's a case of putting everything together.

The buttons I made were used in State of Play's final pinball machine. the machine is currently at the Apple office in London as they love it so much! Great news.

So, made a real pinball table for @nowplaythese & @londongamesfest. Have the world's first play of INKS this weekend pic.twitter.com/elYHlDesTN

— State of Play Games (@State_of_Play) March 30, 2016

Both the print and the pinball machine (with those lovely buttons) were exhibited at Somerset House for Now Play This exhibition.