Devlog #3: a pinball table in the belfry

Noctivore is a text RPG for your phone. You hunt by night, take gear off what you kill, level up, and take on rival hunters in an async arena. When your energy runs out, there's a shelf of small arcade games to pass the time. As of this week there are eleven. It runs in the browser at noctivore.app.

What happened

Since the last devlog, the shelf got a pinball table, one arcade game stopped twitching, and you can now change your Arena name. Two of those three came from players.

Belfry Pinball

A pinball table in the castle belfry, played upright on your phone. One silver ball at a time, three balls a run. There are three bells to ring, two slingshots above the flippers, and a bank of five bats on the left. Hit all five awake and they take wing, and your multiplier goes up by one. It never comes back down during a run.

On the right, a stair winds up the side of the table and over the bells. Make it all the way up and it wakes the next sleeping bat, so it's a second road to the multiplier. Hit it too softly and the ball rolls back down.

Your left thumb works the left flipper, your right thumb the right. Like the other arcade games, the whole lower screen counts, so your thumbs don't have to cover the table.
You can hold a flipper up to catch the ball and take a breath. The pace keeps climbing while you hold, though.
Each ball starts slow and speeds up the longer it stays alive. Losing a ball resets the pace for the next one.

It's at the top of the shelf.

A bot found the bugs

The physics is written by hand: straight walls, round bells, and flippers that hit harder near the tip. Every arcade game in Noctivore has a bot that plays it over and over, to check that every run ends and that a better player scores more. On pinball the bot found things I'd never have found by playing.

A ball that bounced between the two slingshots for fifteen minutes, scoring the whole time. The bells and slingshots now kick a little unevenly, so no bounce repeats exactly.
After the first playtest I lowered the gravity, and the loop came back: at the new gravity, one slingshot sent the ball almost exactly onto the other. The slingshots are steeper now, with a softer kick.
A ball that slipped off the side of the stair near the bottom. The game still thought it was on the stair, so it fell straight through the floor, past the pit, forever.

Three playtests set the pace. The first lowered the gravity. The second slowed the whole table down to three-quarter speed. The third made the speed-up start over with every ball, because balls two and three were launching at full speed.

Midnight Run stopped twitching

A player reported this one. In Midnight Run, the line beside your score reads something like 99 m · 1 drop · 1 bite. On a typical phone it sat right at the edge of fitting, so each time a number gained a digit or a word went plural, it jumped to two lines, then back to one. The top of the screen twitched while you were trying to run. It's now always two short lines, and it fits beside the score on every phone width I tested.

You can change your Arena name

A player asked for this, with a cooldown so nobody abuses it. In the Arena there's now a Change name button under your record.

Your first change is free. After that, you can change it once every 30 days.
Your old name is held for you for those 30 days. Nobody else can take it, and duel invite links with your old name still find you.
The fight history keeps the name you had at the time. The feed shows rivals by their current name.

What I learned

Pinball passed every test and still failed its first deploy. The bot's practice runs took almost two minutes on the build server, in one go, and the test runner gave up waiting for an answer. The old version stayed live in the meantime, so nobody saw it. The bot now takes a short pause between runs. Last time I learned that a test can't see your thumb. This time I learned that a slow test can fail even when everything it checks is right.

Your turn

What's your best Belfry Pinball score? And if the table gets one more thing, should it be multiball, a second ramp, or a way to nudge the table? Tell me in the comments.

— D4rkF1r3fly