Boing pinball
A 3-D pinball table of my own, Comet Tour, played with a red-and-white chequered Boing ball — flippers, slingshots, pop bumpers, drop targets, a spinner, a ramp, a skill shot, multiball, five missions and a dot-matrix display — on keyboard, touch or gamepad.
Added
How to use it
Comet Tour is a single-level pinball table I designed for the browser. The ball is the chequered Boing ball from the Boing Lamp and the effect lab, cast as a comet on a tour of five planets. The camera looks down the table at an angle like a real cabinet, or straight down on a phone held upright. The score, ball number and messages come up on a dot-matrix display at the head of the table.
How to play
Press Start game, pull the plunger back and let it go. Keep the ball off the drain between the flippers and out of the two outer lanes. You get three balls.
Flippers |
Z or Left Shift for the left, / or Right Shift for the right. On a touch screen, touch the left or right half of the table. On a gamepad, the bumpers or triggers. |
Plunger |
Hold Space or ↓ to pull back (a second for full power) and let go. On a touch screen, swipe down from anywhere and let go — the further, the harder. Gamepad: hold A (or d-pad down). |
Nudge |
←, → and ↑, the nudge buttons at the bottom of a touch screen, or the d-pad. Nudge twice in quick succession and you get a warning; the third warning tilts the table — the flippers go dead and you lose the ball and its bonus. |
Pause |
P or Esc, gamepad Start. The game pauses by itself when you switch tabs. M mutes. |
What scores:
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Skill shot — one of the three top lanes flashes as you launch. Steer it with the flippers and send the ball through it for 10,000.
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Lanes A B C — light all three to raise the end-of-ball bonus multiplier (up to 5×). The flippers shift the lit lanes left and right, so you can line up the gap.
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Ramp — the blue ramp on the right. Each ramp shot locks a ball; the third starts multiball, with two more balls fired in, and during multiball every ramp shot is a jackpot.
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Missions — the hole on the left starts a 40-second mission at one of five planets: pop bumpers (Venus), drop-target banks (Mars), spinner spins (Mercury), ramp shots (Jupiter) or lane sets (Saturn). Finish all five and the hole starts Supernova: multiball with every score tripled for thirty seconds.
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Ball save — a ball that drains in the first ten seconds after launch comes straight back.
The toolbar switches the camera (auto picks top-down when the table is taller than it is wide), sound, music, screen shake and low graphics. If the game can’t keep up it switches to low graphics by itself. Full screen gives the table the whole screen; your best ten scores are kept in this browser.
How it works
The physics runs at a fixed 120 steps a second, each split into enough substeps that neither the ball nor a flipper tip moves more than a quarter of the ball’s radius in one, so a fast ball can’t pass through a flipper or a wall. A flipper hit uses the speed of the flipper’s surface where it touches the ball (its angular velocity times the distance from the pivot), so a ball hit near the tip goes further than one hit near the pivot. The ramp is a rail the ball follows, slowing as it climbs; too weak a shot rolls back out. Everything is in millimetres on a table about the size of a real one, with gravity scaled for a playfield tilted at about six degrees.
Sound effects and the music loop are synthesised with Web Audio as you play — no recordings. Moving lights flash at no more than two and a half times a second, and if your system asks for reduced motion the screen shake is off and the lamps don’t flash.
Feedback is a gift. Something to improve, a feature to add, or a bug? Tell me.
Runs entirely in your browser — network requests go only to the services named on this page.