INKS (2016)

Genre: Pinball, Puzzle

Engine: Unity

Roles: Game design, level design

We wanted to deconstruct pinball and reformulate the game as a series of distinct puzzles, each with a clear goal. This meant stripping the visuals back to what was necessary, without losing the game’s vibrant appeal.

This is what led us to developing INKS, a colourful pinball puzzler for mobile.

About the project

Gameplay

Levels are beaten by bursting every block of colour on the table. We start with a golden ball. If it’s lost, we get a silver ball. Then bronze, until lastly out comes the inky black ball to make a mess of our artwork.

Levels 47, 67, 77 and 99

The game has 5 sections of 24 levels. Each new section introduces a new mechanic — teleports, rails, disappearing walls and bounce pads.

Revisiting a classic genre

If you like pinball, that may be partly due to its distinctive, retro and chaotic energy. But this is also what puts many people off. The busy graphics and sounds can hide what are cleverly laid out designs with branching missions.

Beneath this, most pinball tables share very similar layouts and essentially a handful of targets that yield points depending on the order they were hit in.

Pinball table studies

Shifting the learning curve

Hitting specific targets in pinball is hard. Hitting targets on curved walls is easier because there’s a greater margin for error, and no matter where you hit the curve, the ball will likely hit more than one target as it glides along.

This was useful for designing early levels especially because it shifted the difficulty curve such that players new to pinball can get into the game without going through this frustrating period of helpless tapping. By the time they reach levels where they need to hit certain targets, they’re already much better at aiming.

Level 73

Level 1

Early level designs

Trophy system

In standard pinball, one ball = one life. This works because you’re trying to set a high score, or any score at all, before dying. But here we have no score, only a single objective. I wanted to offer tiered rewards somehow, and realised that the balls themselves could be the trophies. We liked the way that you begin with your prize and have to desperately cling on to it, it felt like a fun and neat solution.

The four trophies

Bonus points

We still wanted the most ambitious players to feel rewarded for their immaculate precision, so I added a target par to every level to reward beating a level in as few hits as is technically possible.

Hole in 3

Each level is essentially a series of targets