Kabounce customisations
This weekend our artists provide a sneak peek into some of the Customisation available in Kabounce. Note: all Customisation is cosmetic only, these only affect how your pinball looks.
Initially, we already had plans for a Customisation system in Kabounce; however, you could only pick a pinball and trail. This wasn’t really sufficient, we had the ambition for more! The Customisation started with one of the artists adding a top hat, monocle, and moustache to a pinball – we were sold, it sparked creativity in all of us.
Originally we thought, there is only so much we can do with balls [spheres], right? Wrong! We expanded the range of Customisation options to include more hats, glasses, bowties, moustaches, arms, wings and much, much more (ridiculous) additions!
Pinballs need categories:
To keep our database of items structured (and selectable for players) we categorised everything:
- Base: the Pinball which is the cute, the bad and the weird (sometimes expressed as a single ball)
- Modification: materials or paint jobs for your Pinball.
- Trails: leave a dash of magic behind, or party it up with some confetti.
- Top Accessories: hats, horns and other oddities. These can even be rotated and tilted for a perfect fit.
- Middle Accessories: glasses, goggles, shades and other blinkers
- Special Accessories: these add a lot of variation and are often placed around the sides, bottom or backside of the pinball. Including (but not limited to) unique selections such as wings, arms, side wheels, ties or noses.
If you’ve slapped on all the parts, you either have a cute or badass pinball – or your own personal meme.
Rarities
To separate the complexity and impressiveness of the Customisation options we categorised them into rarities, these are: Common, Rare, Epic and Legendary. Common items in general are simpler, such as caps and top hats, whereas legendary cosmetics can be fully animated assets! Collect all the legendaries and show your friends who’s the true pinball wizard!
To roll or not to roll
Making these Pinballs is sometimes hard as… well… balls. When we added eyes and more character to the pinballs, we ran into some difficulties with the accessories, it really didn’t look good to see a hat at a relative height above; while the Pinball (with eyes) rolls around. For this reason we made several internal variations or types of Pinballs to aid our development .
Normal Pinballs are those with simply a texture or a flavour skin/effect, these will always roll normally, hats will float above, glasses are attached to their front, but stay in place – to give a sense of direction.
The animated Pinballs were a lot tougher, they have a clear front and forward – mostly because of their eyes - in some cases we simply keep their eyes in the direction you’re rolling at all times. This makes it feel much more readable in which direction they are going, and accessories fit plus look better.
In more extreme cases we wanted to keep the rolling effect, eyes included, but not have the accessory meaninglessly float above. To avoid accessories which are rolling with the ball clipping too much through other objects (accessories don’t have collision which is a gameplay oriented decision), we scaled down a lot of the accessories for those specific cases so they still work with the animated Pinballs.
We’ve seen so many weird Pinball dress ups we could have started a YouTube series, but in the end we didn’t want to have the Pinball roll and stop only to be looking into the bottom of a hat, or faceplanted on the floor with a hat on its metallic butt.
We look forward to find out what YOU can create!
-Joris, Kim, Laura and Robbie
Find daily tweets on our twitter or search #pinballoftheday . We showcase a new customisation set each day!
Drop by on Discord where you can usually find us dwelling and have a chat!
http://discord.gg/Kabounce
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P.S.
Here are some of our favourite combinations: