The short answer: Yes.
The not-so-short answer: This is going to be a lot more work than I thought - and I was expecting it to be a lot of work originally - and I've had a bunch of real life issues ranging from annoying to serious crop up lately. Add to this the fact that some of my limited free time goes to real pinball and another fraction goes to TPA. (This is good, because anyone who doesn't play a lot of pinball shouldn't be designing a table.) So there's not much time left to wrestle Visual Pinball to the ground, conjure up some primitive art so that a real artist at least knows what I'm trying for, try to figure out what to do with the right Gate of Hell spinner that seems to be in the way of at least one major shot no matter where I put it - and no, I'm not going to take the easy way out and merge the spinners with the ramps! - et cetera, and so on, and so forth.
Yes, I know, first world problems.
But in the meantime, a few more rules changes from playing it mentally. (Again, a design rule: If the table design is too complex to fit the entire design in my head so I can "play" the table mentally, it's too complex for a player to grasp on the fly in a real game.)
The not-so-short answer: This is going to be a lot more work than I thought - and I was expecting it to be a lot of work originally - and I've had a bunch of real life issues ranging from annoying to serious crop up lately. Add to this the fact that some of my limited free time goes to real pinball and another fraction goes to TPA. (This is good, because anyone who doesn't play a lot of pinball shouldn't be designing a table.) So there's not much time left to wrestle Visual Pinball to the ground, conjure up some primitive art so that a real artist at least knows what I'm trying for, try to figure out what to do with the right Gate of Hell spinner that seems to be in the way of at least one major shot no matter where I put it - and no, I'm not going to take the easy way out and merge the spinners with the ramps! - et cetera, and so on, and so forth.
Yes, I know, first world problems.
But in the meantime, a few more rules changes from playing it mentally. (Again, a design rule: If the table design is too complex to fit the entire design in my head so I can "play" the table mentally, it's too complex for a player to grasp on the fly in a real game.)
- To reduce the lather-rinse-repeat aspect of the Greed rounds, they now ask the player to hit certain subsets of the 7 Greed targets in predetermined orders, rather than just "hit X targets in the time limit".
- Similarly, Envy's hurry-up when collected now lights one shot for the next hurry-up and one other shot for 3 seconds as a double-value combo shot. This adds a risk-reward element: do you go for the fast, risky but high-scoring shot, or settle for the conservative one?
- Stacking a new sin now adds the full value of its timer to the existing timer. To compensate, the timed sins have shorter durations, especially in the earlier/easier rounds. (And particularly in Sloth, where I started with 2 holes in 90 seconds. Not sure what I was thinking there...)
- For the first 7 sins (basically up until Sin first advances the table difficulty), hitting any one 6-6-6 drop target or any one unlit S-I-N lane will light Start Sin. After that point, you'll need to complete 6-6-6 or S-I-N to light a new sin.
- Starting the Wages of Sin round a third time starts Reaper Madness instead (complete with DMD animation of Death toking up!). This is a 50K-a-switch frenzy that shares its timer with the current sin timer...and can be dragged into multiballs.
