Rolling and flinging through a pixelated dungeon, accompanied by a mysterious but always friendly score, and discovering an enigmatic tower. When I first encountered Pinball Spire at the online gaming showcase Steam Next Fest last June, I was immediately intrigued and wrote about it in the second edition of The Ball is Wild 🪩 pinball culture newsletter. Then only judging from the trailer and a short description, it seemed like a very likeable indie game with a limited scope but a clear vision.

When I played the full game on its release day on October 2nd, my assumptions were confirmed: Pinball Spire is indeed a videogame that delivers itself in a manageable size, but more importantly as a coherent experience, both in terms of game and level design, and also regarding its presentation. The Canadian developer behind the game, Oakville-based programmer Tom Voros, did most of the work by himself over the course of two and a half years. Prior to that, he was part of a big team at Ubisoft that developed Far Cry 6 where he was used to working in a specialised division. With his new project, Tom couldn’t rely on his programming skills alone. He had to try out and learn many new things, needing to make a lot of compromises in the process.

Meticulously crafted video pin

Pinball Spire may seem like just an okay-ish video pin game at first glance but it soon becomes clear that this title was developed by someone who is not only highly talented, motivated and professional, but also palpably critical towards himself. Hence the game provides a great playing (and flipping) experience which doesn’t overstay its welcome at any point, and without any superfluous features or elements whatsoever. The player has to work his pinball-way up the eponymous spire by puzzle-solving different playfields. Aside from common gameplay elements like flippers, slingshots, ramps and lanes, Pinball Spire also plays around a lot with light and darkness, buttons and switches, as well as spatial challenges where you need to figure out the way from point A to point B. In addition, there are three distinct powers to be found in the game that the player can use at any time, though those powers are bound to a depletable Mana system in order to prevent spamming.

I played through Pinball Spire in a bit over four hours total on my Steam Deck (plugged into my TV) and was pleasantly surprised by the constant and clever changes in terms of challenges between solving puzzles and hitting targets, and the fact that the pace always switches between slow and fast sections. I experimented with every new room, often paused to be able to get a closer look at new elements, and repeatedly zoomed in and out of the action to achieve a good overview as well as an eye for the details. This game is without a doubt one of the highlights of this year’s video pinball output in general, and so I was happy that Tom Voros agreed on doing an elaborate interview with me about Pinball Spire and the development process behind it. (Our conversation was done through a video call, the audio was then transcribed via an online tool and edited by hand afterwards.)

Hi Tom! Why did you choose to create a pinball videogame and what were the challenges involved?

“I think pinball can be intimidating to a lot of people who haven’t played it before. It’s so easy to feel like you haven’t accomplished anything when you just launch the ball, it bounces around a few times, then you don’t catch and lose it. It feels frustrating. That’s kind of the typical experience for a lot of people playing pinball for the first few times. And it can be very discouraging. It’s also completely unlike the way most games are designed, right? Typically, you want to ease players in on game mechanics and the challenges and make the player feel confident in themselves. But pinball is really brutal. It’s like you either get it or you’re just going to fail over and over at first. That’s one of the things I wanted to tackle because, frankly, I’m not a great pinball player myself. I love how kinetic and physical pinball is, but it’s also very challenging to play.

One of my goals when I started the project was: How can I design this to be more approachable? I figured you shouldn’t be afraid of the ball draining and so there’s no fail state in Pinball Spire. The bottom of the spire is basically a launcher that shoots you back up so you can’t ever really lose the ball. That idea led to a lot of other decisions on top, always asking the questions: How can I assist the player, and how can I find the right balance where people who are more experienced at pinball can feel like they can sort of play it their way. The Focus ability is an obvious way that I tackled that: It lets you slow down the game and you get a nice preview and not have to guess as much about where the ball is going to go. But you don’t have to use it if you don’t want to. I tried to find a balance, and it’s interesting seeing the reaction, because I’m getting some criticism from both sides. The pinball purists say that this game helps you too much. And then the new players are like: This game is too hard, I can’t control the ball, it’s going all over.”

To me, Pinball Spire is specifically a puzzle pinball game. You have to figure out a specific solution within every board or playfield, which sometimes takes away the necessity of needing to be a skilled pinball player. But let’s talk a bit about the presentation first: One of the things I like very much is how you work with light and darkness. Many puzzles are designed around that. How come?

“I knew from the start that I didn’t want to make a traditional pinball game. One of the games I looked at a lot was Sonic 3. All the older Sonic games take a lot of inspiration from pinball – there’s pinball elements all over. Also, Sega released Sonic Spinball, a dedicated pinball title. Those games move really well, the physics are dialed in and the abilities that you get really complement your movements. In Sonic 3 especially, you get the fireball, which gives you a dash, but also lets you hit enemies. You get the bubble shield, which lets you stomp down and bounce up higher. And the lightning shield, which gives you a vertical boost. That was my main inspiration for the things I wanted to do in Pinball Spire. I wanted to have abilities that feel good and additive to the abilities you already have in terms of just basic pinball: shooting the ball, launching the ball, et cetera.

Initially, this started as a very small game. It could have gotten more abilities that didn’t make it into the final build. But for the core abilities I did get to, I wanted to see how I can make the most of them. I started bringing in elements that supported the core gameplay. Then there’s some Metroidvania elements in there like having a connected world that you can traverse.

Going back to your question: Zelda is another inspiration because it has a lot of light and darkness. When the ideas seem to naturally fit together, I would prototype them, try them out, see what I could do with it. When I got the idea for a fireball lighting torches, I thought this would be a good way to tell the player that this is not a typical pinball game. So maybe you haven’t played pinball before, but you have played Super Metroid or Zelda – then you might be like: Oh, that’s cool!”

Still, Pinball Spire is not straying too far from the classic pinball action in many aspects. You have to get the shots right, you need to take your time to practice. Sometimes, you come to a spot where you need to do something specific. This is one of the few problems I have with Pinball Spire: That you can’t do many other stuff at certain points in the game. What I love, on the other hand, is that every feature you have put into the game is really useful. This, to me, is great game design!

“I’m glad you enjoyed that stuff. It’s always gratifying watching people play and using all the abilities.”

We were talking about the two different player bases: pinball people and videogame people. Which group is playing Pinball Spire more?

“I’m seeing a lot of people from both camps who are enjoying the game. There’s a great review on Steam from someone who says he’s played tons of pinball and that he loves everything about my game. That’s really cool to hear because I wasn’t expecting it to go over so well with the hardcore crowd. The tables are relatively simple, and you usually only have a few things you can do at a time. One of the decisions I made earlier on is that it’s going to be more about the traversal, about moving through the space. I generally want the player to know what they need to do and set up some challenges. It’s not about sticking around at one table for hours until you’ve mastered it – the way you would play a real pinball machine over and over.

So I’m glad both camps are enjoying it, and I’m gonna keep making tweaks. There’s definitely room for something like an alternate game mode where maybe I take one of the tables from Pinball Spire and make it more like a traditional machine: add more complexity, add more layers to it, and turn that into a score attack mode or something. On the other hand, I have so many different improvements and little features I’d like to work on that it’s hard to figure out where to prioritize. I probably want to expand more on the core game. At the moment, my priorities are also building an on-ramp for newer players to teach some of the common tricks of pinball. I posted a little video on Twitter the other day to show players how to cradle the ball, which I feel is such an essential element of pinball. And it completely unlocks the way you play. I see that some players are getting frustrated because they’re not picking up on these sorts of things on their own.”

One thing I also want to talk to you about is storytelling. In Pinball Spire you can collect different skins like a hat or glasses that your ball character can then wear. Did you also consider making the ball a specific character and telling a story around it?

“For sure. We actually had some ideas to do more storytelling, like have some more characters in there. But the realities of game development got in the way at some point and we had to decide what our focus really was. Still, I would definitely love to build out more story, more lore about this weird world. If we do get a chance to go down that route, then there’s certainly opportunities to also incorporate that in the tutorialization and in the puzzles and in the challenges and make the game a richer experience in that way. But for the initial release of the game, our focus had to be: make a cool pinball adventure.”

Did or do you feel restricted when it comes to storytelling? Because a ball is a ball – scarf, hat, and glasses or not. It’s certainly harder to pull off than with a humanoid character, for instance.

“Oh, for sure, yeah. Again, this goes back to the basic inspiration for the game, which is a lot of old action games like Sonic and Mario. It’s about trying to tell a story in a very rudimentary way. You get a sense of what’s happening, but it’s not like stopping the action every few minutes for cut-scenes and dialogue. That was my guiding principle: give enough hints to entice the players to want to you know more. Move along their journey and hopefully arrive at some kind of satisfying conclusion at the end.

In terms of the shape of the character: It might be one of those cases where the ball is the silent protagonist and all the other characters are talking at him. To be frank, a lot of the decisions that went into Pinball Spire were made with my own limitations in mind. And a big one for me was that I’m not much of an artist. So I had to think like: If I’m going to do this, what are things I can probably draw? And honestly, that was one of the reasons I went with pinball: because it’s a ball. I can draw a ball. I can draw flippers. I can draw bumpers. And even then, as basic as this stuff is, I had to work at it quite a bit to get something I was reasonably happy with. So if we add more story and more characters, it’s still going to be constrained by what I can execute.”

You worked on Pinball Spire for about two and a half years.

“Yeah, and prior to that, I worked on Far Cry 6 at Ubisoft. I was there for over five years. I got really lucky to get an opportunity to try my hand at AAA game development. And that was a really cool experience.”

You’ve been a programmer within the Far Cry 6 team. Something else, too?

“I was an AI programmer at Ubisoft, at least by title. I also did a lot of gameplay stuff. Coming out of that project … you know, it was a very long project. And I was eager to do something a bit simpler, a bit faster. Also – I think like a lot of indie developers –, I wanted to push myself creatively in some areas beyond just programming. So I thought, let’s try indie games. It’s something I’ve tried before in the past, but that did not go so well. But I wanted to take it more seriously this time and really commit myself full time. I was going to make this thing. It started as a smaller project, and grew and grew. I felt that the game had potential as I was working on it. About a year in, I decided to pitch the game to publishers to get more support on marketing. I partnered with indie.io – they were called Freedom Games back then –, and soon it became bigger than I had originally anticipated.

I’m really happy with a lot of the ways I was able to push myself on things like the pixel art. I also did all the sound design, which was really hard and challenging. And I originally intended to do the music as well, but I sort of chickened out at the end. I decided that I don’t think I can do music that is going to do justice to the game. I didn’t want the game to be held back just because the music is not great. So I decided to partner with composer Starling Tan, and she did a really wonderful soundtrack.”

What kind of information did you give to Starling Tan? Did you show her videos of the game?

“Yeah, so I sent her the build of the game so she could play it. Before that, it was screenshots and light descriptions of each of the environments. My focus was very much on the Metroidvania tradition, like have the music really amplify the atmosphere of the environment. We looked at some reference pieces and agreed on a general direction to go with each track. She would then come back to me later with a sample. It was pretty much spot-on every time. The music turned out so fantastic, and it so perfectly complements the atmosphere of the game. Also, something I wasn’t anticipating is that the soundtrack ended up being very mellow, which is very unlike pinball typically, which has a lot of metal and rock music, very energetic. But Pinball Spire is not really that. And I think that’s actually another useful way to let the player know that this just is a different kind of pinball game. You can take your time, you can be more meticulous about your shots.”

Your brother also helped a bit during the development of the game, right?

“My brother Mark. He’s always my sounding board for my game design ideas and he also came up with a lot of designs on his own that I prototyped in the game. But one thing I learned working on this is that few of the things you sketch out on paper will survive very long once it’s implemented in the game. Because once you start testing it, you realize all the things that aren’t working or need to be completely tweaked. So I took Mark’s designs, put them in the game, and then iterated on them so that it feels like a satisfying experience. He wanted to give me more designs, but I eventually had to slow him down because you can sketch something on paper very quickly but it takes me weeks to get it in the game properly.

Mark also provided some of the key sound effects, which was really cool, like the enemy death and the flipper sound effects. These sounds he made in FamiTracker, which is a NES tracker. He has some experience doing tracker music, and that stuff really intimidates me. So I let him do that. I was really happy that he created some sounds that evoke more of that retro vibe that kind of gives Pinball Spire some of its unique feel. So Mark helped out with a few things, but as the project went on, he was less involved and it became more of a solo project for the remainder of it.”

When you compare the two development processes – one a AAA project, the other a mostly single person indie project –, can you share the most important differences that you experienced?

“I definitely miss working with a team, and the creative collaborative process. I haven’t had much of that on this project. But then again, it was nice being able to figure out my own priorities when working on Pinball Spire. I spent, for example, way too much time doing controller vibration. I wanted to really get the rumble right. And there was no manager to tell me: Hey, that’s done,

time to move on. Time management is definitely a big factor. When you’re working on an indie game, you have to be your own boss and you have to be more disciplined about your approach. Which is a challenge, because I always want everything to be as good as it can be and that’s unrealistic because that just means I’m working on something forever. So you have to develop a sense for when something is good enough that you can move on to a new task.

Once I had signed with a publisher, that really helped as well, because I had to come up with an actual development schedule that they could track my progress against. And that meant that I had to stay focused on the important tasks. But it’s great to be able to have that creative control and be able to experiment. Still, it’s not the same as working in a team where everyone is really good at the thing that they do and you know you can go to an animator and say: Hey, can we try making an animation for something, and they totally nail it and make something amazing. That’s obviously not something I can do now. If i need a really cool animation, it’s like, oh boy, how’s this gonna go? So making compromises is something I had to learn.”

Okay, so let’s come back to the beginning of our conversation – to pinball in general. How has your view on pinball changed, from now that the game is out, to before, when you started on the project?

“Like I mentioned, I’m not a pro pinball player or anything, but it is something I’ve always really enjoyed in the videogame space, especially because of games like Sonic Spinball, Kirby’s Pinball Land, and games that create an environment and sense of atmosphere around pinball. So it’s not just trying to get a high score. I wanted to make something that would capture that, but also try to make something that would be satisfying as a pinball game on its own.”

But are you fed up with pinball now? Or would you consider sticking to the pinball mechanic for a while?

“I have so many unused ideas, I would love to do more. I’ve had people point out that the physics aren’t perfect. Right, physics aren’t perfect. I could see it too. That’s something I still feel like I could try to dial in and then make more improvements. But it was definitely a learning process. I didn’t appreciate at the start how much of a challenge it is to design pinball spaces that really flow well, that feel satisfying. Where you can get a sense of what you need to do with how to aim your shots intuitively. I had to develop those skills over time and it was a lot of work. I definitely have a much greater appreciation for what goes into designing a pinball game. I spent a lot of time on Youtube watching players play all kinds of pinball games, trying to study what mechanics or challenges they’re using, how they are playing, how they are approaching the game. I was very conscious of not having the background for it, but I wanted to do my best to deliver that experience as best as I could. I did the studying, played some games for research, but mostly the more gamey ones, like Pokémon Pinball or Sonic Spinball, because these are closer to the types of experiences that I wanted to make.”

I think in video pins, ball physics aren’t that much of an issue. Because it’s not a simulation, you’re doing a pinball videogame. However the physics turn out to be: Within half an hour, every player will figure out how they feel and work anyway. One other thing I’m interested in though: Why is there no nudging in Pinball Spire? Is this something that you thought about, or something that you didn’t know could be important?

“This is a bit of a touchy subject because so many players have been asking for the nudge, and I felt bad saying: I’m sorry, there’s no nudge. Honestly, as I don’t have the traditional pinball background, I didn’t realize how important a lot of players consider the nudge to be. It had come up during the design process and I thought, well, this is more of a deliberate, slower paced pinball game where you have a higher degree of control over your shots than you would in traditional pinball. So maybe I don’t need a nudge. That decision was also helpful from just a scoping perspective: one less thing to worry about. When I put the demo out in June that’s when a lot of feedback started: You know, I wish there was a nudge. If you had a nudge, you could maybe make something happen more easily. But without the nudge, you sometimes just feel like you’re waiting. And I think that makes a lot of sense. It would be cool to give the player one more thing that they can do.”

I have to admit: With the missing nudge, there is a bit of a grindy aspect to Pinball Spire here and there.

“I’m completely on board now and convinced that I should have a nudge. It’s just a matter of finding the time to do it and figuring out how to implement it. I say this because I know it could be a very simple thing, but I want to think about whether there is a more interesting way to incorporate it into Pinball Spire. It could be another ability. Maybe it’s something that you have to collect, maybe it’s something that has secondary uses. At minimum, I think it probably should be an ability that consumes Mana. One of the reasons for the Mana system is so that the player has to think a bit more about what they’re doing and not just spamming buttons. And I think with a nudge, there’s going to be a temptation to probably just mash on the nudge, especially if there’s no tilt.”

Exactly, you need to compensate the fact that you have no tilt bob and come up with something else to prevent nudge spamming.

“My focus so far has been more on bug fixing and smoothing out some of the rough edges that still remain here and there, trying to make the game less frustrating in a few spots. I just haven’t gotten to the nudge yet. I do think it should be there, and I kind of regret that I didn’t put it in.”

I don’t think it’s something that’s fundamentally missing though. I was just interested in the story behind it.

“Another aspect of it is, again, storytelling: Within the world of Pinball Spire, what is actually happening when you nudge? Because in real pinball, you are pushing and smacking the table. Is the whole spire shaking when you nudge, like if someone would be attacking it?”

Maybe you could come up with a nudge easter egg. You could unlock a secret room and then you find this hidden feature. And then you are allowed, like, only to nudge once or twice every few minutes. Or even something like a nudge one-off?

“A one-off. Oh, no, I think I would get angry messages.”

Pinball Spire, developed by Apparition Games and published by indie.io, is available for Windows and Steam Deck on Steam. You can find more information about the game on its Press Kit site. The official soundtrack by Starling Tan is here. A review copy of the game was provided to The Ball is Wild by the publisher.