TiltLab · Machine 06 · On the floor
FIELDWORK
The FIELDWORK game, rebuilt as a pinball machine in the windmill shed at the edge of a dead basin. The three balls are the cores, SAIL, DRIVE and WATER, and you choose which one you launch. Six jobs repair the valley outside the shed while you play: the windmill turns, the canals fill, the fields go green and the Works wake on the far rim, one stage at a time. Then the drought breaks.
The idea
Can the balls be the thing you are repairing?
FIELDWORK in the GameLab is about two small machines and one dead valley. Seven, a field robot, and Mote, its drone, fix a windmill, a drive, a pump and a set of canals, and the valley comes back. Under the basin there is a buried war machine, the Sand Kraken, and on the far rim a machine called the Works that wakes when the water reaches it.
The first draft of this table already had the best idea in it: the balls are cores. There are three, SAIL, DRIVE and WATER, and each belongs to one machine. On this table each has its own colour, counts double on its own shots, and has a cradle at the top of the table that only takes it. Before you launch, the action button changes which core is in the shooter. Send the wrong one and the cradle turns it away.
The rest follows the game, in its own order. Six jobs, each a short list of objectives: hang the sail, fix the drive, power down the Kraken, fill the tank, water the fields, turn the Great Wheel. Most end by bringing a core home. With all three home, the Works wake and let them go.
The story is told by the room. The cabinet stands in the windmill shed, and the shed is open on the basin. Everything outside is the game's own: its windmill, its tank tower, its truck, its farm bots, the Great Wheel and the Works, built from the game's Blender models. As you play, it comes back. On the title screen, it stays as far as you have brought it.
On the playfield
Every part, and what it does.
| Part | From the game | What it does | Points |
|---|---|---|---|
| The survey sheet | The basin | The playfield is Seven's survey of the valley: relief, contours, the canals, the fields and every shot labelled. There are three sheets: the dead basin, the water back, and the flood. The machine writes on it in pencil while you play: the job, its objectives and a tick for each one done. | – |
| The cores | SAIL, DRIVE, WATER | The balls. Each is tinted and banded in its colour. SAIL doubles the Rotor and its spinner; DRIVE doubles the farm bots, the drive gear and the middle; WATER doubles the ramps and the Sluice, and fills the tank twice as fast. | – |
| The cradles | The windmill, the gearbox, the header tank | Three seats along the top of the table, each for one core. The windmill's is at the end of a spur off the Mud Road, the gearbox's at the top of the drive chain, the tank's off the Pipeline and the Shed. A core at home stays there, glowing, until the Works let it go. | 75,000 |
| The bus | The power bus | A row of lamps across the middle. Shots made back to back charge it and it drains when you stop. Every whole step multiplies everything you score, up to x4. While the Kraken is awake, it leeches the bus. | – |
| The Kraken's node | The Sand Kraken | An armoured node on a wire track across the middle. Mote marks it; it vents, orange, for a moment, and a hit then pulls a breaker. Three breakers and it powers down. While it is up it throws drums out of the sink: a red ring shows where each will land. | 150,000 a breaker |
| Mote | The drone | Hovers over the table. In the first job its beam in the middle catches the ball and holds it while a corner of the sail goes up. The action button throws its net over everything in the air. | 25,000 a corner |
| The drive gear | The gear train | A turntable in the middle of the table. Once the DRIVE core is home, or the Works are awake, it spins and flings whatever rolls onto it. | 1,500 a ride |
| The Drive | The drive chain | The middle shot. A ball in the slot under the node rides a chain lift up to the gearbox. | 4,000 |
| The Mud Road | The truck through the mud | The left ramp, with its vertical loop. It hauls the membrane, and when the windmill's cradle is open a spur takes the SAIL core home. | 20,000 |
| The Pipeline | The pipe to the tank | The right ramp. Fills the tank, opens a sluice, and takes the WATER core home when the tank is ready. | 12,000 |
| The Rotor | The windmill's hub | The left orbit, with the rotor hub for a spinner. Every three turns pull a loop of cord off the hub. All the way round and down the right wall is a wall run onto the third flipper. | 6,000 · wall run 8,000 |
| The Shed | The shed and the yard | The scoop at the top right. Fits the shear key, takes the WATER core home, and pays the super jackpot in the Works Multiball. | 7,500 |
| The Sluice | Valve V1 | The right alley. Opens the intake valve and the sluices. | – |
| The bearings | The drive's three bearings | Three drop targets. Down all three to oil the bearings, or for a net charge once they are done. | 3,000 · all 15,000 |
| The farm bots | The farm bots | Three pop bumpers, each with one of the game's farm bots on top. They hop when hit, and in the fifth job they work the rows. | 1,000 |
| W-O-R-K | Pickups | Four top lanes. The flippers move the lit lanes. All four bring Mote with two net charges, or twenty seconds of rescue (both outlanes kick back), in turn. | 2,500 · all 15,000 |
| Flippers, slingshots, plunger | – | Chrome Orbit's lower playfield, unchanged for a sixth table, with yellow FW-7 flippers. Plunge into the flashing lane for a skill shot. | skill shot 30,000 |
The rules
Pick a core. Do the job. Bring it home.
- Six jobs. The Sail, the Drive, the Kraken, Power and Water, the Fields and the Works, in the game's order. Each has its own sky, its own survey sheet and its own list of objectives, and each is worth more than the last.
- Objectives. They come one at a time, on the backglass and in pencil on the sheet, and the shot that serves the one in hand is lit. A cradle's shot glows in its core's colour while that cradle is open.
- The cores. Change the core in the shooter with the action button before you launch. Bring the right one to its cradle to finish the job.
- The Kraken. It wakes with the third job and leeches the bus. Hit its node while it vents to pull a breaker; three and it powers down, and that is an extra ball. Get the ball clear of the red rings, or net what it throws.
- Works Multiball. All three cores home and the Works wake: the cradles let go, three balls, jackpots on every shot, and three of them light the super jackpot at the Shed. Every shot turns the Great Wheel, and the Works wake stage by stage, nine of them.
- The flood. After the sixth job the drought breaks. Four balls, the fourth the Kraken's own core, and the Kraken rebuilt in the middle of the table. Four hits on its node, then the Shed. Then round two, with everything worth more.
- A clean job. No drains and nothing thrown landing on the ball, worth 250,000.
Things that stay
The field log, and the valley.
Everything here is saved on your device.
The field log · nineteen pictures
- Each job pins the game's own pictures to the cork in the shed: screenshots and renders from the GameLab, of the depot, the gears, the Kraken, the fields, the Works and the titan in the flood.
- Teal string joins them, a column for each job, with the flood along the bottom.
- Open the log from the title screen to see every picture you have, with a caption and where it came from, or look at it on the shed wall.
The valley
- On the title screen the valley outside shows the furthest you have brought it: sails on the windmill, water in the canals, green fields, and the Works awake as far as you woke them.
- Start at any job you have reached, and your best score on this machine.
The room
The windmill shed, and the valley outside.
Black Budget Bird's room kept watch. This one gets repaired. The shed is corrugated steel on teal posts, with one side open on the basin. The sky follows the job, from dawn at the windmill through the dust of midday to dusk at the Works, and the flood brings the storm and the rain. Outside, the windmill stands a few steps away; across the basin the Great Wheel sits in the Cut, and on the far rim the Works. The Kraken comes up out of the west sink when it wakes, and in the flood the sink fills into a lake.
In the shed
- Seven stands by the cabinet with Mote at its shoulder. They watch the game, and cheer, look worried or get to work with it.
- The workbench: a vice, the shear keys, a valve wheel, oil, and the radio, whose dial shows what it is playing.
- The generator in the corner stays cold until the drive is fixed, and the brake lever by the door comes off when the windmill turns.
Round the cabinet
- The cabinet is faded teal steel with yellow riveted rails, a ratchet strap across the apron and an oil can on the corner. A windmill turns on top of the backbox once the sail is home.
- The backglass is the game's own console: the job, a picture from the log, the three cores and the repair chain filling as the valley comes back.
Under the glass
What makes it run.
- Physics
- The shared TiltLab table rig: Rapier 0.21 at 120 steps a second. New for this machine: turntables, which spin a ball that rolls onto them. Off unless a machine asks for one, so the earlier tables play as they did.
- The models
- Seven, Mote, the windmill, the tank tower, the truck, the farm bots, the Great Wheel, every part of the Works and the Sand Kraken are the FIELDWORK game's own Blender exports, packed smaller with meshopt. The table, the shed and the basin are built in code around them.
- The sheets
- Three survey sheets baked from a script: noise for the relief, contours, the canals and fields, and type in the game's faces. The pencil is a canvas over the sheet, and when the job changes the sheet comes off like a page.
- Playfield
- One layout file holds every wall, post and switch. The lower playfield is Chrome Orbit's; the upper table is Black Budget Bird's, with the cradles along the top and the drive chain up the middle.
- Testing
- A headless bot plays whole games in Node to catch stuck balls and dead ends. A script plays all six jobs and the flood through the rules.
- Sound
- The shared kit for the parts, the game's own effects on top, and sounds written in the browser: a plucked note for each lane, a chime for each core and a call for each objective. Outside, the game's own beds follow the valley: the wind, crickets at dusk, the generator, water in the canals, birds over the fields, the Works' drone and the storm. The radio on the bench plays four songs from Voidleaf Riot's The Wider Rising, from the MusicLab; the Kraken and the flood get the game's duel, and winning gets its victory.
- Controls
- A / ← and D / → (or Shift) for the flippers (the right one works both right flippers), Space to plunge, E, J or ↑ for the net (or to change the core before launch), Z and / to nudge, Esc to pause. A gamepad works. On a phone, use the pads at the bottom of the screen.
- Loading
- The models, the first sheet and the sounds, about 10 MB, arrive before the first ball, then every shader is compiled. The Kraken, the other sheets and the pictures load as they are needed, and the beds and the music stream from where they already live.
In the lineage
Machine 06, after Black Budget Bird.
FIELDWORK starts from Black Budget Bird: its campaign of objectives, its magnet (now Mote's beam), its board of pictures that stays, and a room whose sky follows the game. From Margin Aces it keeps the moving target and the attacks marked before they land. From Folded Thunder it keeps the third flipper and the loop. From Chrome Orbit it keeps the lower playfield, the sound kit and the start-up loader, and the first draft of this table, which ran on Chrome Orbit's engine, gave it the cores.
Its new ideas are balls with identities and a room that gets fixed. The thing you are playing with is the thing you are repairing.
Play FIELDWORK · Back to TiltLab · The original: FIELDWORK in the GameLab. The radio: The Wider Rising by Voidleaf Riot in the MusicLab.