Coded some initial spinner rules. First time you shoot the spinner, it stops it in the upper lanes. Next time it orbits around back to the left flipper for a 2x spinner shot, and stops it in the lanes. Then you get two orbits before it stops it, etc.
Coding this was way harder than that sounds, due to me not really thinking about 'shots' and such when I designed the playfield. A ball shot through the spinner could go in one of six lanes. Or it could fall back through the spinner. Or fall down the shooter lane. Or it could manage, theoretically, to go below the left one way gate and continue on to the left. When the gate is open, it will usually go all the way around, triggering the left orbit switch and the left inlane on its way down. But it could also fall short into the upper eject, or go under the ramp, or fall even shorter into any of the lanes, etc from before.
Originally I figured I didn't need to care about this too much. I'd just consider a shot to the spinner as whenever the spinner suddenly spun a few times. But when I'm purposely designing the code to let you repeatedly rip the spinner, it's very likely the spinner will still be spinning somewhat by the time you rip it again, or you could even go right under it while it's spinning, so I ended up with a ton of code for different edge cases trying to detect when the player does a successful orbit or not, multiple timers going on, etc. It's a bit of a mess, and it's going to be even more of a pain to debug if something goes wrong.
It would have been really nice to close up some of the areas a bit more so I could know 'for sure' whether a ball passed through there, rather than having a big open area up there for the ball to bounce around in. Too bad big areas for the ball to bounce around in are fun...
Scoring wise, I'm trying to sorta take a page from Meteor, since I like the way its spinner value is continually fluctuating. For the first iteration of that, my attempt is to make the spinner score more when you having matching numbers of drop targets down on each bank. For instance, the spinner starts at 10 points. You knock down one target on bank A, that goes up a bit. You knock down one target on bank B as well, that number goes up even more. Two targets down on each bank is better than one, etc. I'll try to balance it so you can get the spinner up really high, but at the same time if you hit one stray target it may ruin it completely.
Hopefully this will also encourage people to 'shoot around' more, instead of finding one or two banks they feel safer on and just picking targets off those
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