Zision Interactive

For the second aspect, I wanted to see whether the shot behind the pop bumper could be made if you removed the pop bumper. So I took out the pop bumper:

Gobble hole? No, I need to fill it. What do I fill it with? Well, lets just cut another hole with the hole saw and save the piece

Not a perfect fit, but for testing it works better than expected.

Now... Can you shoot into that area to the right of the back lane?

No problem!

Originally I was going to consider redesigning the lanes area to add another 'shot' here if this angle worked, but I realize there's already a handy blue target right there, that can no longer be hit by the pop bumper, so I don't really need to design any new shots. Just add an arrow insert pointing at that target and make it a jackpot or something, and it goes from 'least useful target in the game' to 'major shot'. Considering the amount of work necessary to redo this area to use two shots instead, I'm inclined to just go with the four lanes from the previous approach and this 'shot' here.

Now for the last bit, should I put something where the pop bumper was? I did a bunch of test runs, dropping the ball from each of the upper lanes, rolling it down the metal guide, shooting it from the upper right flipper, to see exactly where the ball traveled, what angle it was going at, etc, and then took a deep breath and installed two posts.

This is another case where I hate trying to place stuff, since getting these two posts positioned at the proper location and angle to get the bounce I want could take a lot of trial and error, leaving my playfield filled with holes, but I don't really have any better ideas on how to approach it. Originally I'd hoped that both ends of the rubber would be located on my disk I installed, so I could just replace it if necessary, but it was clear from my drop tests that at least one end would need to be on the playfield.

Now... does it work?

Success! I'd like it to feed a bit higher on the flipper, but proof of concept is working good. I think eventually it'll need be lowered a bit (but not so low that it obstructs the right flipper's path to the upper scoop. A bit of nudge when the ball lands on the rubber should help too. Before fine tuning further I'm going to play the game more and see how this affects other parts of the game, but throwing it around by hand it seems to be working generally how I'd like:

I had also planned to maybe put a standup behind this rubber to be hit by the right flipper, and it looks like from a very early shot you can hit the bottom edge of the rubber, so that does look possible, but I'll wait to do that until I'm sure I like this rubber and its placement. I might also experiment with alternate coil stops/etc on the right flipper to make it shoot at a higher angle.