Vira Pinball

Vira is an events company with its own ticketing platform. At an event, a brand competes for attention with the stage, the bar and the queue, and the usual activation loses that fight: people grab the giveaway, take the photo and forget whose booth it was. The idea was to make simple, genuinely fun games with the brand inside the game rather than on a splash screen. The first one is a pinball, because anyone understands it in three seconds by watching someone play, a match is short and it makes you want another go.

Two stretches of the same match on the Main Stage machine: the first 34 seconds, in which the table goes through all three stages, and the Final Encore. For recording, the game runs on a manual clock with seeded randomness while an automated player works the flippers: the same match replays frame by frame, with no loss of image quality. The real game is in the section above.

• The lanes spell the brand: The four top lanes are V, I, R and A. Lighting all four raises the multiplier, so spelling the company's name is the move most worth repeating.
• Event vocabulary: The goals are DROP, BOOTH, CROWD, ENCORE and JACKPOT. The DJ booth traps the ball, the crowd is a target that moves from side to side and the encore is the multiball.
• The night as progression: The three stages are Soundcheck, Dance Floor Filling Up and Headliner. Clear the third and you get the Final Encore, with everything worth triple, then Night 2 starts on a slightly faster table.
• The magenta dot never changes: Each stage recolors the table, but the dot in the logo always stays in Vira's magenta. Stage color is mood, and the dot is brand.
• Nothing that looks like gambling: Roulette, slot machines and scratch cards were left out on purpose. A company that handles payments doesn't tie its brand to games of chance.

Same table, different mood. With each stage gravity goes up, bumpers kick harder and the ball-save window shrinks: ten seconds in the first, seven in the second and four in the third. The stage belongs to the whole game, so losing a ball never sends anyone back to the start.

Stage 1 · Soundcheck

Stage 2 · Dance Floor Filling Up

Stage 3 · Headliner

The first version had a table, flippers and a score, and got old after two matches. Before investing in art, I studied what makes a real pinball machine hold a player and brought to the table whatever fit into a one-minute match.

• Skill shot: Releasing the plunger at the right strength, inside a window that changes with every ball, scores before the first flip.
• Combo: Clean shots in a row, up to three seconds apart, multiply the reward.
• Missions per stage: Each stage shows two missions on the scoreboard, and completing both is what advances the stage. The player always knows what's left.
• Multiball: Locking the ball twice in the booth releases them all at once, and that's when the jackpots come.
• Measured forgiveness: A ball save at the start of each ball, a kickback on the outlane and an extra ball for clearing the second stage.

The game uses no engine and no physics library. The table is described in logical units, in a single file, as walls made of segments and arcs, bumpers, targets, slingshots and flippers, and the simulation advances 480 steps per second, which keeps the ball from tunneling through a moving flipper. Writing the physics by hand made every flaw visible and cheap to fix. One example: the ball used to get stuck in the V between the guide and the flipper, and the fix was to shorten the guide so it ends just above the pivot. A ball that sits still for too long is also detected and put back into play.

The art is rendered in Blender by scripts that read the same table file the physics uses. Move a wall in the game and the render moves with it, so art and collision never drift apart. The game starts by drawing the vector version and swaps to the renders once they finish loading, so it never waits on an image.

Vector version, drawn by the game itself

With the Blender renders

Sound effects are synthesized in the browser, with no audio files at all: flipper, bumper, plunger and reward sounds are generated on the fly. The voice lines belong to the DJ and the Producer, two characters from Vira's cast of unicorns, generated with ElevenLabs. The Main Stage has fourteen lines, for start, new stage, multiball, jackpot, ball saved and game over, and only one plays at a time so the DJ doesn't talk over himself in the middle of a multiball.

• The whole screen is the controller: Left half and right half, including the bands outside the table. Nobody has to aim at a button.
• The plunger doesn't trigger the flipper: While the ball waits in the lane, a touch on the right only pulls the plunger.
• Respects the device: The table avoids the notch, the screen stays awake during a match and the game pauses when the phone is turned sideways.
• Light on purpose: Background, logo and walls live on a cached layer, redrawn only when the stage changes. On phones the light glow is turned off, since that's the heaviest part.
• Scores on the wall: The leaderboard keeps the device's top five, with names up to eight letters and how far each player got.

The menu, with an opening video rendered in Blender in the background and the two machines. The second one, Fila Zero, is still in its first version.

I built the pinball with Claude Code as an engineering partner, in conversation. I brought the idea, the references, the brand vocabulary and the game decisions; the AI wrote the physics, the rules and the art scripts. Blender and ElevenLabs came in as tools inside that same conversation, so the table, sprites, opening video and voice lines came from the same place as the code. What I didn't delegate was playing. Every round of tuning started with me playing and saying what was wrong: the ball that got stuck, the stage that dragged, the flipper that fired along with the plunger on the phone.

In two days the pinball went from idea to a complete browser game, which Vira's partners tested on their phones. It hasn't been to an event yet, and the second machine is still in its first version. The activation line already has its next games sketched: a whack-the-scalper game, a tower of bar cups and a unicorn race on the big screen, where the whole crowd plays from their phones. The same rules apply to all of them: matches of up to one minute, instant restart, the day's leaderboard in plain sight and the brand inside the scenery.