La Bidouillerie

The demo now builds a pinball machine. After the twelve vacuum-robot missions, the workshop opens a second bench: a pinball cabinet, its drilled playfield, its backbox, and the same kit of parts to screw onto them. It is not a different game loop — it is the same one, on a machine you can play once it is built: you trace your walls, you wire your flippers, you arm the transformer, and you shoot the ball.

Five missions, and the table stays playable at every step. The shooter lane and its arch, the gate one ball wide, the two flippers with their con-rods and coils, the walls that bring the ball back to them, then your table: two slingshot bands, two lamps, a rollover switch in each return lane. Nothing locks you out, you can shoot the ball between two parts, and the last mission offers to archive your table.

The pinball parts. Flippers, plunger lane, thin walls straight and curved, posts, gate, rollover switch, slingshot kicker, leaf switch, playfield lamp, upright coil, score reel. A slingshot band is traced like a wall, between its posts; its kicker turns itself parallel to the rubber, and its leaf switches reach out for the elastic. Measured with the coils on the 50 V tap: a ball arriving at one metre per second leaves at three and a half.

The backbox is a mounting surface, like the playfield. An upright perforated plate, its wiring board behind it, and the same gestures: B moves from the playfield to the backbox, F turns over whichever surface you are on, H shows or hides its board. A fifty-five-column ribbon links the two boards: a terminal at the far end of the playfield board is the same terminal at the bottom of the backbox board — nothing to run between them, and nothing to unplug.

The score reel, ten digits on a drum. It fits on the backbox, all its mechanism facing you — drum, ratchet, pawl, coil, cams — and its six terminals behind. One step per coil stroke, not per amp. Two contacts do the rest, and that is where it gets interesting: the carry, closed at 9 only, sends the stroke that takes the units from 9 to 0 on to the tens; the reset, closed everywhere but at 0, passes pulses through until the drum comes back to zero and cuts exactly there. Two reels and three wires, and you count to 99. Nobody will tell you how: that is the whole point.

Every terminal says what it is. Right-click a terminal on a score reel, a relay, a rollover switch, a lamp or a coil: the card no longer says "connection terminal" but "Index 3, one of the five contacts in the cycle — open", and the state follows live. On a table where forty wires look alike, that is what tells you where you are connecting.

Twenty encyclopedia pages for pinball. The parts first — the flipper, the walls, the post, the gate, the rollover switch, the slingshot, the lamp, the score reel, the bumper coil — each with its history, and four drawn plates: the reel from the side, the wiring of two reels that count, the slingshot in three stages, the gate in its lane. Then the ideas: your table is a 1970s electromechanical pinball machine without a single chip, and one page explains what that means — electrical on one side, electronic on the other, and the 1977 tipping point. Seven more pages describe the parts you do not have yet, so you can read the inside of a cabinet before you touch it.

The game draws sixteen times less, and the circuit weighs half as much. On a loaded table — nine bands, eighty-one wires, a score motor turning — each frame issued more than five thousand draws. Kit materials now go to the graphics card in batches, the render no longer runs once per light, the charges running along the wires cost ten times less, and the backbox ribbon only enters the calculation through the links that carry something. Measured on the same table: from eighty to nearly four hundred frames per second.

A circuit with no power costs nothing. Supply off, the electrical solver was running flat out on a circuit where the current was zero everywhere: four frames per second on a furnished playfield. It now rests as long as no source is worth anything, and wakes at the first volt — from four to sixty frames per second on the same table.

Strokes no longer depend on the frame rate. Flippers, plunger, slingshot kicker: all of them hit more weakly when the game slowed down, to the point that at sixteen frames per second the ball no longer made it up the lane. Each of them now advances on the physics step, and returns the same speed at sixteen frames as at three hundred.

Your saves live in the Bidouillerie folder of your Documents. The folder used to be called SLF_ASPI, a name inherited from another game; it is renamed for you on first launch. A red cross deletes a file straight from the load list, after asking. And a pinball table no longer loads onto the robot by mistake, or the other way round — the two grids have nothing in common, and the parts landed anywhere.

The robot missions, gone through one by one. Steps still ticked without your having done what they asked: "both must mesh" counted the gear being fitted, even twenty-five millimetres away from the other; "plunger engaged in its con-rod" counted solenoids on the bench; and the floor test ticked on the round trip, with a battery-less robot, without your having seen any of the problem it exists to pose. Others did not say enough: bring the board back before wiring, and the battery draining in real time, which could stop the machine with nothing to explain it. The panel no longer runs off the bottom of the screen on an eleven-step mission — what went under was the banner that takes you to the next one. And every step you complete makes a small ding: the panel is on the right while you work in the middle.

And the fixes you will notice. The ball no longer jumps over thin walls or over a slingshot rubber. A solenoid whose supply you cut lets its spring push the plunger back out. Wires keep their colour from one session to the next. The rollover switch no longer triggers four millimetres too early. A blown LED stays dark for good. The bumper feels the ball even when it arrives in line with its rods. The frame counter no longer shows itself uninvited — F3 shows it and hides it. And the game closes without waiting a minute when a firewall swallows its last line of statistics.

Coming with early access. You can already see them in the drawer, under a padlock: what makes the logic of a real table — the relay, the contactor and the contact blocks that stack onto it, the score motor and its five index contacts, the bumper, the drop target, the insert.

A part's data sheet now opens with a right-click. Left-click meant two things at once: brief, it opened the sheet; held down, it grabbed the part. Two gestures on one button, and nothing to tell you which one was expected — several players left during the first mission without ever finding how to push a solenoid's plunger.

Left-click now means one thing only: your hand. A brief right-click on a part opens its sheet, a right-click on empty space closes it, and a cross has appeared in the sheet's corner. Three welcome side effects: switches and dials finally have a sheet you can read, you can check a roller's speed without shoving the robot by missing your aim, and nothing opens by accident any more.

The current would not flow. On yesterday's build, connecting the bench supply did nothing at all — no current, from the very first mission. The fault was ours and it slipped in a few minutes before publishing: rebuilding the interface quietly took away a component the whole game relies on to know which machine you are working on. It is fixed, and that rebuild can no longer take it, because it now puts it back itself.

If you downloaded 1.5.1 yesterday, this is the one you want. Nothing else has changed.

The connecting rod no longer leans. A tester found the exact cause: it depended on the order you assembled in. Pinned to the plunger first and then to the gear, the rod ended up three and a half degrees out of true, with its pin no longer square to it. A pin is a pivot — it has one degree of freedom, and its axis stays perpendicular, full stop. Both ways round now give the same, straight assembly.

A loaded robot comes back with its wiring. Since the last version, the electrical layer was quietly dropped on load: the mechanics returned, the board came back bare. Robots saved in between can be repaired by refitting the electrics once and saving again.

Slow motion slows the machine down, it no longer changes it. Pulling the time slider made the motor run smoother — and genuinely faster, up to twice its real speed. It was not showing you your machine any more, it was showing you a different one. Now the readings hold to within a tenth of a percent whatever the setting.

And your computer no longer changes the mechanics. The same fault ran deeper than the slider: a machine at thirty frames per second did not run the same mechanism as one at a hundred and twenty. Everything that moves the world is now clocked in fixed steps, independent of how fast the picture is drawn. On a modest machine, it is the same workshop as anywhere else.

The words say what they mean. The front wheel is a ball caster and no longer an idler — an idler guides a belt and carries nothing. "Press" now says press what, and the shaft step tells you its 15 mm rather than leaving you to count presses.

Five new Encyclopedia entries — bodging, electricity, circuit, voltage, current — and the brushroll finally admits its working range: nothing below 10 rpm, full efficiency from 67 to 200, and beyond that it throws the dirt instead of sweeping it, like a real road sweeper.

Hold Shift and keep the part in hand. Fitting twelve terminals used to mean clicking the same tile twelve times. Hold Shift as you place, and the part comes straight back into your hand — wires above all, since a circuit is wired one strand at a time. Let the key go and everything is as before.

The pin lights up in the hole it is going into. A 32-tooth gear offers twelve crank pins per face, all identical, and until now you fitted the connecting rod and found out afterwards. The pin of the hole you are aiming at now switches on while you approach — and the pins on the face you cannot see are no longer catchable at all. Nobody ever pinned a rod while looking at the other side of a gear.

Clear the bench in one go. There was no way to do it: starting over on a large build meant taking it apart piece by piece. The button is at the end of the top bar, in red, and it asks before it wipes.

An old robot loads without falling apart. When a part can no longer find its place — because the kit has moved since — it is no longer dropped somewhere at random: it is left out, and the game tells you how many are missing and why. Your robot comes back with holes rather than as a heap.

And the English says what it means. The sweeping roller is now a brushroll and the motor part a carbon brush — the same word was doing both jobs, and a tester spent forty minutes building a motor on a mission that asked for a broom. The motor bench texts, the placement refusals and the battery warning are translated too; they were still coming out in French.

Wires stay flat on the board — and cross over each other. They no longer drift upward on their own. If a wire would cut across another one, the game refuses the placement: two wires crossing in the same plane would touch. The up and down arrows then route it over the other, or through the thickness of the epoxy. That is exactly what a multilayer board does, and the hundreds of tiny plated holes on any real board are the passages between layers.

The board turns translucent. The left and right arrows fade it continuously, so you can watch the mechanism living underneath without hiding the board away — and without losing its buttons.

A changeover switch and a reverser. The first one neither opens nor closes: it routes. The second is two changeovers on a single slider, six terminals, and it reverses a motor in one move. The crossing happens in your wiring, not inside the part.

Keyboard shortcuts now follow your keyboard. W picks up a wire — except on an AZERTY layout, where nothing happened and Z did it instead. The game was naming its keys by their position on an American keyboard rather than by the letter printed on them. Every letter key is fixed, on every layout.

The machine has a voice. The motor hums, and its pitch follows the speed; when it strains without turning, it growls instead. That second sound is not decoration — dead spots are one of the things the bench teaches, and until now a stall was silent: you could see it wasn't turning without hearing it push. The connecting rod clacks the instant it seats into the plunger, and the plunger itself rubs as it slides.

The tool board filled up. Needle-nose pliers, wire strippers with their stepped notches, a Phillips screwdriver and a soldering iron with its cable join the hammer and the flat screwdriver. You don't use them — they are there to say what kind of workshop this is. A board holding nothing but a hammer announces carpentry.

Missions no longer tick themselves. Several steps could be completed without doing the thing they described: Find the beat validated without the push button, which is the entire point of that mission; six turns pushed by hand counted with the flywheel still sitting on the bench; ten turns counted whether or not the machine was actually powered. Each of them now checks what it claims.

Brushes have to touch the commutator. Set down beside it they power nothing, and the armature's card says why. Until now it was enough for them to be somewhere on the plate — a brush planted two centimetres from the copper, in mid air, ran the machine as well as a properly seated one. On a real motor, a brush backed off by a millimetre stops everything.

Clicking finally lands where you see the object. The desk lamp and the tools each had a single click box stretched around the whole thing — on a jointed lamp that box was mostly empty air, and the cursor lit up half a metre from the metal. Every piece now carries its own.

The workshop no longer answers you — AngeloStudio does. The word was doing two jobs at once: the place where you repair your robot, and the person you write to. The workshop has replied made it sound like you were chatting with your own bench. The button that sends a robot now reads To AngeloStudio, and messages arrive from a name rather than a place.

And a pile of smaller things that came with 1.3.1 and 1.3.2 and were never written up here: the solenoid no longer shakes when idle, connecting rods pin cleanly, a part can no longer be dropped inside a rod, the belt stopped vanishing into the small pulley, and the game warns you when your battery has run flat instead of letting you wonder why nothing moves.

Coming in the full game: the motor bench. A base, a shaft, two magnets, an armature, a commutator, two brushes — nothing pre-assembled. Three different armatures, each one a lesson in why no commercial motor has a two-segment commutator. It is not in this demo: the parts are there, under lock, and you can see them waiting.

Your robot fits in a single line of text. A Blueprint button, next to Save and Load, turns your build into a string of characters you can paste into a message. Whoever receives it pastes the same line into their game and gets your robot back, part for part. It is what Factorio blueprints do, and for the same reason: showing a build had become harder than making one.

A robot you receive is filed with your own saves, under the name you give it. It does not overwrite what is on your bench — you load it when you want to.

And a “To the workshop” button sends it straight over. One click and the robot lands in the message board. No more hunting for a file on your disk to show what is not working.

Gears that do not mesh no longer count as a success. Turning a wheel by hand used to tick the box even when nothing was driving anything. The steps that ask for a train to follow now check that it actually does.

Charges no longer haunt a wire you removed. Cut the power, change your wiring, switch back on: the current used to reappear along a wire that no longer existed.

A new Encyclopaedia page: the controls. Every key and every mouse gesture in one place — including H, which folds the circuit board away to reach the mechanics underneath, and the difference between a short click and a held one.

The words that stopped people are now explained where they turn up. Three players got stuck on the same three words, each on their own. The chassis slot is now called “the large opening in the chassis”. The idler wheel announces its catalogue name, “the ball caster”. The green plate is a circuit board, no longer an “electrical plate”.

The cursor changes shape over the supply leads. They had always been clickable, but nothing said so: one player hunted for them for eight minutes.

The Encyclopaedia answers better. The word you searched for is highlighted in the page you land on, and the page opens on the tab that contains it. Back returns to the list of results instead of the contents. New page: the chassis, with its real dimensions and the twenty-millimetre grid.

Every game carries a first name. Three children on the same computer were told apart only by a number, and one of them carried on with his sister's game.

The game tells you when a new version is online. The demo did not update itself, and nothing said so.

Six new parts: the brush roller, its housing, the dust bin, two pulleys and a 240 axle. Enough to turn the motorised trolley into a sweeper. The brush scrubs the floor and asks for force — the first part in the kit that costs something, and the one that makes torque tangible.

The belt can be crossed, and the machine runs the other way. R switches it from straight to crossed — a figure of eight, exactly as in the workshops of old. It is the kit's only way to reverse a direction of travel without adding an idler gear.

Two more pulleys: a Ø10 and a Ø60. The four sizes now cover ratios from 1.33 to 6. The Ø10 driving the Ø60 divides speed by six while multiplying torque by as much, without adding a single shaft.

Volume is set part by part. Open a part that makes a noise and a slider appears in its data sheet. You can silence one solenoid to listen to the other. The setting travels with the robot when you save it.

The brush roller scrubs, and its voice follows its speed. The sound rises when it spins fast, drops when it labours, and stops the moment the robot leaves the floor. You hear your machine run out of torque before you read it.

The flywheel is spoked. A solid disc that spins is indistinguishable from one at rest — and it is precisely the part you want to see carrying on when everything else has stopped. Asked for by a player, who was right.

The connecting rod no longer comes off its pin. It drifted away as soon as the machine picked up speed — six tenths of a millimetre at a crawl, fourteen at full tilt.

Solenoids no longer run away. A solenoid beating fast now opposes its own movement, as in real life: the voltage it produces by moving is subtracted from the one feeding it.

Wires that cross now pass over one another. Each wire sits on one of four levels, rising from its terminal and coming back down to the other: a bridge, as on a diagram — except that here it really does pass over.

And a long list of smaller things: deleting a game asks for confirmation, the end-of-course button finally opens the sandbox, wheels no longer fit between the bearings, the flywheel fits anywhere under the chassis, a chassis hole is no longer lost after a dismantling, and every rewritten instruction is translated.

French and English localisation.

First release of the demo.