I was thinking today about a design for a new fruit machine, something that's different, even interesting and where a £5 game is as fun as a £25 repeater...
So imagine this fruit machine, I've named it "Pipe Dream", the top board is composed of interconnecting pipes, at each junction there is a valve symbol. You enter the feature with one "pipe run" activated, that is one pipe run is lit up and forms a sort of lapper board where you can pick up the lower value prizes and features to start.
As you run around the board, if you land on one of the valves, the "pipe run" connected to that valve activates and your lapper board is extended in length, obviously this particular pipe run would have better prizes.
So to make things more interesting, there is also a 'pressure gauge' for each of the pipe runs which increases by an amount, every spin, each spin you get the opportunity to vent a particular pipe run and thus decrease the pressure... If the pressure reaches max the pipe bursts and goes out, bad news if you happen to be on that pipe as you're killed off, otherwise letting the pipes with the lesser prizes die out refines your 'lapper board' so you're almost guaranteed a better prize.
The tactics and skill element comes in here as you have to effectively build and maintain your feature board and take a calculated risk as to which prizes you want to keep in play at any given point.
Anyways sorry I've babbled on too much here but I'm visiting a friend in a few days who's good with graphics, perhaps I'll get them to knock up some nice graphics and set to work making this idea into an actual game...
Maybe it's just a pipe dream? I'll probably go to sleep, wake up and realise this is a terrible idea, so just going to apologise in advance for that...
Anybody else just sit around thinking up crazy ideas for machine designs? My notebook is full of this stuff and I'm starting to think I'm just a weirdo