User blog:Entertainmentz/Behind the Scenes of Angry Birds Stella Pinball

It's been five years since Angry Birds Stella became part of the Angry Birds franchise, busting in the scene with a spin-off game and corresponding web series that lasted for two seasons. And sadly, it failed to gain a lot of traction, with such media being discontinued within a couple of years and the characters ending up as seemingly meaningless extras in both Angry Birds films that followed.

And yet at least one fan, who's not a gal, still thinks the Stella characters deserved more love - at least when they looked fully limbed for the films. And somehow, this particular one came up with an ingenuous way to celebrate them - by brainstorming a quite rad pinball table that faithfully adapts the spin-off game and the two-season web series. This would be the perfect third and final table to wrap up what would be an awesome Angry Birds-themed pinball pack that he hopes that Zen Studios can someday make reality (namely as Pinball FX 3 DLC) if it can strike a licensing deal with Rovio - and the idea's already been proposed on the Pinball FX 3 Reddit new table wishlist megathread.

So how great is this pinball table anyway? It's *like*, pretty awesome - and a lot of work was put into it. It all began when it was decided going forward that the Stella table had to be a whole lot different than the last two Angry Birds tables - and one way that it would differ greatly was that it was highly asymmetric, like Zen's Star Wars Rebels pinball table. The table also had to have elongated, curvy lanes to give it a feminine touch - and to allow for fast, fluid ball motion, where combos could be easy to execute, which highly reflects the titular heroine's incredible parkour skills, limbed or not. And it also had to represent Stella's friends and their abilities well in some way. For instance, Willow could be represented as an orbit with a mini-flipper on one end, in reference to how she can abruptly change direction in mid-air to hit targets that her original shot arc wouldn't reach. To reflect her strong penchant for art, it would also make sense to add a flag to the other end that could be spun many times to make her creatively "paint" a random award.

The gameplay flow also had to faithfully follow both the original slingshot game and the series, and that in part would mean having the missions being based off of select episodes from the series. One of the early episodes would involve Stella and her friends taking on Gale and her Pig army, and we also know that's how every level in the game plays out, so it was absolutely certain that it had to be one of the missions. And since the game was all about helping Stella retrieve her stolen photos, the table could reward the player for each mission (and also most side modes) successfully completed with a photo that Stella can recover. The more photos the player got, the greater the reward for beating the wizard mode, which is a series finale showdown against Gale. This clearly takes a page out of the mission scoring system from one of Zen's original tables, Sorcerer's Lair, where players strive to beat missions successfully to gather as much obsidian stones to defeat the evil sorcerer effectively.

Another important way this table differs from the other two Angry Birds tables is that this table replaces kickbacks with a magna-save ability. A good look at all the pinball tables out there, including Zen's own tables, shows that it's quite unheard of to have a pinball table with six return lanes (which are used to spell Stella's name) using a magna-save and no kickbacks - which might give the impression that it's quite an unusual design decision. But there's far more justification for a magna-save system than kickbacks in the source material - because Stella's main anger power is to trap nearby objects in bubblegum and levitate them - and that can exactly function like a magna-save for a pinball table.

There are a lot of other design decisions that were made that not only honored the stories of the two-season web series, but also made the table a fun one to play, but there's so much of them that we'll leave that to you to find out what they all are in the table's article. But before wrapping this article up, it would be important to point out a few last details that are utterly important to this table: 1) the table needs figures of Stella and her friends as they appeared fully-limbed in the movies because they just look that good and 2) the table might be a straight-up adaptation of the spin-off, but it wouldn't hurt to go somewhere new by giving these gals brand-new, never-before heard voices and dialogue. With all of this considered, here's to hoping that this table would make Angry Birds fans somehow re-appreciate these bird friends forever!