So I want to share how I actually stumbled into a decent community for this, because for a while I genuinely had nowhere to put my work.
A bit of background first. I have been tinkering with a plinko-style prototype on weekends for about eight months now. Nothing fancy, just a personal project built in a free engine, with a custom peg layout that shifts every few runs to keep things fresh. I got obsessed with plinko physics after playing Plinbo, which has that roguelike loop where you unlock modifier pegs between drops. If you have not played it, the way it randomizes peg density per floor completely changed how I thought about bounce behavior. I started sketching my own layouts on graph paper like a complete nerd, and one thing led to another.
The problem was I had no one to show it to. My friends are patient people, but their eyes glaze over when I start talking about how a ball's horizontal drift accumulates across twelve peg rows before it reaches the scoring buckets at the bottom. Fair enough. So I started looking for somewhere online that actually cared about this stuff.
I tried a few general indie dev spaces and got polite responses, but nobody there really knew the genre. Posting a gif of a ball bouncing through pegs and asking "does this feel right" is a weird ask if the person reading it has never thought about peg spacing ratios in their life. I needed people who had opinions about whether a tight peg grid creates too much chaotic variance or whether a looser grid makes runs feel too predictable. That is a specific conversation.
Eventually someone in a thread I was reading mentioned https://www.reddit.com/r/PlinkoCommunity/ and I clicked over mostly out of curiosity. My first reaction was that it was small, which I actually liked. It was not overwhelming. I could scroll back a few weeks and read actual discussions about Plinko Panic! scoring buckets, someone's analysis of RNG seeding in Pachillinko, a thread debating whether Horse Plinko's peg collision model felt physically plausible or just random. That last thread had me nodding along for twenty minutes straight.
I lurked for maybe two weeks before posting anything. I wanted to get a feel for what people actually cared about before I showed up waving my prototype around. What I noticed is that the sub splits pretty naturally into a few kinds of posts.
* People sharing favorite runs or unusual ball paths from games like Plinbo or Plinko Panic!, usually with a short clip and some commentary on why the bounce sequence was interesting.
* Math and physics discussions, like how peg radius affects the probability of a ball landing in a particular bin, or how run variance changes when you add bumper pegs that redirect rather than just deflect.
* New release talk, mostly indie stuff, sometimes very early access or even pre-release builds that someone in the community made.
* Homebrew and prototype sharing, which is the category I finally posted in.
When I posted my prototype, I kept it simple. I explained what I was trying to do with the shifting peg layout, attached a short screen recording of a few drops, and asked specifically whether the scoring buckets felt rewarding to aim for or whether the spread felt too random to matter. That specificity helped. I got about a dozen replies over two days, which for a small sub is actually a solid response.
The feedback was genuinely useful. One person pointed out that my center buckets were too dominant because my peg rows were too symmetric, so skilled players had no real reason to try for edge buckets. Another person brought up Pachillinko's approach to asymmetric layouts and how that game creates interesting routing decisions. I had not thought about it as a routing problem before, but that framing completely changed how I revised the next version.
A few things I would say if you are thinking about posting your own prototype there. Be specific about what kind of feedback you want. A vague "what do you think" gets vague answers. If you have questions about bounce physics or RNG patterns or scoring bucket balance, ask those directly. Also, engage with other people's posts before and after you share your own stuff. The community is small enough that people notice if you only show up to promote your own work.
I have also found it useful for just staying connected to what other indie plinko builders are thinking about. Someone recently posted a breakdown of how they handle multi-ball drops without the physics turning into complete chaos, and I spent an embarrassing amount of time reading through the replies and taking notes.
Anyway, if you have a plinko prototype sitting on your hard drive and you want real feedback from people who actually care about peg layouts and bounce behavior, that sub is genuinely worth your time.
