On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 01:46:36PM +0200, gabor papp wrote: > >For your enjoyment a short video from last night; > >https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=432229103453985&; > awesome, congratulationas.
Thanks! It went over quite well, at the end of a night of "serious" pieces and with a few breaks for refreshments I think the audience was longing for something a bit different too. > > i really like the turning, and how you use the sides of the board. I'm happy with that, I wanted to keep everything as compact and simple as possible, which I think is often a safe bet as a design philosophy; less separate elements means less chance for disaster if you're not a experienced designer :-) > > is the grid distorted below the ball? or is it just an illusion of > the video recording? looks nice, though. No, that is really there. I wanted a sort of "shockwaves" so those planes move away from the camera, in that dimension there are no gameplay elements to disturb. The field is actually a grid of planes sharing a single texture-renderer. Originally the radius around the ball to do this was set based on the speed with which the ball hit the wall (decaying after that) but I simplified that when that speed became more of a result of my quantisation than of how people play. All of those effects slowly get "unlocked" when the code feels the game is "exciting" (long volleys, equal scores and the like) so new players don't get bombarded with elements immediately. That part probably needs tuning in the future because I underestimated what would be a "long volley" for fresh players. I do like this philosophy though; I think many games give the biggest effects at extremely slanted victories, while those are not nearly as exciting as a tense game and I think equal matchups should be rewarded. Another thing I learned was that it's ok to have a lot of visual chaos as long as you stay away from the colours of the elements that matter to gameplay; tests with white visual effects were a disaster; I lost track of the ball, while the same effect in blue was totally fine. Thanks, Kas.
