triplefox 2019-10-08 07:00
I do like a good pinball game, and have been studying them pretty intensively for the past month or two since I'm thinking of making one, so I had to try this one out. Just the way it's been executed on(build your own playfield) brings it way out of the scope of a jam game, though, so I had low expectations. Even a single plain-jane playfield, no gimmicks, that feels good is something that can be refined for weeks to months - when design tools try to get around that fact and provide an easy modular kit, they are guaranteeing that they will deliver something that only lets you make a low-quality playfield. And then there's a whole unfinished tycoon game on top of that. It adds up to being a lot of software and assets work before you have any chance of really tuning the game design - I opted for a Breakout style game this time for exactly this kind of reason.
To give you some idea of what's missing just in the basic gameplay:
There is no nudge. The flippers are weak and can't bring the ball all the way up the playfield. When the ball hits the bumpers it barely reacts. When the ball lands on the flippers it stops dead instead of bouncing. The plunger can't replunge if the ball falls back into it. There is no ruleset to speak of, which makes the result play with less depth than many 40's era games.
This level of execution is actually the norm, though. There are, like, four good pinball games on mobile(Pinball Deluxe, Zen Pinball, Pinball Arcade, Zaccaria Pinball), out of hundreds, several of which have table designers like this. It's hard to do the genre justice, and it's like sports or racing sims in that regard. With most video games, the physics are of relatively low importance and all the focus is on bombarding the player with interactions of timers and finite state and animation. But when you actually try to simulate a real thing, suddenly you can be spending a huge amount of time on details, and your most likely target audience is going to require that you get the details as right as they can be.