coda-highland 2023-10-02 23:19
Heh, cute! I don't quite see how this fits the theme of "limited space" but it's a simple but pleasant game to play.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD54 → Pong Begrenzt
By equalenergy and Lachlan5150
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 979 | 3.06 | 49 | |
| Fun | 788 | 3.16 | 48 | |
| Innovation | 1005 | 2.68 | 47 | |
| Theme | 1070 | 2.67 | 48 | |
| Graphics | 896 | 2.85 | 49 | |
| Audio | 618 | 2.91 | 48 | |
| Humor | 832 | 2.28 | 40 | |
| Mood | 992 | 2.75 | 44 |
Heh, cute! I don't quite see how this fits the theme of "limited space" but it's a simple but pleasant game to play.
We thought of something big but it was more than we could do, the walls cave in which is the best really we could do. Glad you still enjoyed it!
@coda-highland I'm curious how you had rated "Innovation" did you rate it low for being pong but different, or high for having a spin on pong?
A nice enough twist on a classic. The controls feel very intuitive and the amount of sliding that the paddles have after movement stops feels natural too. I was actually able to play through low visibility debuff most times without issue because the paddle's movement just felt right.
As for some advice, in general when two objects interact with each other (ball -> paddle, ball -> debuff), it's a good idea to do something to visually confirm that interaction. For instance, when the ball hits the paddle, flashing the paddle white for 0.1-0.15 seconds would be a nice effect that confirms the hit and just feels nice to look at.
Two small issues/bugs that are worth nothing too: the score doesn't reset between playthroughs, and sometimes the ball collides twice with the same paddle, this could be fixed by adding a small timer after a collision and not allowing another one to register if the paddle has been hit too recently.
Overall a very nice entry and a good effort. Good job!
Thanks for the feedback, in a possible postjam I will try to keep that in mind!
Great job on making this one. You two really put a lot of work into this entry and I'm really proud of you! The sound effect of the bouncing ball is perfect.
Thank you for playing (playtesting too)!
I couldn't make it 30 seconds . . . can you give me a spoiler of what happens? heh
@lou-bagel I do appreciate you trying and the walls start significantly shrinking, GL!
It's still Pong. Everyone not living in a cave knows how to play it.
Nice game. It took me a while to understand that I control both sides. aswd and arrows keys works fine so after some training, it's possible to play fine!
very fun game! good take on a classic genre and the spins thrown at you are very interesting. good use of the theme
great, I lost to myself in this game :D
@coda-highland basically the canvas slowly shrinks, as it shrinks the freedom gets more and more limited. :)
Nice pong variant !
And making it in scratch is impressive, that looks like quite a lot of work, good job !
Lost my game to a frost "power-up" :p
@ampo while playtesting I saw how powerful that ice power up was... I didn't do anything because I loved it like that!
Fun little game! I really like the idea of playing pong with myself and powerups being kinda against me.
The shrinking of the play area is interesting and fits the theme pretty well. I always lost on the low visibility "powerup", but sometimes I kept going and was hitting the ball by eyeballing even though I didn't see anything and that felt really good!
Well done!
A nice little game, fun idea that you control both sides and want to keep the ball in, and I like the power ups.
@ampo thats me at my finest :)
Controlling both paddles was a fun twist! Planning out the angles and having to get ready as the walls cave in was very stressful, lol, great work, very cool entry.
Fun little game! First I thought I needed a friend to play, but controlling both paddles is much easier :p
I like the little powerups, they give a bit more purpose to the game. It makes me feel of the good old days where we would stare at the DVD logo until it hit the corner ^^"
Pretty good implementation of Pong. The sound effects felt satisfying and the paddles had a very smooth acceleration. Interesting choice to freeze the paddles immediately on hitting the ball and then having them retain their previous inertia upon gaining control of the paddles again. I did not like the giant paddle power-up. Since it covered the whole screen, there was nothing to do while it was active, and then when it ended, there was no warning or audio cue before the paddle shrunk. There was no time to react and it felt unfair rather than like I messed up.
Well done, thank you for sharing!
@lovewerk I was considering adding another metronome effect like the one used at the start, but it was at the bottom of the priority list, more important things had blocked the way. I do appreciate your feedback and will in a theoretical post-jam try to keep all of that in mind, again thank you for the feedback.
@lovewerk the giant was originally supposed to simply make the screen grow, but for some reason (i think it mightve been the extension we were using to have both of us work on the project at the same time) it bugged out. but honestly this is mostly on us and im sorry that the game bugged out like that :(
@equalenergy @lachlan5150 I totally understand the issue with time restrictions, I didn't even have time to add actual gameplay to my own game haha. But your game feels good and the art and sound are crisp so I think if you made a little tweak to give some feedback and some sort of timer indicating time left on powerups, it'd be a pretty much totally finished and polished game!
I'm really impressed you created this in Scratch, and also find the visual design very nice, I did find it hard to see much of the unique mechanics, though. With the game being moderately hard and the "powerups" relatively rare, I only got the screen to shrink at most once per game. In the future, it might be worth it to increase the rate of item drops so more people can experience the full design of your game :) For a single-player pong game it is a really nice challenge
@peacememories the power ups appear more or less often dependant on how close the walls are btw
Damn, I never thought I'd see a Scratch game on LD. I got really far and I think I started to understand what the power-ups do, but unfortunately I lost my game to one of those frost power-up against which I couldn't do much :( . but overall you did really a good job!
Hey, really cool - especially considering it was made with Scratch! Neat little innovation on the formula (even just having singleplayer Pong). Movement and sound all felt tight and bug-free. On my first play I hit the frost powerup which wrecked me - but after that, I hit a bunch of powerups on my second play and couldn't tell if they were doing anything - not sure if the powerup broke or whether it was just subtle compared to the first one I hit.
Either way, good stuff - this was nice.
Haha, nice entry guys! Nice remaster of pong to fit the theme. And the technical limitation you had make it even better!
Single player pong is a nice idea. The powerups are brutal. One issue I noticed when the paddle switches control, the new paddle already moves a bit. That knocked me out a couple of times.
To put it in the way @lovewerk did, the paddles regain the previous inertia, this was due to the script being a "stop all other script" not a script to manually stop the paddle.
@eeperdeheap yea that bug was because we forgot to set the y velocity after the paddle switched back lol. if we make a post jam we will make sure to fix it :)
i did notice it but we were on a big time crunch near the end and i forgot to fix it
10 minutes were left to spare when I posted lol!
Interesting game. When I picked up the limited view thing, it became impossible to play. A problem I see is that people with slightly slower reaction will have a hard time even getting to see the powerups work properly. I get where you were going with the game though and think it is an interesting take on the theme.
Yes, it has to do with the theme. Pong
Scratch! That's awesome :) I've never seen a game in a game jam made in scratch. Once I say it to my daughter, she would like to participate in LD too :) I like it!
A nice little game, fun idea :)
Ayy, nice idea for a pong-like game !
A solo pong is something I've never seen, and I liked the way things are implemented. The sound design is pretty cool, the graphics are simple but enough, and the theme actually is nicely implemented with the limited space being the shrinking walls (it took me some time to arrive to one of these powerups though, I kept on getting the widening walls and cold ones).
I think you could try to implement some storytelling in the game, or maybe some things you have to do as well to spice things up ? Like having to click on some stuff else you die, or read that you have to do something else you die (like a DO NOT MAKE THE BALL BOUNCE ON YOU PADDLE FOR THE NEXT 5 BOUNCES) or something like that, might be a neat idea since this is a solo game.
Also you made this on SCRATCH ! Takes me waaaay back 5-10 years ago when I was a kid and I was making stuff on there lol, goood job with your game, coding on scratch is rather... LIMITED (omg limited space), so congrats for managing to make a game in a short time with it ! Especially since you didn't do a lot of game jams before
Scratch is limited indeed! We're just too lazy to learn a different language! (Umm... it was definitely intentional scratch; limited space haha not just coincidence)