Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → MiniLD → MiniLD 42 → EarthBall
By gatechgrad
A good start... Needs some polish.
Some ideas if you want to develop this further:
1. Gravity wells
2. Worm holes, maybe that change the properties of the ball (weight, friction, drag, etc)
3. UFO's that explode on impact
I'd like to see what you can do with this in the future.
Cheers!
Thanks for the feedback!
Now I know why Pluto was demoted as a planet, so hard to hit!
The game played itself most of the time, a bump feature or some extra pedals higher up would make me feel more in control.
This was pretty fun. The board is a bit long, so there is a lot of time spent waiting for the ball to come back down. Also the ball seemed to stick to the walls a bit, and on a couple occasions the ball managed to get behind the plunger.
Takes me back... A slightly different camera view, showing more of the vertical, or just reduce the aspect ratio of the table itself (to make it less tall) perhaps?
Nice game, but earth does get stuck a little too often... :)
It might also be a cool idea to make the table taller and add some more flippers somewhere, stuff like that ...
Thanks for trying it out. I'm still looking into fixing the problem with the ball(Earth) getting stuck in the flippers and going through walls. I've got the ball set to Continuous Dynamic collision detection, which is supposed to handle fast moving objects. However, whenever it bounces off of a planet it still moves too fast for the collision detection to handle it. I think there are some more tricks I can play with Unity to try to get it to work right.
I did get the ricochet off the wall fixed, which just required adding a physics material to the ball with Bounciness set to 1. I may need to scale it back a bit, because it feels almost like a beach ball now.
I would also like to add ramps and higher levels, but I currently have the Y-coordinate locked. Unlocking it will generate a new set of problems to deal with, like the ball bouncing upwards and out of the play area.
My high score was 3190. My only complaints are that the front few planets often "spiked" the Earth straight into the lava at high speeds and Neptune was incredibly hard to hit, at least for me. The music was good and I liked the graphics and sound effects.