Post by aronegal in BALL comments

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aronegal1 year ago(+1)

This is great! A bit too hard hard, but great fun for 2 on a sunny day, so the screen looks good from any angle)

Few wishes, feel free to disregard ;-)

Manual as menu image playdate.setMenuImage - feels kinda unnecessary to waste menu item on that, when it can be always there ;-)
Switch between tilt/d-pad controls from the menu playdate.menu:addOptionsMenuItem at any time
Score with dithered (grey) line and smaller - less obtrusive
Single player mode? Squash-like, where you play against the wall with crank. Score chaser?

Thanks for the game!

Alex Chapman1 year ago

Thanks. And thanks for the feedback!

(For the record, this is actually easier than Pong -- I was using the FPGA and Atari 50 remakes for reference. It's a beastly quarter-muncher.)

There is a phosphor trail on the ball for readability, but I kept it short for crispness/accuracy. I really should throw the option on the menu. Along with a ball glow.

In-game control switching would be nice (especially when I was testing and hit the wrong one), but I'm trying to lean on minimalism and A game/B game feels like classic Atari to me.

Big Old Scores come with the territory, but yeah, I realized they should be dithered immediately before realizing I really didn't want to redraw the fonts and probably nobody would care. Guess I bet wrong there.

Alex Chapman1 year ago

Oh and the single-player mode is just, you know, control both paddles. It's not quite chess against yourself, but it's better than poker against yourself.

Alex Chapman1 year ago

1.01 grants the setMenuImage wish -- great suggestion, and it let me write an instruction card. Also has the dithered score font and options to make the ball more visible (if less crisp) in bad light.

aronegal1 year ago(+1)

Nice! Already tried it! The trail length is a nice touch!

I have weird relationship with Pong since for me the "original" is the soviet arcade knock-off that had 5 modes. Only recently I tried the Atari version on original hardware and didn't like it.. But yours feels great!

itch.io

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