Feedback needed for Pong-ish game

Hello everybody,

If you like pong style games about reflexes and prediction i would like to hear your comment and advises about this mini game.

Suggest you to play on computer (or at least use Opera for Android if you will try it on mobile, somehow lag is happening in chrome while playing)

Game play: I will write it below but it's preferedif you discover the mechanics. You can use any key or tap on mobile.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/246 ... index.html

------GAMEPLAY---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Only control of the game is paddle speed. You can't control paddles direction or position so you have to predict balls destination to pause paddles on that point.

Well, the game reminds me of Flappy Bird for some reason, also very difficult. It's very hard to predict and time when to freeze. Now I think there's one thing you might want to change, I got a highscore of 6 by doing literally nothing. I just left the pad to auto-move and the ball bounces exactly back in the right direction. So that's not rewarding in contrast with manual effort. Not sure if anyone's done this game before, but it has some originality.

Hey, this is pretty clever. Really intuitive and fun ! I like simple mechanics like this one !

Random feedbacks:

_At first, I thought that clicking was freezing the racquet, but just for 0.5 seconds. It took me a while to realize that the racquet was unfreezing because of the ball touching it.

I ain't sure how to fix this really. Actually you already added the "snowflake visual feedback", which is cool. Anyway, after a few tries, I understood. Doesn't really affect the experience, 'cause you can retry super quickly.

_ Sometimes, I clicked just after the ball touched the racket. It was very frustrating because it wasn't moving, and it felt like it should.

--> "I did'nt click for you to stay in place forever like this, stupid game !!"

The problem here is that the player doesn't have a lot of controls and lot of ways to affect the game. He can't fix something he fucked up. If you do one mistake in this game (clicking without wanting it), you're gonna be a spectator of your death. There's no suspens. Once you made a mistake, you're just passively waiting for the game to kill you. Not really fun.

sooo, maybe a solution to this would be to add another way to affect the game (Although I love the fact that it's a one button game.), or maybe to make the player able to "unfreeze" the racket if he made a mistake. But it would change the whole gameplay mechanic so I'm not sure.

_Is there any kind of difficulty curve in it? Felt wrong for me on this point. I think the ball is just acting the same way no matter how long you played, am I wrong?

Also the game is really difficult. I think it would be better to start with something a little bit easier (if you can make this easier), and then have something like the ball speed is increasing or something.

Oh, and I scored 22 on my best try, if that's helpful for you

Anyway, the idea/the mechanic works fine. Improvements can be made, maybe, but it's really a nice game already !

Fellows thank you for your kind feedbacks. You know it is really important to gather opinions about games while creating them.

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Hello, there. Likeness with Flappy can be the simplicity and hardness of the game. I mean, if the ball will not hit walls with narrow angle, it is really easy to predict the falling point. How ever we need to coordinate ourselfs to rapid decision and acting. Making point without doing anything in the game is not good, i share your thought. How ever it will not take too much. For example i never more than 3 points without freezing those paddles. For the genuineness of the game, "ACCORDING TO MY RESEARCHES" i did not find that much similar game.

regisRquoi

Thank you for your kind compliments. I also like those simple mechanics in games. My main achieve is to have a simple game which is challenging, funny and frustrating with nice balance. I would like to answers step by step so we may have new ideas to solve some problems.

• As you said, main problem is showing player that tapping will "freeze" those paddles and hitting by the ball will "defrost" them. For that purpose i first designed the ball as a "fireball" with orange/yellow colour with yellow particles following the ball. And also while on "freeze" state i add extra ice sprites covering paddles and add freezed water texture to background. How ever they did not look nice and plain which was making hard to focus on game. So i add that simple snowflake staff.

May be i should find something different or resize and reposition that flake to somewhere more noticable? I don't know.

• That second thing you said is still confusing me. I know it is somehow complicating for someone to understand that they touch the screen right after balls touch with paddle and that's the reason why those paddle stop themself.

I may try to disable freezing action on tab the screen while that balls x coordinate is very close to paddle. Reason i did not is to avoid "this game is not accepting some of my touches/ not working properly" minds. But i understand what you said and still unsure about it.

• About fixing things when they f.cked up! i game them 3 chances (which was only 1) to continue I guess i was quite fair. As you said giving player unfreeze power will change everything in the games taste (if it got one).

But i can try to give ~0.3 seconds to unfreeze it again it it was a mistake. So we will see if it will be nice or not.

-NO. There is no difficulty curve. I tried to make ball faster in every 5 hits but it was not funny. May be i couldn't find that balance but:

.if i increase the ball speed slowly, game is getting boring because slow speed is not giving any challange to player.

.if i increase speed suddenly, after 3 or 4 "5 Hits" game become impossible to play So i decide to keep it stable.

And knowing you scored 22 is not helpful but satisfying while i made 33

Thanks again your very useful feedback guys.

That kind of game was unexpected when i read the title

Kind of addictive and really unique!

Beaverlicious

Yeah, i suck about those "titles" at forums. Can't create a catchy headline Happy if you like the game itself.

Title is okay;-) just expected something different