lecarore
Joined 9 years ago
Joined 9 years ago
1. I'll improve the onboarding, but it's a balance between too much text and too little. I think i'll "unlock" some things like the default perk, extra upgrades by playing better, etc.. after a while, and explain them at that time.
2. You can click menu/unlocks/perk name to try the perk, but only for one level. Maybe i could instead start a normal run with that perk.
3. clicking the score at the top right lets you see what perk you have and restarts the game. The button didn't work at some points, but in the latest version (web) it definitely works. Again, it's a "missing tutorial" issue, more than "missing features"
4. The game indeed has a dominant strategy, I haven't reached 66k high score at all, but I can see some perks work better than others. I was thinking about a challenge of not using a perk. So, high score without multiball. High score without hot start. This would make alternative strategies more interesting to develop. Another option would be "hard mode", where the bricks take more hits, perks are rarer, missing resets the level score, missing a coin reduces score... some new level of challenge basically.
I think all those points can wait a bit though, except the ball stuck one, where i'd love to have more details. If you play on web, you can turn game recording on in the menu, and share the video of any odd behavior. This bug is at the top of my todo, but I also have a job and it's not easy to reproduce, so it might take a little while to fix it.
A/ I had a current level display before, but now the menu is in its place. I guess once you pass level 1 i could display your current level instead of "menu" at the top right. I also want to show the score and multiplier, i'll have to do hard choices. B/ Yes, letting users pick the next level is a great perk, it's a bit of a code change but not that hard, i added it to the possible new perks list. C/ This perk already exists (menu/unlocks/+1 level) but you need to score a bit to get it.
I've played a lot of nova drift where the is a lot of complexity to the upgrades system in-run. In previous versions of breakout 71 you would permanently unlock perks level by level but that was a lot of code and not contributing much to the fun, so I got rid of it and you for example just unlock all 3 levels of "extra level" at total score 13000 (all run scores summed).
I did restrict some perks about ball to ball interactions (ball_repulse_ball, ball_attract_ball to having first picked the multiball perk) because otherwise they'd do absolutely nothing.
The misses, coin catch % and level clearing speeds are already tied to an in-game behavior of having more options and being able to upgrade more than once after a level, so I don't know if I'd also add another thing that depends on it. Keyboard users (where it's really hard to not miss 50% of shots) will be mad :)
I never heard of Mario style time unlocks, that sounds like silly fun. You get something for finishing the level in a sepecific amount of seconds, no matter how many minutes?