Beach Ball Break: Soft Launch
by Jeremy Alessi · 05/15/2006 (10:54 pm) · 4 comments
I've now got Beach Ball Break up for Windows and Mac platforms on my web portal Mousetrap Arcade. I fully expect to make some fixes but over the last few days I've really got it ironed out smooth. Unfortunately beta testing was a bit of a miss. Many of the guys I had testing it felt it was too slow paced. However, that sits in kind of a stark contrast to a lot of the girls and more casual game-playing guys that have played the game that really like the relaxing feel & pace of the game. I'm banking on casual gamers enjoying the ambiance and relaxing pace.
The game is very minimalist and that was done on purpose. I've gone through and done some fairly big projects as a single developer or in a duo. Honestly, at this point I'm really thinking less is more. I've gone in and hit on what I thought were the essential aspects of this title and I'm going to see how it does. I'm not expecting much ... but there are expectations which is important.
Next up I plan to do a full game based on my 'Game-Short' Do Yooh Lo also using T2D/TGB. If there's one thing that's certain about my experience over the past few weeks it's that these are the best tools I've used to date. The whole Torque line is great and has now become the dominant platform for my tinkering.
More to come...
About the author
#2
I have to say that I would never pay for this game. There are a thousand breakout clones better. The graphics and the sound are pretty terrible.
Good proof of concept I guess, but I have to be honest and say I found it hugely underwhelming. What's going on with Oust?
Ian
05/16/2006 (4:05 am)
Hi Jeremy.I have to say that I would never pay for this game. There are a thousand breakout clones better. The graphics and the sound are pretty terrible.
Good proof of concept I guess, but I have to be honest and say I found it hugely underwhelming. What's going on with Oust?
Ian
#3
It's not a bad game but I do have some minor quibbles about it. This all meant as constructive criticism, I still played for a good 15 minutes.
A) The beach ball often gets stuck in an endless(almost) horizontal bounce with very little Vertical velocity. This simply isn't fun; Watching your ball take over a minute to reach the bricks is not fun :) Maybe add stronger gravity? As long as you keep your restitution fairly high, it will still feel like a beach ball. Anyways I find it screws up the pacing, and makes me wait a whole lot, which is not the same as being relaxed :)
B) The bigger levels are cool, BUT! On my p4 3.2 ghz with a gig'o'ram, I expect the game to run smoothly, and it does. In smaller levels, when you hit several bricks in succession, the game throws particle fx at you like crazy! You might want to tone it down a wee bit?
C) The basic goal of 'having a relaxing break' is cool, as is the mousetrap logo and slogan ('your mouse stops here'), but with no 'real' title screen, and with incredibly blurry backgrounds, it's hard to keep playing for longer than 5 minutes.
D) The first time I switched to full screen, the game simply filled the screen with weird colors and lines that made absolutely no sense. I switched back to windowed and to full-screen again and it worked fine.
Thanx for entertaining me!
05/16/2006 (8:15 am)
Downloaded it, played it, and now I have to talk about it!It's not a bad game but I do have some minor quibbles about it. This all meant as constructive criticism, I still played for a good 15 minutes.
A) The beach ball often gets stuck in an endless(almost) horizontal bounce with very little Vertical velocity. This simply isn't fun; Watching your ball take over a minute to reach the bricks is not fun :) Maybe add stronger gravity? As long as you keep your restitution fairly high, it will still feel like a beach ball. Anyways I find it screws up the pacing, and makes me wait a whole lot, which is not the same as being relaxed :)
B) The bigger levels are cool, BUT! On my p4 3.2 ghz with a gig'o'ram, I expect the game to run smoothly, and it does. In smaller levels, when you hit several bricks in succession, the game throws particle fx at you like crazy! You might want to tone it down a wee bit?
C) The basic goal of 'having a relaxing break' is cool, as is the mousetrap logo and slogan ('your mouse stops here'), but with no 'real' title screen, and with incredibly blurry backgrounds, it's hard to keep playing for longer than 5 minutes.
D) The first time I switched to full screen, the game simply filled the screen with weird colors and lines that made absolutely no sense. I switched back to windowed and to full-screen again and it worked fine.
Thanx for entertaining me!
#4
05/16/2006 (9:21 am)
Yeah, only the 'small' levels have the blur effect. I did that as a sort of depth of field because if you have the camera zoomed way in on the ball and bricks with a really sharp BG then the foreground just looks REALLY bad. In the 'big' levels everything's sharpened quite a bit ... although everything is fairly low res anyway. 
Torque Owner Adrian Tysoe
Pace wize I thought it was pretty good, didn't think it was too slow in the handfull of levels I played. Could do with more tile variation though.
Overall not bad at all :)