[Fluxus] latest project

[Kassen]

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 01:46:36PM +0200, gabor papp wrote:
> >For your enjoyment a short video from last night;
> >https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=432229103453985&
> awesome, congratulationas.

Thanks! It went over quite well, at the end of a night of "serious"
pieces and with a few breaks for refreshments I think the audience 
was longing for something a bit different too.

> 
> i really like the turning, and how you use the sides of the board.

I'm happy with that, I wanted to keep everything as compact and simple
as possible, which I think is often a safe bet as a design philosophy;
less separate elements means less chance for disaster if you're not a
experienced designer :-)
> 
> is the grid distorted below the ball? or is it just an illusion of
> the video recording? looks nice, though.

No, that is really there. I wanted a sort of "shockwaves" so those
planes move away from the camera, in that dimension there are no
gameplay elements to disturb. The field is actually a grid of planes
sharing a single texture-renderer. Originally the radius around the
ball to do this was set based on the speed with which the ball hit the
wall (decaying after that) but I simplified that when that speed
became more of a result of my quantisation than of how people play.

All of those effects slowly get "unlocked" when the code feels the 
game is "exciting" (long volleys, equal scores and the like) so new
players don't get bombarded with elements immediately. That part
probably needs tuning in the future because I underestimated what
would be a "long volley" for fresh players. I do like this philosophy
though; I think many games give the biggest effects at extremely
slanted victories, while those are not nearly as exciting as a tense
game and I think equal matchups should be rewarded.

Another thing I learned was that it's ok to have a lot of visual chaos
as long as you stay away from the colours of the elements that matter
to gameplay; tests with white visual effects were a disaster; I lost
track of the ball, while the same effect in blue was totally fine.

Thanks,
Kas.