15th August 2017

Each week, as people submit comments to the various games, I'll try to keep tabs on them all and collect them into these Player Thoughts posts.
Luckily, RSKGames seems to be the only one doing it, so it's not that hard to keep track of!
Feel free to give your own feedback.

This week, RSKGames looks at Rainbows Shooting From My Balls..!!

RSKGames

Game Overview: Pong with a twist, many balls with trailing rainbow colors. When player fails to connect with 10 balls the game is over. When player misses a ball a rainbow is formed where the ball hits the wall.
Player's paddle on the left side, computer AI's pad on the right.

-=-=-

Yup, it's a very basic Pong clone, but with a colourful background! Honestly, it's not much more than that, but the multiball aspect makes things all the more difficult.

Gameplay: The game design elements like multiple balls, 10 lives, different balls speeds and a tough computer AI makes a familiar game feel fresh and engaging.

For a while, I had the AI be a little dumber, but at the end of the day you could just as easily be playing against a wall, so I figured having a hard AI wasn't that much of a bad thing.

The randomness makes it difficult to predict in which run you'll get high score. Some runs are so brutal that reaching 50 points w ill be difficult.

The hardest part I've found, is trying not to panic when two balls are at opposite sides of the play area!
If you panic, you typically end up losing about 3 or 4 lives in rapid succession. Instead, try to focus on what you CAN hit, and ignore the fact that you're about to lose your Combo.

Graphics: The rainbow effect when ball hits the wall and the trailing rainbow tail in the ball gives a colorful look to the game.

What a lovely rainbow effect

Of course, it's not perfect, and could definitely have been made more colourful had I hard coded the colours, but I felt it looked good enough for the amount of time that the rainbows are onscreen.
The lack of proper Oranges and Yellows is still rather annoying, though!

Music: The best part of the background score comes when you are able to sustain more time in the game.

As with most tunes used in AGameAWeek games, it was quickly knocked up within about an hour!
But it works well, and that's the important thing.

Scoring: Each consecutive hits to the ball without losing life increments the points for each hit, which is also used to multiply the points player gets when the computer AI loses a life.

The combo thing was a late addition. Previous to that it'd been a simple "1 per hit, 5 per CPU Loss", but it ended up giving me stupidly low scores!
"oooh, 15 points in that game! Wowie!"
Instead, the Combo system was popped into place, and the difficulty of keeping the Combo up became the new focus.
Remember kids : Combo's work really well!!

Overall a fresh life infused to a familiar game.

It's a nice diversion.
It's certainly not my best game, but it kills a few minutes, and that's good enough.

Views 197, Upvotes 36

Player Thoughts

New games every week!