After a bunch of playtesting and getting feedback from players, I changed a whole lot of features and tweaked some aspects of the game. The main changes were:

Music and Sounds: Probably the most noticeable change is that I added sound effects to the game. I still have to rethink a few of them and get better audio clips for some things, but at least we can hear the balls popping :p… Also, my friend CaioBap composed a simple music loop for the game (not sure he has an account here).

New Item Look: Still keeping these items as placeholders until I decide on the look of each individual item, but they are a bit better to differentiate from the regular balls now. As with the ball shader, I came up with this look messing around with the Strumpy Shader Editor (tinyurl.com/strumpyshadereditor) until I thought it was good enought.

Minor Gameplay Adjustments: Hooked up my mother to the game so I could have a playtester near me (and she has become really addicted to the game. When I ask her to test some new feature, she spends like two hours playing if I don’t ask her to let me change something in the game). After lots of playtest sessions and some code-tweaking here and there, I have implemented and adjusted a difficulty adjustment system that makes more balls pop to the stage according to your current score and implemented the possibility of having more than one ball spawnpoints per level (which I’m calling BallFactories, more on that later). Right now I think that the matches are a bit to lengthy (running at about 7 minutes and 50 seconds on the simplest level) and I might change some numbers to the difficulty manager to drop that length to about 5min/match.

Major Gameplay Adjustment: Now you can use bombs to eliminate the black balls (blocks) that used to litter the level after some time. This thing alone improved the game on lots of aspects that I wanted to tweak, as giving more value to nongreen and nonblue items (clear loners and slow time were way to much above the others in power level) and rewarding the player for playing smart (as in making large ball chains to get the right items instead of randomly clicking everything).

Two New Levels: One of the things that I wanted to try with this game was to see how much the gameplay changed if the layout of the level were different. There are ball-popping games to the thousand on the web and I have never seen one that explored the possibility of new levels and after playing a few times I have realized that the experience is definitely different from one level to the other: You start to value some items above the other, you try different tactics to form chains and the environment presents new challenges and opportunities. Above all, I think that adding new levels really improved what the game can be if I manage to finish it. (Next step: Interactive and moving objects :D )

Complete code reformulation: The more I thought about adding more than one BallFactory to some levels, the more I wanted to have used a more modular approach to programming the main class of the game (called Scorekeeper: The game object that stores information on each level and is responsible for almost everything that happens in the game) so I completely reorganized every script that I had programmed before. Now, instead of having a single script with more than 500 lines of code to do everything, I have a main Scorekeeper class that keeps 7 different managers for distinct aspects of the game.

That was a bit longer than I expected. I’m planning to fully document the project and keep a production blog for it. If anyone is interested in knowing more technical aspects of the game, just leave me a shout ;)