Centipong has been wrought with issues since day 56. It’s been a bit of a pain, but for a whole bunch of obscure reasons.
I’m up to my last day, and I just wanted you folks to expect something slight odd with this release.
See, the thing is, as much as this IS Centipong TWO, I didn’t really want to tread the exact same path.
I’ve already done Centipong, and Centipong Jr in Java, and Centipong DS as well.
And starting this project seemed like a great idea, but it’s the exact same thing AGAIN!
It’s been really hard to push myself along the exact same path that I’ve already done. I haven’t found this to be a fulfilling coding experience, it’s dragged and dragged and it’s all been a little bit overly repetitive.
The paddle’s there, the balls there, the pods are there, the mushrooms are there, there are progressive waves getting longer and faster.
But..
There’s no pickups.
If I add the pickups I end up with the same “Grow the paddle, shrink the paddle, add a ball” type things, and.. we’ve done them before.
I’m trying to come up with something All-New, but absolutely nothing is coming to mind.
Progress is stupidly slow, and I’m finding myself just batting the ball about, wondering what else I could possibly add.
I got nothing…
If you’ve an idea, let me know quicky, because otherwise Centipong 2 is going to be a bit pants compared to the original.
(…in his best EA PR person’s voice)
But it’ll look better!!!!
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6 users responded in this post
Maybe instead of just bouncing things off the paddle, there was a button to turn it into a net:
When it’s a net, you collect whatever hits it, and then you either turn those things into power-ups (collect 3 reds, 4 blues or whatever) or sell them or whatever. The catch is that you still need at least one thing bouncing around the screen or it’s “GAME OVER”.
Or maybe have a separate net that you bounce things into.
You can do Slow (everything will slow down for period of time), Magnet (the pong ball will be caught every time), Mouse control (where you will be able to move the paddle in all the directions for some secs) or even self aiming ball
Blip Flip – two crazy things from Gravity Bob come down the screen and place the paddle to the top with a weird sound. Could be nasty if your ball is going up, or useful if the ball falls. Those two grabbers make a weird blip when they touch the paddle.
I don’t know if this is possible to code or not, but maybe some kind of gimmick involving perspective or something like turning the whole game around and on it’s sides. Maybe even taking control of the Centipede for a while. Or the ship from Centipede, for that matter.
Shatter-influence suggest me to suggest you attractor/repellor waves that can have distant effect.
Otherwise, how about a “paddle teleport” that lets you play upside-down for a while.
I also think of bullet-time effect that could somehow let you move faster than your ball during a slowed-down time so that you can actually force it bouncing in ways you should normally hardly achieve (better combined with free-moving paddle).
PS: I’m shouting loud without having read other’s suggestion. Sorry if I redund.
The net thing sounds interesting.
Slow/Magnet/4-way, etc .. Well, they’re all powerups.
If I get the net-combo thing going it’ll be interesting to see them in that, but I’d rather not just do a plain ordinary “And here’s a pickup” type of thing.
Can’t flip the paddle to the top, because of the basic game rules.. !
The centipedes come towards you, starting at the top.
If you flip to the top, you’re likely to hit one of them, and that’ll kill you..
Centipede control is one of the dullest things imaginable, since you’d just end up pushing it away from yourself so you can live longer.
Might as well just have some sort of powery force that pushes the centipedes away..
Which I think is what sylvainulg was getting at..
And then there’s slow-mo again.
I added it to centipong 1, but .. honestly.. it was pretty damn useless. All you did was move the paddle around a bit whilst the balls slowly did nothing much at all.
I might play with the Net idea for a while, and see what happens.
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