Moving targets a non-starter

I spent a big chunk of this week trying out moving targets in Pinballesque. They’re tempting because they’d let me build a game out of spawn patterns and movement behaviour rather than table geometry, which would be less work. It turns out they suck pretty hard in this game:

  • The combo system is all about making patterns, so inadvertent hits are really punishing. This rules out spawning a big jumble of objects. In Breakout it’s a good thing if the ball makes it through the outer layer and starts bouncing out of control in the interior layers, but that’s death with this combo system. I wound up restricting them to a single layer and tried to make sure the return angles were fairly straight.
  • I needed to move the objects very slowly, so the player has time to wait for the ball to roll to the right part of the flipper. To change the configuration of objects at more than a glacial pace, I rhythmically pulsed the movement.
  • I needed to make the objects fairly large as well.
Add it all together and the experience isn’t really that much different from a series of ramps that periodically cycle through colours.

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