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A jam submission

UltrapongView game page

Pong-like for GDFG jam
Submitted by nyctus1 — 1 day, 16 hours before the deadline
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Ultrapong's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Overall#23.7503.750
Narrative/Mood#23.5003.500
Polish#23.7503.750
Audio#24.2504.250
Game Design#23.5003.500
Art#23.5003.500
Overall#23.7083.708

Ranked from 4 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Explain how long it took you to make your game.
Around 30 hours over October (shocking)

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Comments

Host(+1)

I had a lot of fun playing this game. I think you did a great job with the sound and overall mood. Very charming and very "Ultra".  There was a nice bit of depth with being able to "swipe" the ball and curve it. Idk if it was just me but the paddle speed seemed really really high and initially hard to control. Once I got used to it it wasn't so bad. Anyways nice work!

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the play and the feedback, I had fun watching the stream replay just now! 

I can see a few people had trouble with the mouse sensitivity so that's something I have to look into. Watching the stream made me remember that people don't always play the game as I imagined they would - because of the mouse sensitivity issue you were playing very "conservatively" because it was so difficult to not miss the shots. (When testing, I didn't have that issue so was hitting extreme curve balls all the time and balanced the difficulty on that basis). So seeing that is a great reminder/lesson for me - thanks.

I was going for the over-the-top aesthetic (to make up for my soporific trading game last month) but the voice effect was not mine :)  freesound.org.

Submitted(+1)

Nice, very polished game!

The game looks really nice and I can learn a lot from your visual touch. The soundtrack was nice, being told I suck was not bad either.

I did have some trouble really controlling the paddle with my mouse and getting positioned correctly under the ball, but that can also totally be my skill. Also, for me the sounds was a bit too loud and I'd like to be able to put the volume down a bit, because the soundtrack itself was great.

Great job!

Developer

Thanks for the play and the helpful feedback. Seems like everybody found the same thing with the controls so I'll have to be more careful with those in the future.

Submitted(+1)

Very cool! 

I liked the second mode with powers up that the ball can collide with and can change your paddle. That kind of variety helped the gameplay. I also liked the overall look of the game; the trail on the ball was satisfying. I did find that the mouse sensitivity was a bit too high; i couldn't control it as well as i would have liked. Also I think it would be helpful if the player had the choice of when to start the round maybe with a press of a button. There were times late into a match, when the ball is moving very quickly, where the round started as i was trying to get my paddle back to center and it had already scored on me by the time I got back.

Great job though!

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the play and the useful feedback!

I agree I should have slowed down the round start, when the ball was moving faster. 

(+1)

Great job with this!

What I Liked:

Loved the aesthetic. The music & graphics fit well together and made for a good atmosphere.

I liked the bit of humor (the sound effects were funny and telling you "You Suck" after losing a few points was good)

The particle effects on the ball and the trail behind it looked great.

I think the extra mode was pretty cool. I think the "powerups" created some more interesting gameplay.

I'm really curious how you did the AI. How hard was it? I'd imagine it was a bit tricky to make the computer challenging but not perfect? What did you do to ramp up the difficulty?

What I Would Like to See:

I found that if I positioned myself at just the right position at the start of each point, the ball would always hit off my side and go off to the side, giving the computer a hard time getting to it and giving me an easy point. Not sure the best way to prevent the player from these easy points (maybe vary the initial trajectory at the start of each point?).

Awesome stuff, well done!

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the play and the helpful feedback!

You're right, the AI was tough to balance. Whenever I made a slight gameplay change, it made the AI either too easy or impossible to beat, so I had to rebalance often. The way I implemented it was that the AI picked a target spot to defend, but only had a limited reaction speed, like humans, and sometimes was inaccurate. Then I increased the difficulty by reducing the size of the errors, and increasing the reaction time.

cool, thanks for sharing!