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Peggle Defense's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Creativity | #1851 | 3.459 | 3.459 |
| Overall | #1897 | 3.288 | 3.288 |
| Enjoyment | #1954 | 3.081 | 3.081 |
| Presentation | #2037 | 3.324 | 3.324 |
Ranked from 37 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
It's peggle/pinball but you're trying to defend the attacks. In my mind, the original Peggle/pinball had the sword/ball be a destructive oppressor/predator happily destroying whatever he pleases for their amusement, and then now you're shown the other side, that the pins actually care what happens to them. With my assets, time and lack of experience, I had difficulty illustrating that storyline in time though, and had to focus on functionality and basic gameplay.
Did your team create the vast majority of the art during the 48 hours?
We used pre-existing art
Did your team create the vast majority of the music during the 48 hours?
We used pre-existing audio
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Comments
Good game after all, it was hard to get it but it's interesting when you understand what's going on, i had more fun than i expected.
The game has some things to improve and update, and the theme doesn't fit that much but it's a good game.
Enjoyment 4, Presentation 4,
I don't know what to put in creativity, i think i'll leave it at 3 for now, if i change it i'll upload this comment.
(For some reason itch.io send this 3 times, idk what happened)
Thanks for the feedback and positive rating. It's much appreciated.
I'm curious, did you read the "How does your game fit the theme?" and if so, did you disagree that it's a role reversal in that sense? Or do you just mean that it wasn't obvious from the gameplay itself?
As for the multiple comments, I have have had the same issue, and for me it was because I had an unsaved rating while posting the comment, and then it prompted if I wanted to discard changes when posting the comment, but if you click cancel it still posts the comment without refreshing the page to show it. It's just a webdesign flaw with itch.io
I read it, but i meant that from the gameplay i have no clue of what's the reversed role, it just seems to be a normal game without the explanation.
sorry if i explained wrong.
Don't worry you're good. This is what it reads:
"In my mind, the original Peggle/pinball had the sword/ball be a destructive oppressor/predator happily destroying whatever he pleases for their amusement, and then now you're shown the other side, that the pins actually care what happens to them. With my assets, time and lack of experience, I had difficulty illustrating that storyline in time though, and had to focus on functionality and basic gameplay."
In other words, instead of being the destroyer of pins, you now have to protect the pins - and it's now (thought to be) revealed to you that the pins that the pin-destroyer originally targets for big points is actually your life and you're trying to protect those from being destroyed.
I'm curious what you have in your mind when you think of "role reversal" and what you expect in a game for it to live up to that.
Well, i have read it before, what i meant was that, at least for me, the game itself isn't clear enought about what is reversed, i've seen a lot of games like that in other contexts, i understand your idea.
Alright thanks for the follow up. Lastly I'm curious if you can link me to one of the games that are like that
Great choices of pixel art, sound effects, and ambient sounds. It took me a long time to realize that the numbers were prices, not counts. It's quite fun, even though there's a lot of luck involved. It's really satisfying when you get a series of lucky bounces. Great work!
Yeah I'm sorry for the lacking and confusing info. Especially that the income gains weren't at all displayed (except in the screenshots).
I'm surprised to hear you call out luck though. Could you elaborate?
Interesting idea. Kinda confusing but you can figure it out. Game isn't really balanced to make placing the pieces interesting though so it needs more work on that front. Nice sprites though.
Thanks for the feedback. I agree with it. There's basically only three pin features:
1. Attract the shot
2. increase your income (which incentivizes maximizing airtime without getting hearts destroyed)
3. Diamond collision box (rather than circles for all the rest), which didn't add much but I just left it in there.
In the end, I decided that the levels had to be designed as puzzles instead - which you probably can guess from the first two levels, but the third and fourth level were impacted by the bug that placed pins persist through levels. The third level was meant to be fairly easy and give a little taste of being able to experiment with placing many pins, while the fourth level was meant to be much harder and about creating enough income to sustain making pins without losing. With the bug though, you could build up a lot of extra pins in level 3 and then use those to make level 4 much easier.
I agree that there's so much more I could've done. I wanted to explore different levels of bounciness for pins, different "balls"/attacks, different pins with growth stages and elements and many other things. But as this was my first jam and I'm too inexperienced, I didn't have time to explore any of that.
The visuals are really good, and I liked the idea of an inverted pinball game. I just wish there was a bit more of explanation on how the mechanics work, because I got quite confused on that front. And congrats on making it on your first jam :)
Thanks! Did you manage to figure it out in time then? I.e. apples give 10 gold / sec, slime gives 1 gold / sec?
Creative idea and fun and challenging gameplay!
I do agree a more complete tutorial can be helpful, but you can pick it up regardless with a few trail and errors and you're good to go.
Nice!
-Enjoyment: Very cool puzzles and fun watching it play out after placing stuff!
-Creativity: Super cool idea!
-Presentation: The art is put together well, and all the effects and UI look great!
-Neat game indeed!! Please check out my non-creative entry when you can :D
Interesting concept and very stunning spritework!
It looks very pleasing and the concept is interesting. The pixel art looks very good and the colour palette used too. Really fun ! Good job :)
Cute little game. The levels are well designed. Perhaps the difficulty increases a bit too quickly. Other than that good job!
Great game! There could have been a better tutorial but other than that it's a great game.
Thanks for playing and giving feedback! I agree, I'd do it differently if I had more time and experience. But would you care to elaborate on what you first thought and where you got stuck/frustrated before figuring it out? If not, that's okay - I'm just curious how different people approach this.
Really neat idea. I was a bit stumped about the hook of the game until I figured out the income system - a lot of potential there to play around with balancing your income with protecting your hearts. I hope you keep working on it after the jam, I'd be interested to see where else you go with the concept!
Would definitely be interesting to continue working on it. I think I'd prioritize very differently (and both visuals and audio would change a lot) if it wasn't a 48 hour game jam. One of my biggest reasons to do the jam was to try to finish a small game with a guaranteed chance to get feedback from different players - and without that, I haven't found enough good reasons to do it, unfortunately. But thanks a lot for the encouragement. If more people feel this way, then I'd be way more interested.
Cool! I like the idea of a reverse Peggle, definitely a lot of potential there in terms of game mechanics and level design. Reminds me of Peglin in that it's a more modern take on the genre.
Had fun playing the game, wish there were more levels. I like that it isn't just a game of "keep away", but there is also a more puzzle based aspect where the player has to figure out how to raise their income levels and keep the sword in the air for a certain amount of time to finish the level, as demonstrated in level 2.
Like others, I think the game would benefit from a little bit more tutorialization, but at the same time it's good to have the player experiment a bit. I believe that it isn't necessarily bad design to have the player fail a couple times.
Good stuff!
Thanks for the detailed review, and I wholeheartedly agree with all you've said! I also thought of Peglin but to me Peggle/pinball has so much more left to give than Peglin did, and this was just my first game jam attempt - and I thought I could make it functional in time because I knew how to make gravity and bouncy objects.
Interesting about the experimentation. I feel that users should be encouraged to experiment and ideally have surprising 'aha' moments, but figuring out the UI is never fun - I think that should just be intuitive. What do you think?
Congrats on your first Jam game! It's a fun one! It took me a minute to work out what was happening. I think it needs a little more feedback for the player. I got to level two and then wasn't able to place the pins and I wasn't sure why. It took me a while to realise I had run out of gold. But this game feels great to play and I really like your interpretation on the theme! Good job!
Thanks! Yeah, I hope next time I'll have enough experience to make some more feedback in time (e.g. I definitely won't spend an hour installing and exporting WebGL next time, hopefully xD). If I could, I would've included the income info for each pin, and made some audio and shake/flash of the money when you were out of money.
I'm really glad that you think it feels great to play - as the developer, it's really easy to only see what it's lacking.
I always like a good peggle game. Not a ton of strategy but really addicting.
Very interesting puzzle.
Could have used a little more hand-holding but what a game! Great work
Yeah, agreed. That's why I tried adding the screenshots after the fact. I wish I had time during the jam:
Cool idea of inverting Peggle! For my taste, I liked the levels with obstacles in them rather than the empty ones. They give something to work with :D
Me too! So many things were last minute though. 2 hours before the deadline I had only one empty level and could only place the apple - so... yeah, I just scrambled together the best features I had created and tried to make some quick challenges out of those exact features. I'd have loved to do more with it though. Maybe next year when I have more experience and don't have to research how to do things in the middle of a jam!
EDIT: My main idea with level 3 was to add a break where you could spam pins to have a satisfying feeling and also explore the randomness that goes in peggle - and not just make it a super short physics puzzle game. And level 4 was supposed to be hard, but that was negated with the bug of pins persisting through levels that didn't get fixed last minute.. if I had more time I'd have "followed the fun" more and found more interesting levels with new mechanics for sure
Really fun, polished gameplay. Congratulations on your first jam entry!
Thank you! Very kind to call it "polished" haha. I thought my panic really showed with level 3 and the very unbalanced diamond
I found the premise took me some time to understand, how the money ticks up as the sword gets more airtime, but other than that I found the game pretty fun. I think the idea is cool since it's like peggle but more strategy.
Yeah, that was supposed to be the 'aha' moment in level 2, but without actually displaying the income gain on the apple and giving some audio/visual feedback when you had insufficient funds, it was definitely not intuitive without a lot of experimentation. Thanks for the feedback!
Creative concept, great gameplay loop and the game looks and feels great to play, tho it could've benefitted greately from some basic sound design. The game could've used a tutorial or some simple popups explaining what each peg does. Other than those 2 minor presentation hickups I have no complaints. Great job buddy, you're getting some high ratings from me.
Definitely. I don't know sound design very much but even to me, I thought the levels were way off. If I had the time (or help) I definitely would've prioritized it. This was my first jam and there was a lot of last minute learning involved.
I don't like popups, but I definitely agree that it needed more help with what to do. I would've preferred that you couldn't start the first level without placing a pin or similar. And displaying the income gain on the pins that did that.
Thanks for the feedback and the high praise!