I finished my game called Zappy Time! Zappy Time is a unique arcade game where you must destroy all the pegs to clear the level. The twist: You must keep the balls from hitting the walls or they will turn into pegs. The other twist: Turns happen at specific intervals. When a turn starts, time will freeze and you will get a chance to change the direction of a ball, create a new ball, or move a bouncer. All the pegs must be cleared by the time all the balls leave the screen and the turn counter hits zero.
Game Design: I designed this game to be super hard and finishing all the levels nearly impossible. I wanted the goal to be to get the highest score, instead of completing all the levels. This way, the player will be motivated to play repeatedly for a higher score. With this system it is also exiting to finally reach a new level. I liked this system since I played some old adobe flash games. I found myself repeatedly playing those games to try to reach a new level so I can explore what strange power-ups and features were on the higher levels. Something else that I thought was fun was how the pegs work. It might seem random at first, but the color of the circle pegs and their core have some useful information. The core color tells you the power-up activated when the peg is destroyed. The color of the peg tells you how many hits it takes to clear the peg. For example, a cyan core with a cyan color means that the peg has no power-up and it will take two hits to remove the peg. This system does not apply to square pegs. Square pegs have no core! I hope it is fun for people to figure that out by themselves, but I am posting how it works here for curious people.
Theme: It feels like space. The theme came around when I created some decorations for some square peg in the game. The decorations looked like wires and the walls where electric like. That is when I created the stars in the background. It was super easy and looked nice with the rest of the art, so it stuck. That leaves the question: Why is there gravity in space? Good Question! Maybe the bouncer at the bottom has a lot of mass.
Final Thoughts: I feel like there is so much that I could implement regarding pegs and how the turns work. The only peg that modifies the turn system is the green square peg power-up, which delays the next turn by two seconds. I also wish I had time to add music and sounds, but I am not much of a composer.
If you have not played the game, I hope you try it. It was a lot of fun to create, and I hope you have fun playing it!