Neat take on pinball. Couldn't make it past 6.
I felt like the theme addition really worked against the game here. The timer on the targets was way too strict. There often wasn't even enough time to get the ball to the next one unless randomly just bouncing around in ridiculous mach speeds. And it felt really unrewarding that missing the target due to bad rng, you punish by taking away progress. All too often I made it to somewhere like 7 and then got hit by a string of bad luck and slowly regressed back to 10 without really actually failing. It's like if Dark Souls every time you died it put you back always one bonfire back instead of the one you rested at previously.
I'd say the timer could at least be doubled. Maybe it could get faster towards the end though. And the punishment negative score could be limited to just one from your max so you wouldn't constantly be fighting this tug of war against rng.
I also feel like the gaps between the bounce pads and the lower paddle were too wide. Classic pinballs of course have that same gap (in the middle too though it's very rare) but they have those safety pushups there for a reason. There were a bunch of times when even the initial spawn was something that would lead to failure with nothing you could do about it. Obviously that wasn't a huge issue as there was nothing but few seconds lost there but still annoying. More curated spawn points might be a better way to go instead of full random.
The game looked and sounded great! Really simple and clean yet stylistic look. Liked how you managed to do a lot by very little and accomplish a cohesive looking style. The music was chill and great, fit the mood very nicely. Sounds were top notch too. Really liked the sounds/confetti on the personal record, felt nice and rewarding! I felt like there was a missing sound effect on ball hitting the paddles. Seemed odd that it was completely silent while bouncing to anywhere else made a sound.
Couldn't play full screen as my mouse cursor was offset there by a lot. I think you're running some weird calculations relying on specific aspect ratio. Also something funky going on in the leaderboards name entry. At first it somehow glitched for me. The cursor was blinking on the input but it didn't accept any letter presses to it. Started working again after a full refresh though.
Anyways, good job! 🎉👍
