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?

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.

Thanks! Did you manage to figure it out in time then? I.e. apples give 10 gold / sec, slime gives 1 gold / sec?

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.

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.

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?

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.

Yeah, agreed. That's why I tried adding the screenshots after the fact. I wish I had time during the jam: 

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

Thank you! Very kind to call it "polished" haha. I thought my panic really showed with level 3 and the very unbalanced diamond

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!

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!