Brickety

Hi Guys,

I am building a game similar to brick breaker as my first attempt at a mobile game, please give it a try and let me know what I can do to improve.

There are features that are in the game that will not be present here since it is WebGL. Every time the screen changes an add will pop up. You can receive more lives by watching an add in the main menu.

Lives will accumulate every 30min, online or off. I do not think the offline function will work while it is in WebGL since it does not save to your PC.

Have fun and let me know what you think.

http://probablycomputers.co.za/Brickety/index.html

Comments

  • Just checked it out. Looks interesting and a solid base to build from! :)

    While you're still playtesting and iterating on the design, I think it would be better if you disabled the monetization features for now. Just always starts a game with 3 lives. You wanna first figure out if ppl like the game without any barriers to entry (like watching ads), and then once you've iterated to the point here the game is fun and people keep playing, then you can look at the best way to add monetization back.

    At the moment you have a pretty basic Arkanoid-like game here. It's got al the basics and does a decent job, well done! What it doesn't really have is a reason I would want to play this instead of one of the many other Arkanoid-likes out there. What will Brickety have that you can't find in another game (probably without ads)? Why would I keep wanting to play? Those are the sorts of questions I would be trying to answer.
    Thanked by 2critic pieter
  • I played for a few minutes, some thoughts are below.

    [-]Play area feels small, you could make the blocks smaller and free up some space.
    [-]Reducing the ball speed would have a similar effect to enlarging the play area.
    [-]You need to add bonus blocks, it's standard in every brick-breaker, usual power-ups are shooting, extend paddle, double/triple ball, increase speed.
    [-]Your paddle goes out of bounds, it's customary to stop it at the edge of the screen.
    [-]Losing a life resets the level, rather leave the state of the level the same.
    [-]I wouldn't dare put a life cool-down or full screen ads on this, IMO that would be an instant uninstall.
    [-]Only got to the second level, but level design is important in a brick-breaker, it's like art. You should change from a solid block of bricks to something a bit more interesting.
    [-]Little ping sound and music seems appropriate and 'lively'.
    [-]It's seems to have promise, but there must be hundreds of brick-breakers out there, you will need to up the game if you want to make money on this. Maybe simplicity sells, not sure.
    Thanked by 1pieter
  • Thanx for the feedback so far.

    @francoisvn You will start with three lives. Since it does not save player prefs on the WebGL I think it glitches out. It checks if you have played before and if not it instantiates the player pref and gives you three lives. You also accumulate lives over a period of thirty minutes.

    @critic This was sort of my trial run on how a game is made from the start to finish. I was going for a very simplistic yet fun to play game. I have an issue where the ball tends to go into an exact straight bounce. thus with the player cube the shape it is and being able to move through the wall you can manipulate that.

    I would like to keep it faces paced, the brick shapes change every 5 levels. It starts to go interesting after a while. I will reflect on your ideas and decide what I want to implement. I do not want to redesign the look etc since it was sort of my trial run at game design.
    Thanked by 1critic
  • Onisuke said:
    I was going for a very simplistic yet fun to play game. I have an issue where the ball tends to go into an exact straight bounce. thus with the player cube the shape it is and being able to move through the wall you can manipulate that.
    I think you are supposed to take horizontal velocity of the paddle into account when you calculate the return angle of the ball, it's has an effect of the player being able to 'cut' the angle of the bounce.

  • Onisuke said:
    @francoisvn You will start with three lives. Since it does not save player prefs on the WebGL I think it glitches out. It checks if you have played before and if not it instantiates the player pref and gives you three lives. You also accumulate lives over a period of thirty minutes.
    Onisuke said:
    I do not want to redesign the look etc since it was sort of my trial run at game design.
    I understood how your live system was meant to work (although it bugged and started me with zero lives the first time I played) but I was suggesting that for the moment you completely remove the monetization side of thing: every time you press play you just get 3 lives and can try get further and further until you die. If that simple gameplay loop of playing through levels is fun, then perhaps you can get people to stick around and watch some ads or generate income for you in other ways.

    That said, if this is just a test, that's cool, feel free to move on and try something else :) Although, I'm not sure what you are trying to test...
    Thanked by 2critic pieter
  • Well done on starting your first game...
    Onisuke said:

    @francoisvn You will start with three lives. Since it does not save player prefs on the WebGL I think it glitches out. It checks if you have played before and if not it instantiates the player pref and gives you three lives. You also accumulate lives over a period of thirty minutes.
    This is not a limitation of WebGL, but a bug in your code. I am have no problems saving player prefs and serializing custom objects in WebGL. Google search came up with these two links. Seems to cover the process of this..
    answers.unity3d.com/questions/1095407/saving-webgl.html
    amalgamatelabs.com/blog/2016/Data_Persistence/

    Agree on the power-ups and variation while playing the game being key in keeping attention of players. Also add some particle effects, some camera shake effects to liven it up a bit.

    You also seem to have a sprite transparency issue.. Several blurry edges and white outlines..

    Your UI needs some polish too.. not very lively and a little inconsistent.. Brown coloring is not helping..
    Brick spacing not consistent. Buttons should at least have some clicked interaction effects..

    Its a solid start, but its got a long long way before you are ready to release it publicly :)
    Keep it up and keep going... Will definitely be interested to see the final result..
    Thanked by 1mattbenic
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