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[Rosse]

Barrel Rumble (working title)

Download Barrel Rumble (~600kB, windows only)

Youtube Gameplay Videos: Part 1 & Part 2

Hello everybody. I created a prototype of a certain puzzle game I had in my mind. This is my first game made with Scirra's Construct so I have no idea how it runs on other PCs than mine.

The goal in each level is to collect all the yellow orbs . To achieve this, you utilise canons and shoot balls in whatever direction you want. The ball is influenced by gravity. If the ball drops out of the screen, you lose and must restart the level. You have unlimited tries.
You shoot from canon to canon, but only canons which have matching colors will work. There are color splashes which will switch the color of the ball. Balls bounce back from obstacles.
You use the mouse to aim and left click to shoot. You can press the SPACEBAR anytime to reset the level. There are the debug keys F5 to switch to the next level and the F4 key to switch to the previous level. ESC will quit the game.

Please note this is a prototype. There is no good UI, no level selection, the graphics are placeholders and the levels are test levels. The first few levels are tutorials, then there are some easy and some hard levels.

Feel free to download the game and post critique. Have phun


Thanks,

Rosse

[Cafe]

Simple concept, but nice game. 
It does get hard fairly fast, which is rather positive to me. I'm not to fond of game driving you through 50 levels before getting a little challenged.

So yeah, nice work for a first try, just try to innovate a little more and you could have something really interesting  .

Good luck!

[tesselode]

Interesting game. The barrels feel a lot like the ones from Donkey Kong Country.

Anyway, I can see the potential for this game to get quite difficult. And it's actually pretty fun. Develop it into a bigger game and I bet it'll be worth playing.

[Falmil]

I didn't really see the point of all the collections at first due to levels tracing in straight lines, but later levels require strategy so it works better then. I believe I had some collision issues because it seemed like there were a few levels where I had to alter the firing angle my mere degrees to insure that I would collect all the pick-ups. Also, I swear I went right through a box once when there were no color transformations involved.

Due to the effects of gravity, a short path projection might be handy for many of these shots.

[tesselode]

Due to the effects of gravity, a short path projection might be handy for many of these shots.

I think a path projection would ruin the challenge of the game. Or at least some of it.

[Falmil]

I'm just talking a path the length of 2 boxes. I think its difficult enough with having to collect pick-ups, get to the next box, not know the power of your shots and not being able to mess up without starting over. I guess it could be an easy mode option if it was a big deal.

[Rosse]

Thanks for playing my game. I really appreciate your comments.

About the Donkey Kong Country similarity - totally! I was inspired by the barrel levels from this game and for the final version I hope to achieve a similar feeling. Thanks for noticing it. I take that as a compliment.

The steep learning curve was mainly because of the lack of time I spent designing the levels. The first levels intentionally were built this way (tons of yellow blobs). I wanted to give a quick introduction in the game mechanic without words and hoped the player would develop a "feeling" to gauge the distances. I'm going to optimize these in the next versions.

Additional features will include barrels which can be used more than one single time (have numbers on them), fixed barrels, moving barrels and different obstacles. I want to keep the count of the game elements as low as possible but have difficult levels.

In some levels you really have to set an exact angle to be able to solve the level (eg. the last level). This was mainly a test and I'm not if I'll use that in the future. There are several possibilities to solve that problem. One way would be that the angle could only be set at for example 16 or 32 different values. But in the end I want to leave it to the leveldesigners (there will be a leveleditor).

For the difficulty-setting I have the following in mind. I'm going to install a slider at the bottom which looks like this:

[]---o---------| ?

There is a square at the far left, a slider in the middle and a question mark at the right. When you slide the knob from left to the right, a line which projects the shooting curve will get longer and longer. This will make the game easier. Additionally, you can set the knob to the square, the hardest level. In this one, some barrels disappear and maybe some obstacles appear. This will increase the difficulty. The question mark will give some hints.

Since this is a prototype, nothing is fixed. The collision is probably buggy, because I used the standard functions and routines and I have no idea how they work. For the final version I'm going to use Unity3D. Please note: as soon as you have collected all the yellow orbs, the ball will disappear and the collision with the barrels is switched of.

Another thing is the graphics. I think they aren't very appealing currently. It looks like all of the popular games for mobile phones have quite graphics. I guess in the end more people are willing to play the game if I change the ball to a cute creature which will collect/eat fruits. I like simplistic things though.

Thanks for your discussion

[deadeye]

In some levels you really have to set an exact angle to be able to solve the level (eg. the last level).

I'm glad you're aware of the issue, I was going to suggest that not be a requirement .  The first shot on the last level is basically an exercise in pure trial and error, which doesn't really make for satisfying puzzle solving.  And once you find that one pixel where it's okay to click your mouse to make the shot, it's a chore having to find the exact same pixel if you mess up and have to shoot again.  Just be careful about crafting your puzzles so they're tough, but fair.  It took me forever just shooting at random before I figured out how to arc it over the barrier properly, and I didn't feel clever or skillful when I solved it, just lucky.

Once you get the other types of barrels you mentioned into the game, it should be easier to add some challenge with timing and strategy.  You won't have to rely on pixel-precision in order to make a good puzzle then.

Other than that, you have a pretty sweet concept for a game here :handthumbsupR:.  Looking forward to seeing more done with it.