Brick Breaker Clone Lessons Learned so far

The mechanics and systems that do seem to be the most fun are the ones that allow for the following;

making bricks harder to break, randomly generated levels, and random given events and tools.

Unlike the Brick Breaker game I got inspired by for random abilities; arrow shooting and other such abilities are tied to breaking bricks in order to gain the ability to break more bricks, also some level elements do make it harder/ more difficult to balance if I don't add other abilities.

Speeding up gameplay tied to breaking bricks; the more bricks I break the faster the gameplay goes for the given events and leading up for said actions and interactions.

Ice

Introducing ice bricks that let out snow when damaged for the 3rd health state forcing the player to 1. dodge, 2. melee hit the frost or 3 tank it. Each tactic has a pro and con.

Dodging; pro, avoiding the hit, con might miss the ball

Melee; pro, destroy the ice flake and con; loss stamina

Tank it; pro, influence ball direction still and not waste movement or resources, con; can't move and lose movement speed up.

Ice also changed to influence/ affect other ice bricks with the snowflake with raining snowflakes causing other bricks to become ice.

Stamina system

With having it where the ball hitting the paddle gives you stamina and overall hitting more bricks; gives back more stamina, as thus letting you hit more balls.

This is a snowball reward system.

Game pacing

The pace of the game is quite different from a normal brick breaker game because I am speeding up the ball after every brick being destroyed and forcing the game to move faster which in turn, makes sure the game speed is speeding up until the end where the next level where the game speed dies back down.

This idea will be applied to boss fights as well; speeding up the game every time the boss is hit.

Other environmental items do slow down and or speed up the pace of the game.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Psychological manipulation #2 Big numbers

 This is a fine balancing act for players but the goal of the matter is to keep going for the big numbers and keep the big numbers with them getting bigger, and bigger then you get the picture. With this not only having one set of numbers get bigger but having the other numbers get bigger as well. You need some form of system to keep the players wanting the numbers to get bigger. For idle clicker games you use the reset system to get the player coming back; with the MMORPG system you scale down those numbers in updates so you can keep numbers getting bigger or use the shared power system for the players to use. Personally I like using an XP reset system; once the XP hits max for the level, the XP subtracts from the XP cost bringing it down to 0 and as thus allowing that big number of XP to still feel big. Then you might be asking about the player leveling up which there is always the COD reset level system where once the level hits a big enough number you have it where the progress...
Read more

Power Creep

 Power creep can be both a good and a bad thing. With power creep you have it where players are being fed more powerful items or cards where they ditch old equipment for the new toys and make it so players will actually use it. On that same note you're trading the learning the items/ understanding how to make oneself more powerful through strats by relying on your given powerful new toys and making players throw them away again once more toys do show up. It's a useful investment strat for card games but does get boring for games where the only thing you have to look forward to is bigger more powerful numbers instead of different strats/ tactics you've never seen or used before with the bigger numbers feeling meaningless. Person experience; with Yu-Gi-Oh playing the rogue format was more fun even if I lost because I wasn't losing to the FTK format and actually scaled down in power with having fun seeing different strats/ tactics, that the limitations that were self impos...
Read more

Deck Size matters

 Small decks These kind of games make it where the game is being given a more consistent/ predictable strategy. The outcome being much more predictable but having it where players are dealing with mill and burn strats far too often making them busted. Large decks These kind of games make mill/ burn strats basically useless but have less reliance on consistent drawing what you want; however in a game where search abilities exist with the more search power the more options that open up and remove the down side of having a larger deck becomes.
Read more