Atomic Pinball by Toeofdoom

[raw]
made by Toeofdoom for LD20 (COMPO)
Proud member of the submitted for the sake of submitting club.
Incoherent mess factor is high.
Danger to slow computers. Controls are Z and X or N and M.
It's dangerous for to go alone! Bond it with to make it stable! Bonded atoms don't explode as easily! (Note: Explosions not implemented)

Play pinball! (Mash buttons!)

This game changed halfway through. The music was made for a platformer and might have been good for that.

The source package is uploading as of now. If it isn't up by the time uploads close, comment, because that's a mistake :)

Ratings

Coolness 2% 177
Overall 2.96 139
Audio 3.26 53
Community 2.47 165
Fun 2.41 193
Graphics 3.93 22
Humor 2.44 142
Innovation 3.30 80
Theme 2.22 222

Feedback

lingmops
02. May 2011 路 18:50 UTC
10 points for involving SCIENCE! Bit confusing mind.
Dmurph
02. May 2011 路 19:38 UTC
I get the concept but there was too many things going on at once. It also slowed down my computer and it started freezing. Good graphics and sound tho!
code_glitch
02. May 2011 路 20:15 UTC
No unity for linux :( shame i cant play the game...
馃帳 Toeofdoom
02. May 2011 路 21:09 UTC
It did end up pretty confusing, yeah. I would've liked to get more time to actually make the pinball machine, but the reaction system took a long time and I only switched to a pinball machine once I realised the platformer movement wasn't so great and I didn't think I had time for a decent set of platformer levels.

For the performance, I found that it acted *much* better at a higher physics update rate - obviously that comes at a cost though. Pinball seems to be more sensitive to accuracy of physics than many games.

If I had a solution for the linux issue, I would use it :( - but even using something harder like ogre + a physics library and sound lib means I would have to leave mac users hanging unless I found a way to cross compile.
mpc174
03. May 2011 路 05:12 UTC
Innovative, but I couldn't figure out what was going on. Not exactly theme related. Nice graphics and music. Using molecular bonds is a funny concept, but I'm not a science guy. Good job turning something out after the initial concept failed.
Winterblood
03. May 2011 路 21:53 UTC
I like the idea of pinball chemistry...but I'm rubbish at pinball and haven't studied chemistry since school, so I was a bit lost. Nice graphics though! :)
Dark Acre Jack
03. May 2011 路 23:45 UTC
Pretty lights and music.

Yep, with tuning and polishing this could be quite interesting!
馃帳 Toeofdoom
04. May 2011 路 05:47 UTC
Haha, I haven't studied chemistry since school either so you can imagine there were a lot of wikipedia lookups. Anyway, both the versions of the game I tried could sorta work, but have some issues to think through first. Such as how to have lots of atoms bouncing around but also separate "signal" from "noise".

If anyone's actually interested in seeing the platformer (and has the unity editor) you can grab the source package - it has the platformer level I was working on in there (go to open scene and choose testscene.unity)
hamster_mk_4
04. May 2011 路 06:24 UTC
As a concept Chemistry games sound fun, but this one went way over my head. I would have enjoyed it more if there were some sort of visual indicator that a compound was stable and could safely pass through the bottom.
Kynrael
04. May 2011 路 15:43 UTC
Theme not obvious, but I had some good fun seing the atoms link together. Racked up a 190k score, I don't know if that's any good ?
Milo
05. May 2011 路 00:32 UTC
Nifty, but my limited knowledge of chemistry and limited skill at pinball SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN MERGED. Really quite pretty, regardless of the fact that I don't know what I'm seeing.
mjb67
05. May 2011 路 19:50 UTC
Genius!
jonbro
06. May 2011 路 10:00 UTC
what the confused!!! it is like the craziest multiball ever, where you have to bind specific balls. I wonder if pinball skill would help.

I think that when the platformer plan failed, just make a sweet pinball game and forget the whole science thing. You might be trying to load too much stuff on top of a mechanic.
馃帳 Toeofdoom
07. May 2011 路 07:51 UTC
I don't mind polishing up fairly normal games, but for this ludum dare I felt like trying something a bit unusual. Turns out I couldn't make it work that well within the time limit (although I did make some pretty good progress on the "bonding system", all things considered) - but it's something I can come back to when I figure out how to make it accessible and awesome. :)

To be honest the idea was that you would mainly try to hit heavier, solid atoms around and working with the others would be more about flow control, so a stream of flourine would hit a stream of... maybe lithium? Dunno if much will make flourine stable, realistically :P

A similar thing could work for the platformer idea, but I also want to figure out a way to play as a light atom like hydrogen there. Perhaps those levels could take place in vaccuum chambers, for the most part, where there's no (or less) air to smash you around.

190k is a fair bit higher than I've bothered to get, by the way.
Endurion
14. May 2011 路 08:14 UTC
The idea is a really good one. It looks good and sounds good. However the gameplay is boring. You can keep mashing Z/X (why Z? think of other keyboard layouts!) and amassing points (and clogging up the table with atoms).
A good challenge would be to put built molecules into a target somewhere.
mwest
21. May 2011 路 21:28 UTC
Cool graphics and music and it was interesting to see a pinball game :P...

Just not much fun, but well done on trying something unusual in the first place!