Fun take on a classic game! The physics are very smooth and I liked the background music. The ability to play in web is also a big +1 from me. Well done!

I enjoyed the game and any online game in 48 hours is commendable. Really nice work!

Smooth and clean

Started out kind of slow, but then after a while it became very fun! I was feeling like a god when I had 5 or 6 balls that where going super fast!

Very addictive gameplay. :thumbsup:
I know the goal is to juggle a lot of balls but is it possible to get the highest score just by keeping one ball alive with super-saiyan concentration?

@mza Yes it is! But it would be very time consuming because the points you get for each bounce are proportionate to the square of your current chain, and only bouncing one ball would lead to your chain falling each time a new ball is served. The number of balls in play is also factored in. Like in many games, you can take the safe option to survive a long time, but to excel you need to take risks!

Woah I expected little but found such an addicting game! The music is fitting and the sound effects great and clear. The graphics are nice and crispy, just as I like them. The gameplay has such a nice feedback loop, and I really like hot every ball has the same bounce frequency, creating a rhythm in the bouncing that changes with each ball added or lost, and puts you in a trance-like state.

My biggest problem would be the background, which I found very bright and after a while it hurt my eyes a little. I suggest an option for a less bright planet in the background, or even a very dark background for "pro tournament" mode! Nonetheless, all the above plus having to read some text scrolling in the background really make the game that more frantic!

Loved the game! it's a really good concept, simple and very fun. Feels so good to bounce the balls. Maybe you could make the a bit bigger (or vary their size depending on points), and make the background something like an intergalacting sports area. Idk, just some ideas. Nice job! :D

This is awesome, and a really novel take on the theme. I really appreciated the attention to detail -- the fact that each ball makes a slightly different noise, and that the super ball makes a satisfying "ting" is a great touch.

Once or twice it seemed like I was being told to click to activate the large paddle while it was already embiggened; I'm not sure if that's a bug or not, but thought I'd mention it.

Nice! That was fun, very satisfying when you get lots of balls going successfully at once. My only feedback is the sound effect when you miss a ball is much too loud compared to the rest of the stuff. But overall good fun!

Nice and fun! I like how you added leaderboards! cool stuff.

I've really enjoyed playing this game. Maybe it would be good to add one or two visual hints when a new ball will arrive or when the paddle will shrink.

Nice entry! It was really satisfying to build up a large number of balls at once and get combos.

All the graphics were nice individually, but it got a bit overloaded visually pretty fast. The contrast of the balls against the background was a little tricky, since they're lighter than the darker bits of the background and darker than the lightest parts. Combined with the fact that there was text scrolling across the screen made it difficult for my eyes to follow. In the future I'd recommend using a more muted background (again, the one you have looks great! It's just hard to track the ball against it).

The music was nice, and the different SFX for the different ball types were a nice touch. It would have been cool to see more ball types, powerups, etc.

Good work for 48 hours!

I really enjoyed playing this. There were a few things I didn't like. Most of the time I lost a ball was when my mouse went outside the browser window. Not a big deal, but if you were able to capture the input somehow that would be ideal. Second, it's impossible to read the text while juggling more than a couple balls. Having something with immediate visual impact would make it more obvious what's happening and still allow you to keep your eyes on the balls. Overall, I could see myself losing a lot of time entranced by this game. Nice work!

Really felt like juggling. The leaderboards are a super nice touch, and I imagine were a lot more difficult to get to work than the game itself =P.

The scoring system makes us want to play more and more :)

A very fun and simple game. Great job!

Had fun playing this, nice take on the classic theme! (bit different thoug, very much felt juggling the balls). Cool visuals, nice audio, good sound effects. Sometimes the mouse went out of the window and the target went unresponsive - maybe fullscreen would help there? And the scoring board had very good comments - but not readable while keeping all the balls in the air - a voiceover commenter would be great.. :grin: (but a bit big for a compo, I know). All in all: Good and fun entry! :thumbsup:

Appreciate the work you put in to polish the simple concept here, fun and addictive game. I love the eSports theming as well, cool stuff.

It's challenging! I love the little quips and humor sprinkled about. And online leaderboards are always a nice touch.

Great job with the game. The difficulty was well balanced, and gameplay was solid. Overall I really enjoyed this. The global leader board is a nice feature to include in a jam entry.

The online leaderboard is nice. Only issue I had was I kept moving my mouse off the browser and it stop my paddle from moving, not really sure if anything can be done about that though.

Very nice game, I love hard games like this they get me in them, love the leader board as well. I'm also glad you help me a little with my game haven't tried your code yet but will get too it, thanks!

Fun game. Very polished. Only suggestion would be something to indicate when your paddle is going to go back to small after activating the big paddle as I often lost balls because of that transition. Otherwise really enjoyable. Thanks for the game.

Great arcane style game with nice sound and animation effects. The game becomes challenging to me if more than 3 balls appears on the screen. This is a 48-hour mini game but all the details are focused on enhancing the feeling. Great work!

Man, this was stressful.
I'm not good at games such as this.
But it was fun.

A few pointers tho: the info messages on the screen are distracting. You are not really able to read whatever's there that much because you really have to focus. So, just something that'd appear somewhere and stay there for a bit would be much more readable than a thing that moves around. Another thing is that it wasn't really obvious when you get the long paddle (I only accidentally saw it as a hint on the screenshot).

Also, the score... it's just too big. Once you go millions, your brain can't say if it's 10 millions, or 100 millions or a billion. Drop it down by a factor of 1000 at least. :smile:

Anyhow, keep up the good work.

Wow! First I thought it was boring, but you managed to keep me on my toes.
Getting the click for the long paddle every now and then helps a lot!

If the hall of fame is global, I'm 7th ;)

Really well done, solid, polished, feels just right.

Nice game. I like how the difficulty rises with the number of balls, and how you can keep going on by dropping some of the balls. I couldn't figure out what the star balls were about. Text was a bit disruptive and made it hard to keep track of the different balls in the air. Maybe that was on purpose – but it was a bit frustrating. I played the game in a browser, and the paddle wouldn't move if the mouse wasn't in the game area. I was annoyed by it.

So simple, but so fun! Music was on point. At some point it was becoming instinct where I should put my bounce platform.

I thought the scrolling marquee text was pretty funny.

I played it on browser and my paddle *was* able to move if I wasn't in the game area.

I felt very engrossed in the game, the background text got a bit distracting sometimes. I also lost track on the blue ball but other than those two things it was really fun, good job.

I won't be original here : didn't expect much when the game start... but it got me playing for a moment. It's kindda hypnotic. Classic but efficient.
Well done !

really fun take on a game im super fond of. Background text was a little distracting, but the game is super tight and fun to play. Good job!

Juggling: The game.

Enjoyed it at lot!

Third place! I'll take it!

Surprisingly fun. I wonder if my IRL juggling skills helped me here. I would make it a little quicker to lose: it's pretty easy to chill with a single ball and let all the others die until your paddle shrinks to nothing. Not that you'd get many points that way... but maybe your paddle should shrink even faster when you're running that strategy, just to put the person out of their misery.

Simple doesn't have to be bad! I liked this entry. It was somewhat addictive, and had a nice tempo & ramp-up. I think it worked best when I focused on just one or two balls to 'keep alive'. (Also the different audio effects on the different balls was a nice touch.)

Other than that, I don't have much more to say, but I did notice that while I didn't make it into the top 10, I could still fill in & submit the name-field.

Edit: One more thing: It _could_ just be me, but very occasionally, the balls seemed to get briefly stuck in the text on the screen.

The game had a nice feel - the controls were very smooth, the bouncing felt satisfying. With the online leaderboard I can see someone playing it for a long time :)

edit: also wanted to comment on the sounds the balls made - to me that added a lot; at times it sounded like intentionally composed drum solo

Very addicting! Juggling gets pretty hard when you get 4+ balls, but I kept the chain alive for a good bit! Didn't notice the powerups for a while even though the text was huge onscreen. Maybe having some indicator for when a powerup is about to expire would help the player not ruin their chains, but I should probably just get good.

Decent game, I liked it, although at one point it felt like I couldn't really die unless I got bored, but I liked the game overall!

Thank you so much to the almost 70 of you who played and rated my game! I'm humbled by all the positive feedback that you guys gave, and I'm so glad that so many of you enjoyed playing it! I am very pleased that my best category was fun, which was my goal. I was a bit disappointed with my overall score. I think that many of you had fun playing the game, but found other issues that held it back, which is understandable. I also found that the web features were appreciated, but didn't really seem to translate to any judging categories, unless that contributed to the fun score for some of you. Anyway, I'll try my best to address the more critical feedback that you guys gave me. I'm thinking about expanding this game and addressing many of the concerns, so these were my takeaways:

@sinci1, @caeonosphere Yes, it can be very easy to stay alive for a long time if you only bounce one ball. To be honest, I kind of like this since it makes it possible to play for a long time if you want, but it can also make it boring if you're determined to stay alive. Maybe incorporating a lives system that kills you if you drop too many balls overall could help.

@cdunham, @obscenelytrue Adding an indicator for when the powerup is going to run out is definitely a good idea, and something that should've made it into the 48 hour version!

@remco Yes, you can submit your score even if you didn't make the top ten, and while there's no way to see these scores in game, I can see them in my database. For an expanded version, I would definitely want to make scores searchable by name. As for the balls getting stuck in the text, I think that's just a problem visually. The next section expands more on problems with the ticker text.

@darthnumbers, @prism, @emmanuel-gaillot, @zondarg, @jharler I agree that the ticker text can be distracting. The main reason why I put it in was to add to the frantic sensation of playing, not for you to actually read it, haha. I think the main problem is that it's too frequent. I may add an option to reduce it or remove it altogether.

@kuiefs, @selftitled, @emmanuel-gaillot, @zondarg, @jharler So there were a few people who complained that the game wouldn't respond when the cursor was outside the game window, and one or two who said it does. This may be a browser difference. GameMaker offers no way to track the mouse outside the game window in the browser, and I actually put a lot of time into minimizing the issues associated with this, though it's still clearly a problem. The best way that I can think of to fix it is to have the cursor bind itself to the paddle.

@jeremy-ryan You're right about the background, it's way too bright, especially the green planet. I wanted to make the game feel frantic with all the stuff happening graphically, but I may have gone overboard, haha. I actually meant to mute the background a bit, but I had other stuff going on over that weekend, and I totally forgot to do it before I submitted. Oh well.

@kaisean-games I don't entirely agree with your point about the scores scaling too big. In my opinion, the huge numbers make it more satisfying and crazy, and this approach is used in a lot of space shooter games like Ikaruga. There is one change that I hope to make in response to this feedback, though, which is to add leading zeroes to the score, which would make it possible to tell where you're at in terms of score by looking at how many zeroes are left.

@obscenelytrue Unfortunately, adding an indicator for when a new ball will be served would be really hard since I set it up to serve a ball as soon as enough time has passed and there's an opening to serve one where it would be possible to bounce. Ultimately, these windows are very narrow, so adding any sort of warning would lead to missing the window, and no new balls being served, or balls being served outside the window, which would be impossible to bounce.

Okay, that's all the criticism I found, and I'm running out of characters, so thank you to everyone who played! Good luck on future game dev!