Making The Experience a Competition

So far, our games have been lacking a major feature: interaction with other players. This kind of thing is extremely important, especially the kind of player to player interaction that creates competition. An experience where you are isolated can be nice, but even a crappy game can do well if it correctly utilizes a competitive player base! Thus, Pongfinity shall have high scores.

Kongregate provides a nice little API that can be used to update statistics that they track for you. It is relatively easy to implement, although somewhat restricted in what you can do with it. However, all we need is some simple high score tracking, and this does the trick quite nicely. A little Javascript, and suddenly our game becomes much more enjoyable, because you get the opportunity to compete with other people.

In the finished game, the goal is to have high scores for each difficulty level, and then an overall high score. We may also keep track of "low scores", or the worst scores that occur as a sort of fun-factor. We'll also be implementing achievements into the game that correlate with completion of milestone scores and defeating difficult challenges.

A Sprint Day

I wanted to see what I could accomplish in a short period of time with Unity3D. So I did.
First, let me say that Unity is not my favorite way to program. However, it is absolutely fantastic for creating games. We've had a real love/hate relationship, but we're working things out. The more I practice with it, and the more I get used to its way of doing things, the more I like it. I'm especially ecstatic about the speed with which I can get things working, and how fast I can see results.
So today, I decided to make a pong clone. I've tried this before with Unity, but I went about it in such a way that made it very difficult. Now, especially with all the practice I got from the GGJ, I had a better idea of how to do it. The major problem I had before was with controlling the pong ball itself. I ended up settling on a kinematic rigidbody, and manipulating the ball movement using only vectors. For those of you interested, the formula for a reflection is: r = i - (2 * n * Dot(i, n)), where i is the incident vector, and n is the normal of the vector being reflected off of.
Without further ado, play the result here: http://www.kongregate.com/games/Bloodyaugust/pongfinity
Note: that this was posted on 2/16/12, so things may have changed by the time you read this. Heck, the link may not even work.
Happy gaming all! :D