Retronoid Update XVI

Another week, another update!

Doing it today as its Easter, so have some family time planned over the weekend, plus a week off work next week means decorating will be occurring rather than coding.

Been busy playtesting, balancing and bug squishing this week.

Powerup happenings:
Graviton Beam - Changed the way the mechanic works, so rather than just changing the angle of the ball, it works as a push / pull gravity field from the bat - which means that with a little practice you can steer the ball, but it feels more natural in terms of gameplay.

Triple Ball - Tweaked things so that if you collect it while multiple balls are active, it will check to see how many balls there are first, and if its less than 3 it will spawn the remainder.

Laserball - now adds a score modifier to each  block destroyed.

Score Multiplier - tweaked so that it will still rack up when triple ball is active, but reduced the overall score multiplier scaling a bit. Using the new method the scores were racking up a little too high, too quickly.

Non-powerup related happenings:
Level looping now in, so when you get to the last level it loops round to the first and the scoring changes based on number of playthroughs * block base score. Number of hits each block requires go up in the same way though..

Score reset - hit the maximum score and it loops back round to zero.

Drew up the background tiles and replaced the placeholder tiles with the new ones. So we now have randomly selected backgrounds most of which are in glorious technicolour!

Fixed the last (hopefully) collision related bug. It was a rare one that on occasion allowed the bat to push the ball through the edge of the play area (i.e. when the ball bounced rapidly between the bat and the wall edge). Fixed it by checking to see if the ball was in that location, and moving the bat out of the way instead of the ball. Been wracking my brains for ages on that one thinking it was really difficult (and hence putting it off), and in the end it was pretty simple.

Other stuff:
Been doing a bit or research into what the aliens did in Arkanoid - basically the answer was "not a lot". They're not a threat per se, more of an annoyance. They dont affect the bat in any way, merely wander around the screen providing random deflections and generally annoying the player, until they're destroyed a few hits later. So, should be reasonably easy to put in.

Contemplating putting some boss levels in.

I'm also thinking the play area is a little too wide, so may reduce it by 2 bricks width. Not sure yet if I'll reduce the number of blocks overall (removing 2 whole columns) or just resize the blocks and leave the same amount.

And that's it for this week. Probably wont be an update next week due to the aforementioned family time / building work /  decorating. Definitely wont be an update if Kerbal Space Program 1.1 hits Steam.....