Powerups.. outside the box.
Monkey Archive Forums/Monkey Projects/Powerups.. outside the box.
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| Sup all. Short post, just looking for crazy or normal ideas for little powerups for my game, I have an initial set mostly done, but looking to add some more with your help. For those not tracking, its a breakout/arkanoid style game, bat's and balls. or in my case, Hex's and more Hex's. I have all the common ones, multi ball, speed up, slow down, smaller and larger bat size, add a ball, remove a ball which are part of my initial set. I also have non dropping powerups, pads I think I will call them, they will hide under a hex, when its gone the pad is revealed and wont fall, the ball will travel over it and gain some effect. My first pad will be a worm hole, will require two exposed to work, ball will go in one, and come out the other. so hit me with em, think inside, outside, under the box, im open :) |
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| Guidance powerup? you can influence the left/right of the ball when you move the paddle. |
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| *explode'o'ball' a normal ball but after x seconds or activated it explodes shooting lots of little fast balls out in all directions |
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| A "Tornado" that sweeps around the screen causing positive and/or negative effects. |
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| Gone us3 some of those ... thanks guys keep em coming .. |
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| A couple I have seen in other breakout type games- Guns! In addition to or replacing the ball for a short period. Fires straight up and destroys block. Piledriver- runs straight through blocks, destroying them in the process. Only bounces from boundary and bat. Sticky bat- ball stops when it hits your bat, enabling you to reposition and launch at will. Other ideads- Rockslide- blocks start falling from their own accord, maybe in response to a 'pulse' from the bat. If they hit you, they kill you. Big cahones- larger ball, capable of destroying more than one block at a time. Boost-a-ball- allows your bat some vertical motion for a period of time. Her indoors- the old ball and chain. Allows you to swing the ball around as if it were on a rope. Dirigi-ball - ball's gravity moves to centre of screen for a time so it bounces around with less possibility of coming to the bottom of the screen. Wallflower- allows your bat to move along all 4 boundaries of the play area. |
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| little look at some of them working. game has no sound at the moment, or music, so no noise :/ |
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| Lookin good mate, nice and polished at this early stage. :) What did you go with for the collisions/response in the end, as I seem to remember you posting about having some issues with double collisions and angles a while back, but it all seems to be working really well now. This must explain where you've been hiding the last few weeks, looks like time well spent ;) Well done! |
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| I stuck with the method I had, and simply avoid the issue by putting a hard limit on the speed of the ball, I also opted to NOT! have ball -> ball collisions. I had it all working really well, but it was evident as soon as I turned on things like multi-ball it really screws over the player making it near impossible to predict where a ball will go if you collect that powerup. So I took it out, if it's not fun, no point in having it in :) and thanks for the comment mate, still a long way off being done, I still have no level system in place yet, not sure if I want to use xml, Json or something else for saving out levels, and not even thought about having to write an editor which I probably will have to do at some point. And yeah i kinda just sunk into a little huddle and got on with various bits of code, before i knew it like a month had past lol. time really does fly when your having fun :) |
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here is what the three main power-ups look like now that I have done an art pass on them. |
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| Something no breakout game has done but I have tested (does not add much to gameplay but looks interesting) is a sine wave path for the paddle/bat to travel on. With monkey you could do some wild effects with the wave with its peaks as it rise and falls. Also you can have a sort of Half pipe like use in skate boarding. Either way just keep the Y axis for the curved ground in an array that the paddle/bat follows as the player moves left and right. One thing I didn't implement was having the paddle turn/tilt based on the angle of the floor. Power ups can make the waves more stable or erratic. Rise to fill the board or recede. Also, pressing a button keeps the paddle horizontal regardless of the terrain angle. Finally, stationary terrains could be constructed that the paddle follows like a 45 degree angle, the half pipe, steps, reverse half pipe (hill), pyramid etc... |
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| reverse gravity powerup: gives ball gravity, but in reverse for some seconds, basically giving the player some restful free shots. The catch is that after the effect wears off, normal gravity is applied until hitting the paddle, whereby zero-g resumes. |
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| Right now I am working on the three main fundamental powers in the game, Fire, Ice and Acid. I have Ice fully functional, Fire is also fully function as is normal, but I am struggling with Acid, I need to come up with something that's not like the functionality of the other two, at the moment the basic idea for it is to much like ice. suggestions are welcome as always. Once I have the three main primary powers done I will focus on adding a ton of interesting and cool powerups like your gravity idea. |
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| Acid's easy- ball globs acid on the tile and ricochets from it as normal, but the tile is not immediately destroyed. It dissolves after a period of time. Acid also drips from the hit tile, and can kill you or spread to other tiles. |
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| I'v done the acid.. the ball with Acid deals no damage, what it does tho is infect the tile it hits, this infection then deals the damage, if the ball is at level two then when the tile dies, the infection spreads out in all directions 1 tile, ball level 3 spreads the infection further. here is a new video showing some of this in action. would love some more feedback and more powerup ideas, I am taking notes. PS music aint mine, its youtubes. |
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| My son had an idea when I showed him my recreation. The Anti-Ball ! It put bricks BACK on the board.. for a limited time or until it hits another brick. It only restores bricks that were previously destroyed. |
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| I remember playing DX-ball for ages. Loved that game. I would suggest to play it a couple of times for inspiration! |
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| Yeah there have been so many really good arkanoid style games, DX-Ball was one of the inspirations for one of my really early breakout clones called Busta Blox. This game is actually the spiritual successor to my older game, I was planning to just straight up port it but I had a flood of ideas and just thought why the hell not just keep the same core power's fire and ice, and then make the rest new, and here we are. I think the next big thing will be to get a level editor done, not sure if I will write that in monkey or max. James Gambel got me thinking about level data and I think I have a way of compressing complex level data down to a 255 character long string which if I can pull it off will allow people to easily make their own levels and share them with simple copy/paste/import mechanics. but we will need to wait see how it pans out lol.. |
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