I don't normally do "Postmortem" type blog posts, but figured I might as well start.
Not sure whether this will become a regular thing, or not, but I thought it'd be nice to keep track of what happens after I post each game.
In future I might leave it until a good few days have passed, but the world of AGameAWeek tends to flow fairly rapidly. We'll have to judge it as it happens.

Anyway, welcome to the newest section of AGameAWeek, where I take a look at the stats and things, to help figure out if the game I just made was either a Smash Hit, a Complete Flop, or something somewhere inbetween..

-=-=-

The Game

Retroball is an interesting little concept. The game looks pretty much identical to an oldskool Pong game, but rather than controlling the paddles, you instead control the ball.
You have to rapidly bounce the ball between the two paddles, to keep the combo score increasing.
There are a few powerups and collectables that sprout up along the way, and a pile of Breakout style bricks line the edge to stop you suddenly flying outside of the playfield.

Previously...

I previously created this concept a good number of years ago, but it was incredibly bland.
This newer edition adds the powerups, the combo scoring, and that lovely background, with all it's lovely effects.
You can play the older edition "Not Pong" here.
It's not up to much, the controls aren't quite as refined, and you tend to keep losing the ball a lot.

Upgrades

For this remake, I decided a nice brick-based boundary would probably work well, keeping the ball inside the screen unless you get too chaotic and smash up the walls. Adding on the Combo scoring seemed like the ideal solution to a scoring method, and a SpikeDislike-style Combo Timer is added on to keep things moving nice and fast.

The background is the thing that seems to be getting the most interest, but it's really one of the simplest concepts I could come up with! A grid of 32x32 tiles is fit onto the screen, and simple Filled Rectangles are used to draw it.
An array then holds the colour and alpha of each block, and then I simply light up the tiles as different things happen. Either the colour of the tile is defined by the current "Event", or it takes it's colour from the default grid, which is as simple as "Ink((x+y) Mod 8)"!

Popularity

After a day, the popularity of this game seems fairly obvious.
This game has pretty much crashed and burned...

Lesson Learned : I guess you can't sell (or even give away) a game based on the fact that it looks a bit like Pong, even if it doesn't actually play anything like it.
People will happily say that they like Retro Gaming, but .. nope.. Anything but a Pong clone!!