Mind you, I have not given up on it, but I’m shelving that feature for now and focusing on polishing and releasing the app. That way, I can work on a second project, which would target Multiplayer gaming right from the start. Once I get the hang of it, I can update Hoop Flick.
But it’s not all sad news for this week. In fact, Hoop Flick has improved considerably in the past few days, and I’d like to talk about the changes I made and why I decided to go that direction.
The 12K Incident
The highest ever recorded score in Hoop Flick was more than 14,000 points, but that was with a double score bonus, which I had removed then.
I also introduced an intelligent defender soon after, and since then, testers barely broke the 4,000-point mark.
Then came this past week, when one of the testers rewrote the Hoop Flick record books by scoring 12,034 points!
It was both an amazing (I even wrote about her in my last post) and a very good learning experience. It exposed two flaws in the game:
- The combination of the Hidden Skills of Icy Veins and Acrobatic Shots (an unusual combo) was unstoppable. The later guaranteed that all Money Balls would be unblockable, while the former guaranteed that all balls will become Money Balls during the last 17 seconds of the game. With these, the player almost always survived.
- The game can drag too long when you have lots of upgrades, like the combination mentioned above. When she scored the 12k, she narrated how she drained her battery from 100% to 43%.
The Blitz System
To avoid the second dilemma, I adopted what I called the Blitz system, named after games that the “Blitz” suffix, like Popcap’s Bejeweled Blitz. In essence, blitz games lets you experience a game, for example Bejeweled, in a short, fast-paced format.
By converting Hoop Flick to a blitz-like game, my goal was to shorten the game by skipping unnecessary sequences.
For example, imagine a player who has been playing Hoop Flick. He accumulated enough points to upgrade several attributes and raise his character level to 10. Using this combination of attributes, and his skill, he can now score at least 1500 points easily, so every time he plays, he always scores above that.
The problem here is, he still has to go through scoring 1500 points every time he plays, and even though it’s almost effortless for him because of his skill and his upgrades, it can sometimes be dragging. Wouldn’t it be nice to just skip the game and start at 1500 points?
The Blitz System tries to accomplish this by setting a Time Cap. Once the player raises his Shot Clock above this cap (120 seconds), the game converts excess seconds into 5 points each.
By the way, these numbers aren’t random. I determined that 2 minutes of gametime is somewhat enough (not too long, not too short), so it’d be nice to “start” the game with that time in the end-game.
The other number was calculated mathematically. In 20 seconds of time, with full “Quick Release” upgrades, I would have shot the ball 20 times. On average, most of the testers shoot Perfect Shots at a 40% rate, so 20 shots would give around 100-ish points. Thus, instead of shooting 20 times, the game just awards you with 100 points outright. It’s slightly lower than what you would have scored, sure, but this way’s effortless. Besides, there’s no guarantee you’ll shoot all 20 shots, with 8 of them perfect, anyway.
This significantly reduces the game time, and speeds up the game, making it more exciting.
In fact, and I say this publicly exclusively in this blog, once you upgrade Deliberate Offense and Hot Starter to maximum values, as soon as you make your first shot (which is a Loop Ball because of Hot Starter), your score would jump to 2,800-plus points! That’s more than some testers have ever scored!
Balancing Issues
I mentioned a combination of upgrades that would be unstoppable in the end-game. To counteract this, I tried to balance one upgrade, Acrobatic Shots, by reducing its effect but increasing its scope.
In particular, instead of Money Balls being always unblockable, now there is twice the normal chance (30%*2 = 60%, instead of 100%) for it to be unblockable. To compensate for this reduction, the effect now also applies to Loop balls.
Accessories
If you thought the Custom Avatars feature I introduced before was useless, wait til you see this latest feature: accessories.
Accessories are designed to be status symbols as opposed to cosmetic upgrades. I believe some people would find that they sometimes hinder game play (or provide a challenge?)
The point of accessories is to show people how good you are. Four of the six accessories can only be unlocked via achievements. One is exclusive to Beta Testers. And to unlock the final one, you’d have to pay 20,000 points, which is the same amount of points needed to fully upgrade an attribute.
Here’s a screenshot of the accessories page, and how to unlock them:
- Personal Cloud – Pay 20,000 points
- Halo – Shoot 10,000 Perfect Shots overall
- Cape – Score (not buy or gain) 100,000 points overall
- Personal Aura – Make 10 Perfect Shots in a row during a game
- Jetpack – Score 3,360 in one game to reveal “Big Boss”
- Crown – Be a beta tester
Note: “The Sniper” Avatar on the right is wearing the “Jetpack” and the exclusive “Crown” accessory.
Optimization
I wouldn’t say the game now runs smoothly, but I did a lot of optimization steps in the last version. This includes:
- Removing unnecessary Instantiations (for instance, I was mistakenly creating a Text Mesh with no text)
- Removing unnecessary animated backgrounds (I was creating “clouds” even in the Arena background)
- Removed the collider from the ball when it isn’t flicked yet. I’m not sure if this affects performance, but having the collider there does make the game jumpy, especially when your flick crosses through the rear defender .
- Adjusted background music loading options to have them played from memory instead of streamed from the disk
Oh, and speaking of sounds, I adjusted most of the sound effects, making most of them to be much more audible. You now hear the swishing of the net emphatically when making a Perfect Shot, and it actually gets you on a groove.
Final Notes
As I mentioned, postponing the Multiplayer feature, so that menu option has been removed… for now.
Lastly, I’ve dedicated a page in my personal website for Hoop Flick, which shows it’s latest status, and includes a link to the Play Store (for testers), to the community page, and to this blog
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