Shuttlecocks difficulty

[Spectre Rose]

I've got an old Pong game for home use. Plugs into a coaxial socket on a TV with an adapter and is powered by a half a dozen D-cell batteries.

And my take on the comparison to Shuttlecocks is that it's way too difficult. All this time here and I have 0/10 victories against the AI. My observation is that it's the shuttle speed for the player, while the AI never seems to have any problem catching up since it understandably always knows where the "ball" is going to be. I don't notice this behaviour with the original except on its highest difficulty.

[Wired Jake]

Hey Spectre Rose, The AI can be quite the competitor! Fantastic throwback though, we will pass your feedback on to the team.

[Psyringe]

Originally posted by Wired Jake:

Hey Spectre Rose, The AI can be quite the competitor! Fantastic throwback though, we will pass your feedback on to the team.

I think the main problem might be that Shuttlecocks (like many other machines) only accepts digital input, i.e. keypresses. Analog controls like mouse movement would be a better fit for this game, considering that the original Pong machines used analog dial-like controllers. That would require a substantial change to the game's input routines though, so I'm not sure if that's realistic.

A second suggestion that would be easier to implement, is to add visible borders to the top and bottom of the screen, where the ball bounces off. Since we can only move the paddle with limited speed, it is crucial to anticipate where it needs to be, and this is made unnecessarily difficult when we can't see where the ball will bounce off exactly.

Nice to see officials being responsive here in the Steam forums, by the way!

[Spectre Rose]

@Psyringe

You make some excellent comments, IMO. As I think of it, this game appears to be set up for both PC and console gaming. A rewrite of the game code could be a hefty job, but if done I know how the change could work for both gaming methods. First, when playing a game, if you move your mouse, you still look around a little, even though the view will always spring back to centre on the arcade game monitor. This would have to be changed to accommodate the switch to using the mouse as an arcade game control. For the console controllers, the corresponding thumb joystick (by whatever name they're called) would also have to be turned into an arcade control, but to even pull this off either way would require the disabling of the "look around" function they control while playing a cabinet.

As for your top and bottom borders... that could be very useful and perhaps be the least intrusive way to decrease the difficulty.

And I agree, @Wired Jake has always been on top of reading comments and replying to them and it's nice to see other people recognizing their efforts.

[Wired Jake]

Yeah, it can be a tough one at times but quite fun in the end once you’ve mastered it, and as always we’ll pass on all feedback and suggestions to the developer. Not a problem at all!