Ricochet
Developer: Alexander Matos
Platform: Windows (itch.io)
Release Date: 5/3/2020
short gameplay
Description:
Ricochet is a single-player arcade pinball game, based on 1980's classic arcade games. Player must earn points by destroying all the bumpers within the level, without letting the ball fall down the drain. If the player earn more points, they'll earn the High Score were they or others must beat by earning more points then the High Score.
Development:
This game was a solo project, so I mainly had to did most of the programming, sprite work and audio effects. I used GitHub to store and keep track of all the updates I made in the game.The game was stored as a GitHub repository to keep a library of all the commits I made into the game. Unity was the software that was used in the development of the game. When development began, I started programming the mechanics first and made improvements on the code to make sure that the game would function properly, before working on the assets. Once that was done, I used Piskel to start making the sprite assets and imported them into Unity to make sure that the 2D physics would work properly with the flippers and the ball. I than started implementing the audio mixer and made changes to the code to play the audio files once a trigger was activated. Once making sure that works, I used JFXR to make the actual audio files that'll be used in the game. Later on, in development I started polishing the game by trying to find any bugs or improve some of the assets of the game.
Left: Ricochet in its early development Right: Ricochet in its current state
Development Process:
The development of the game started out as a combination of elements from two separate projects. The pinball mechanics were brought over from an older project that I used to get myself familiar with Unity, the difference being that the original used Unity 3D physics while this one used 2D physics. The jump was somewhat difficult since one of the scripts used the spring function from the Hinge component. The difference being that I had to used the Hinge 2D component instead and the spring function was absent. So I had to make some necessary changes in order for the script to work properly. The other project that I used for this game was a break-out clone that i made for personal enjoyment and I wanted to see if I could make a game like break-out. The element was the destruction of the bumpers, which change their sprite based on the amount of health they have.
Some complications during development was finding out I needed to use programming methods like getters and setters and changing the enum states of objects to change their sprite renderer for the first time. Luckily, I was able to get assistance from teachers and tutors that help with the programming and helped speed up the game's development.
