Slashfall

Intro: Have you ever seen those movies where inventors suddenly come up with an idea in a random unexpected way? When they suddenly get an idea from hearing a word that someone else said, or even those innovator stories where they were taking a bath and got an idea after hitting their head or stubbing their toe on the door or something. Ideas can come from strange places or unexpected circumstances. This is one of those kind of ideas.

The Idea: One day, after having created my first game DodgeWall, I was trying to think of newer game ideas, and I only had 2 conditions set. First I want to create something so simple you can play it with just one finger, secondly, the mechanics should be so straightforward that you barely need instructions.

As I was going along with my day just racking my brains trying to come up with ideas, I took a break, stepped away from the computer for a bit and then decided to wash the dishes just to pass the time. As I was washing my favourite glass of water, I suddenly imagined a ping pong ball falling into it and I thought: "I bet I could shoot a ping pong ball in this..." BAM! Like a lightning strike the idea suddenly came to me. Shooting ping pong balls in a glass, but there must be a twist.

The Mechanics: Shooting a ping pong ball to a moving cup! I imagined it was so simple that it could be done with a tap of the finger on the screen and then the ball would suddenly fall into a moving cup if you time it right, but I thought that's not engaging enough, so I decided a slashing motion is better, and the pinpong ball would be tied with a rope at the top just so that it would make sense where it is coming from.

I did some programming magic to create the prototype and then improved the falling animation and bucket animations. The most challenging was the physics of the ball when hitting the inside of the cup, but I'm not gonna bore you with that, what's important is that the ball is now perfectly falling inside the cup after a couple of hours of hair pulling programming magic.

The Design: A few more hours of testing the game and refining the physics, I then decided to improve the overall feel and look of the game. The ball was already orange from the start and there was barely any changes to that one, the glasses however were just basic trapezoid shapes with solid colors, you can't even see the ball when it is inside, so I had to create a transparent overlay infront of it to create a transparent glass effect and for the ball to be visible while inside the glass.

While playing the game though, I thought it becomes boring without any other goal but shooting the ball into the glass, so I decided to add a little bit of spice by adding life points to it. In the start of the game, the player gets 3 life points. If you fail to shoot a ball into a glass, you lose 1 life point. I thought it was a great addition to spice things up, however a new problem occurred, players can just wait it out and they will not lose even if they don't shoot a ball.

I then decided to add a timer that would count if you have not shot 3 balls in a glass, a countdown timer will appear telling you that another empty cup and the game will be over. AWESOME! I have now created the problem, and sold the solution. But wait, there's more. I wanted to make things a little bit spicier and so besides that, I thought: "what if the ball barely fits the glasses, like there would be smaller glasses." and so this diabolical idea was implemented, and ohh boy the first time I tried it, I couldn't stop laughing.

The Lesson and Closing thoughts: I showed this game to my Dad and he was laughing with the sillyness and simplicity and ingenuity of the idea, he was excited about it. Success! I decided this game is worth pushing into production (Developer term for "let people use it now"), and so that is what I did. I put the game on the website and I also plan on putting it on the Google Play Store in the near future. The lesson I learned from this game is that ideas can come from anywhere and anything. It may not be as glorious as the scenarios in movies, but hey, we still got a new game and I still had fun, I hope you will too!