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Rainbow Star Pinball


b10b
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Hello, I haven't posted here in too long ... I've been working in HTML5 pretty solidly for the last year, but restricted from sharing much of what I do.

 

So I decided to work with my colleagues to make a simple game that I could freely share and that young girls would enjoy.  The result was the colorfully titled "Rainbow Star Pinball".  Warning - if you're into robots, guns or chrome on black, this might not be for you!

 

http://b10b.com/rainbowstarpinball/

 

post-4932-0-11335600-1424212555.jpgpost-4932-0-57374000-1424212556.jpg
 
Description:
 
Enter the magical world of Rainbow Star Pinball. Find treasure at the end of the rainbow, escape the enchanted forest, free the Unicorn's chalice or unite the Prince and Princess at their romantic ball. Flippers, bonuses, and multiple tables await!
 
How to play: Tap down to shoot your ball. Tap left or right to use your flippers. Tap up to tilt the table. Shoot the ball along the train track to start your mission, then follow the lights. Activate the rainbow tunnel to unlock the bonus table!
 
Technical:
 
Using Haxe, awe6 and CreateJS as a base we then ported a physics library from our AS1 days called ICE (by Stuart Schoneveld).  It's a really cool old school library and allows the speedy creation of pinball tables through primitives and then handles the physics in a very intuitive way.  It's no substitute for Box2D for advanced physics, but for Pinball tables it rules.  From there we designed a girl oriented theme and added missions and objectives to the tables.
 
The game has been play tested on a handful of devices.  Framerate on early iOS is below par due to memory exhaustion from the audio, but all others tested positively - please let me know how it runs for you.
 
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a bit slow on iphone4 (with sounds!) but playable and very slow and blurry on galaxy tab. From a gampelay perspective the zoom tracking the ball makes it a bit weird to play, but i am used to fixed view pinballs so. It's the first time i see a "girly pink rainbow" pinball!

from a technical point of view and a bit OT, since you use awe6, if you want to port that game to native desktop, what are you options? can you make a windows build like with haxeflixel? It seems that the haxelib version of awe6 is behind the googlecode version too.

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Thank you for your feedback, most useful.  I've done what I can with it ...

 

@ChrisP, Ousaf, totor

 

Performance matters.  I've been able to optimize the drawing routines a little by consolidating displaylist containers, maybe +15%.  However it still easily chokes if insufficient memory occurs (e.g. another web page in memory on 256MB devices) - the price of decoded soundtrack memory it seems?  So far I've only been able to significantly improve this by disabling animations or audio from loading.

 

@ericjbasti

 

25 fps was a choice, the old school physics library does not know how to react to delta time and a lot of the internal dynamics are hard to tweak.  Plus I'm actually a fan of fixed interval game loops, but don't tell anyone ;)

 

@ptdnet, ChrisP, totor

 

Scrolling and zooming.  Thanks so much, sometimes we're too close to something to see the obvious.  I've added a disable scroll button in the game options so we can play the main table without all that panning and zooming.

 

@Bolko, totor

 

Girl theme.  I haven't seen any girl themed pinball games yet either ... maybe for good reason!?!

 

@totor

 

Using awe6 I have the choice to wrap this CreateJS version using Cocoon, Chrome portable or similar, I'm unsure if that's the wisest move though.  Alternatively I could easily back out of the CreateJS driver, either into Flash & AIR, or OpenFL versions if preferred and then target native executables.  But I'm mostly focused on mobile web these days so I might not be up to date on all the Haxe native options?

 

Thanks again.

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I'm not quite sure if you have any major performance issues tbh, both IE and Chrome's profilers results look good, it's probably just that fps cap that's causing a perceived performance issue - but I don't think it's that bad, especially if you disable the camera zooms and movements. And if you have good reason to keep the cap, then that's fair enough.

 

Still kinda reminds me a little bit of the excellent 3D Ultra Pinball games, which I spent more time playing than I will ever admit :P

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I just spotted that RAF synchronisation doesn't like framerates other than 12, 15, 20, 30, 60.  So my setting it to 25 fps was the same as setting it to 20 fps.

 

I experimented with 60 fps and introduced some delta time aspects to the physics engine which, although super smooth, was problematic in parts of the gameplay pacing.  Next I tried 30 fps fixed which works well, but because this is for young kids (<7) the 20 fps fixed was easier for them to flipper roll.  So 20 fps it is for Rainbow Star Pinball!

 

Next time I will start at a baseline of 30 fps, design the game pacing around that, and perhaps include an automated 2x / 60 fps mode for desktop.

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