TASball by fasterthanlime
TASball is a tool-assisted pinball / clicker / programming game hybrid.
Play now
🏆 Credits
- Original idea by @s_standke
- Level design by @davemakes, @fasterthanlime, and @geckojsc
- Everything else by @fasterthanlime
💎 Features
- Wash windows and mow lawns to afford Pinball tournaments.
- Write AIs for Pinball tournaments to earn more money.
- Buy faster CPUs and more ROM with your money.
- Code golf your way to the best possible solution to earn the most money!
Also, you could:
- Post videos of your creations on Twitter!
- Read the source code and use Inkscape and the cheat mode to create your own maps!
📺 Tutorial
🚨 Enable Subtitles/CC for instructions 🚨
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2lE4DDl5P0
🚨 Enable Subtitles/CC for instructions 🚨
🎮 Controls
Basically:
- Right-click stuff to edit it
- The editor has copy/paste and undo
Everything else is listed in the editor "Help!", and in the video tutorial above.
⚠️ Disclaimers
- The game is made to be broken - not as in physics bugs, but as in insane moves a human couldn't possibly do.
- I wanted to provide the best environment to make a pinball AI.
- Stepping is part of any good debugger - to play in the spirit of the game, make sure you run your simulation from scratch if you validate it. (Being able to get a cash reward if you edited since start is a bug).
- Yes, the clicker part is a joke/under-developed. That's the bonus third theme, nevermind the clicker.
- Yes, stealing cars can help you move a lot faster. There's also a lot of risk, not to mention the guilt. The terrible guilt.
- Physics are hard - while TASball is more stable than a typical jam entry, you may find corner cases. I guess uhhh use them to your advantage? At least the simulations are reproducible.
Play now
| HTML5 (web) | https://fasterthanlime.itch.io/tasball |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/tasball |
Ratings
| Overall | 581th | 3.455⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 875th | 2.97⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 14th | 4.348⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 182th | 4.106⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 42🗳️ | 20🗨️ |
Some comments:
- I don't see the point of the "clicker game" at the start. I think it spread you too thin, and it doesn't add anything to the meat of the game, which is the pinball+programming portion. (And some of the options are just bad. Steal car to get a ton of money or force you to restart the game? Why does that exist?! I can just steal a car and reset until it succeeds, and start off with a ton of cash.)
- Sounds are important. They make games feel good to interact with, which helps a ton. For example, a sound when the ball hits something, a sound when a flipper triggers, etc. The "tone" actions you provided don't count... those are too jarring and made me restart the game to turn it off quickly.
- Speaking of the tones, I think the programming part should just focus on actions you can make the pinball machine do. Makes things simpler.
- There are some glaring issues as well. With the programming part, you can step one step at a time, but also change your program between steps. That means, you don't _actually_ need to program anything! You can just do things one step at a time and manually pick the action you want to do that step.
I can tell that a lot of the things you added were just to play around, which is fine. The comments I added are for if you want to take this further.
Also maybe have the pinball programs running in parallel while I am in the clicker part, if you want to make this an idle game along the lines of universal paperclips.
A few remarks:
- I didn't really like the time penalty. It seems like it goes directly against the idea of pinball - right now you get rewarded for losing the ball quickly after grabbing as much red dots as possible, which seems counter intuitive. It would be better if you get rewarded for keeping the ball in the game for as long as possible.
- It seems pinball programs get deleted when you leave the level, which is a shame. Seems there's no way to save them. It's quite tedious to remake the same pattern every time.
- Would've liked some pinball/flipper sound effects.
- I also would've liked some "sensors", e.g. if the ball is near a certain trigger, jump to a certain label in ROM. So basically conditional jumps. This would allow some more dynamic programs than just things that move flippers up and down in a certain predefined rhythm. Because of that there doesn't really seem to be an incentive to buy faster CPUs or ROMs because the pattern "up-down-up-down" works fairly well most of the time.
https://youtu.be/c2lE4DDl5P0
(Enable subtitles for instructions)
@Bauxite I was definitely planning on conditional jumps (and having memory to write to / read from), and sensors - the game design just comes naturally, but the deadline killed those features :)
What i felt really lacked was the sound design, it would help the game feel better.
All in all it's an awesome concept you got there, maybe would be better if you could share your programs ?
Two small complaints:
* The screen scrolled a bit while playing through the ROM -- this caused the pause button to move. I was hovering over the pause button waiting to click at a certain time, but it kept moving on me right when I wanted to click.
* The clicker game is alright, but I just want to mess with the pinball, so the clicker games ends up feeling like a nuisance getting in the way of more pinball programming.
The art style is super clean and colors work nicely (other than that pinky box at the bottom)
Overall really well done!
One request that might not be obvious -- a way to disable the moving black square while executing would be amazing. Especially at higher frequencies, seeing the square flashing really quickly is very unpleasant visually and might be a seizure hazard.