So even though I didn't manage to finish a good game in yesterdays' MinorHack, it still inspired me to this cool game concept(see image below) for a multiplayer ponglike game.

What do you think about it?

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Sounds pretty cool. I think that it should count frags, as in, the last player to hit the ball before it kills someone gets a point. I liked the power-ups too, especially the sticky paddle. I'd play this.

Wow -- I like this a lot. It's always fun to see Minorhack entries inspire bigger things, and this one looks really unique.

How do you intend the control to work? All keyboard, or will you use the mouse for aiming or moving? It might be fun to have power ups that affect player base and paddle movement as well as ball movement. I'm a fan of 'press space for a short sudden burst of speed' mechanics, as well ...

I suppose there's a lot of potential ideas to think about, here -- probably best to just start putting things in and seeing how they work! Looking forward to playing whatever you end up with

Sounds fun, I'd definately play that. This has a big addictive potencial
For the controls I'd advise to use keys to navigate the player and mouse to rotate the paddle.

Edit: Oh you could also add some arkanoid-like breakable walls.

Looks good, but I see a problem: Players will probably move away much more than trying to deflect the ball from their own paddle, so the paddle could become pretty useless. What would be left would be a simple try-not-to-be-hit-and-escape game.

In my opinion you should avoid that by somehow restricting movement to encourage the players to use their rotatable paddles.

Well this could be achieved that the last player who hit's a ball that kills somebody gets a frag. Just like in UT, otherwise it would change into what you're saying - and I must say that UT doesn't look like that.

Go stand in a corner and just rotate the shield.

The "last player to hit the ball gets the frag" idea that Kauhiz and OICW mentioned seems really key for adding a layer of strategy where it won't pay to just rely on either dodging or deflecting -- you'll want to be moving around and deflecting to attack other players from unexpected angles, and that should add a whole new layer to the game.

But aside from that, mixing it up with plenty of power-ups (and "power-downs") should go a long way toward making sure that there aren't any simple fixed strategies for the player to use.

edit: to counter X-G's strategy -- add ways to break down the shields. Use the fact that the guy who's just sitting in the corner won't be as able to take advantage of the powerups that are appearing over the rest of the game space.
It's hard to think about all the game-breaking strategies at this point in development, but I think there's enough freedom in terms of different game mechanics you can introduce that you'll be able to fix the problems as they arise ...

edit: the two posts that were made, while I was typing this one haven't been recognized in this post yet
edit2: now they are

Yep that would be a good scoring model that I also thought of. First only as an alternative to the "don't get hit" model but the more I think about it, it should be the default scoring model.

I thought of either all keyboard (to limit the rotation speed) or keyboard for moving and mouse for rotating (still the rotation speed would be limited and the paddle would always try to rotate around the shortest angle so that it faces the mouse again). There could be powerups and powerdowns that affect movement and rotation speed. I also like that idea of the limited speed boost powerup.

Yeah, it's quite frightening how fast this seemingly simple concept is going to explode into a very complex game. Simple to play but complex in its' possibilities.

Very cool idea. There could be breakable and unbreakable blocks in the levels and they could either float around on given paths or they could be static.

What OICW said. As soon as the scoring model is so that the player that deflected the ball(s)(with split ball powerup there can be more than one ball at a time) last owns it and scores when it hits another player, people will try to hit the others. The sticky paddle will be a very powerful powerup for that purpose as it will allow the player to decide when to let loose the ball again.;D

edit2 [appended]

Good point. I have yet to think of something to prevent players from doing that.
One first idea would be to have the bounding lines of the level be farer away from the area in which the player is able to move in. Like, the level itself is a platform with a canyon around it and behind the canyon there are walls that keep the ball inside the playfield. The player could even fall into the canyon and lose points. Maybe there could also be a powerup that would hit players back a bit (deplace there position) even if they deflect the ball with their paddle, so that campers could be pushed into the canyon.;D

Yeah with enough clever ideas, I think it should be possible to annihilate such strategies.

I like this idea a lot

Yeah, me too. I think the power-ups should affect how fast a player can move, how fast he can move his bat and how fast he hits the ball. The recoil thing could either be a separate power-up as suggested, or just depend on how fas the ball is travelling. The size of the bat could change when you score, but it shouldn't change too much.

Another cool idea for power-ups would be stuff that changes the ball when the player who collected the power-up hits it. You could have a freeze-ball, fire-ball, thunder-ball etc. The ball would stay like that for some time, then change back. If a player hits a special ball, something cool will happen, like if you hit the freeze-ball, you become frozen for a short while.

I also liked the idea about the breakable walls. You could hide the best power-ups behind the walls, and do all kinds of cool stuff. Oh, and you need an invincibility power-up that gives you a 360° bat for a short time

Oh, and a level with the canyons, slippery floor and the recoil effect would be crazy fun

Wow, I'm getting all worked up . You have to make this game!

All good ideas. It should definetely be like that.

Yeah more great ideas! And the fire ball could ignite the players paddle so that it would slowly burn shorter and shorter for a given amount of time. The thunderball might electrify the player and negatively affect his movement smoothness (he'll be jittering around a bit).

Aye! Hiding the power-ups is another cool idea though it will probably be hard to get them that way if there's only one ball in the game that won't be easily brought to destroy the walls at a specific place. The 360° bat would be the equivalent to the shield that I thought of.

I totally have to! Alright, my plan is as follows: Over the next week I will assemble the first concept and all the brainstorming from this thread into a complete design document. I'll then declare feature-lock (for the first version) on thursday evening, will release the revised design document on friday evening(as a PDF file) and hopefully will start hacking the thing into the computer on saturday.:)

Good luck! Sound really cool.

Nice! Hope to see this one soon

Yeah! You don't have to even come up with an excuse for the players dying when they hit they edge... They went OOB. Like, the power up could "charge" the ball so it will knock people back, and it will do so for the next 3 or so times you deflect the ball.

Make sure you add support for bitmap levels And pinball bouncers (circles the ball touches and shoots off away from them)

Also countering X-G's strategy, you could always make the shield shrink/disappear after the player has stood still for a set amount of time. This would force you to keep movin to avoid losing your paddle.

I don't like that particular solution, though. It feels too much like it was made specifically to force the player to move, which is not good game design. You want to make him want to move anyway. That way he won't feel forced and it won't feel stilted and artificial.

Sooner or later it will become boring for a camper and if you plan to incorporate multiplayer, nobody would want to play with him. Same applied for Last Man Standing in Unreal Tournament.

Still you can find players who enjoy it, but that's their problem.

I like the idea of placing power-ups, and making those integral to winning. Then intelligently place them simultaneously as close to the ball and as far from the players as possible.

You could alternatively make the shields shrink at a fixed rate regardless of player behavior, so the players have to at least occasionally chase a 'shield replenishment' power-up that spawns away from corners.
It should have roughly the same effect but avoid (I hope) the 'artificial' feel that X-G is worried about.

Some more random brainstorming on the power-ups:

• Bomb-ball: The ball explodes after X seconds or after it has bounced off of something X times. Players who are close to the ball when it detonates get killed, players further away get stunned for a moment (the time could depend on distance from the explosion)

• Homing-ball: The ball homes in on the closest player.

• Mirage-ball: Like split-ball, except the other ball is fake.

• Warp-ball: The ball warps to a random location/close to the best player, and shoots off into a random direction/toward the best player at a high speed.

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You could give the ball a slight deceleration, and give it an acceleration according to the players hitting power when it hits his paddle. The hitting power could be upgraded with power-ups. If you made the walls bouncy, you could get the ball moving really fast. And in homing-ball mode the ball would have a constant acceleration toward the nearest player, which would create a really cool effect IMO.

Here's another idea I had: power-ups that make the ball into a power-up. The challenge would be shooting the ball so that it comes back to you before anyone else gets it, and before it turns into the regular ball again (because being hit by the regular ball would be bad). You could do the same for power-downs, but then the ball would have to give the power-down even if the player blocks it (since you'd rather kill them than downgrade their powers). This could be cool, since you could get unsuspecting players waiting to deflect the regular ball. And if they tried to dodge, they might get killed.

Anyway, this is stuff I thought of. Some of it might be good, but I won't be offended if you don't want to use it. I often get a lot of ideas and projects end up becoming too bloated. You should stick to your original idea, that's usually the best one.

Corners wouldn't be a problem if you had destructable walls.

An idea for bitmap levels: use black for empty, this is actually walls. Use red for out-of-bounds, and white for normal. Or make black radiate a certain amount of OOB area on to the surrounding field, to keep it consistent.

Powerups are ok but how about the goal of the game is for each player to collect items, like diamonds of the same color of the player. Every time a player collects their color diamond a new one appears somewhere on the screen and they have to get it, dodging the pong ball all the while.

Every time someone gets hit by a pong ball they lose a point, but no one should gain points for killing people.

Naw, I prefer the senseless killing TBH.

Or that the paddle deteriorates with every hit and needs a power up to replenish?

The points for killing other players is a little more simplistic. I like the feel of it.

This really reminds me of this party game on the 360... The rest of the game is a bit different, but adding the diamonds somehow makes it feel cheapend maybe its just me.

Maybe the diamond setup could be one mode, and make several variants of the game with different targets and objectives.

As a party game, this would pwn some serious butt

edit, makes me think though that it'd be really hard to play with a joypad if you only have two hands. I guess it depends on the controller, trigger like button for doing "things" (like letting a sticky ball go), a dpad or analog stick for movement and a dpad or analog stick for the paddle.

edit2, I've been looking for a good idea for a "demo" ds game for allegro, something better than my tic-tac-toe (with stylus) idea. And something more fun and interesting (for me to work on) than allegro's current demo (not that it isn't fun ). I think if you can pull it off, I may be able to port it to the DS. I'm not so good at the maths stuff, but I can hack some mean code when I get working.

edit3, if you don't have a host for this project, I have svn, ssh and webspace open for you for the webspace you have a choice of two servers, my paid, faster server at strangesoft.net (or any address you want to use), and my home server at tomasu.org. Let me know, I'd be really happy to do it.

Yes, the player should move because of the danger that lies in being easily punished by the other players instead of being punished by the game directly. So I like my first idea with the canyon and the possibility to push the campers off the gaming area better.

I'm not sure whether they should be needed for winning. I'd like it better if they'd just add more spice to the game and more power to that player who uses them best. Sure, by that they will be indirectly turn to be the key to winning, so well, at this point in my line of thought I have no idea what you mean by "make the power-ups integral to winning" because it somehow will be like that automatically.

This might be an optional rule but I don't think it should be in the default set of rules.

Love that one, a small number being displayed with the ball could indicate the time or the number of hits left until detonation. Since everybody will be able to see that number it should add an extra layer of tension to that particular game situation.

This should be a very rare power-up since it is so powerful.

An interesting thought but it could be easily mistaken as a bug in the game if a player gets hit by such a ball and nothing happens. Well, maybe the mirage-ball could just travel through players(but not walls) and vanish after a set amount of time.

I don't like this one. Players should always have a chance to defend themselves.

There will be no bitmap levels but the game should come with an easy to use playfield editor.

This can be made as a different set of rules. The game should support different sets of rules anyway and with polymorphism this should be fairly easy to achieve. There'd be a base class with methods for every game event (like player hit by ball, player collecting item) which the game calls. Each set of rules can inherit from that class and override the event methods to apply different effects to the current game state. That's just an idea though, there might be better ways to handle different sets of rules.

Me too, if it doesn't go overboard. Because then, any deathmatch game with traditional weapons would be better.

Yes there definitely needs to be support for different rulesets to satisfy everyone.:)

No problem, I could help with the math. I currently think it will just involve a bit of trigonometry and some linear algebra, which I think I'm pretty firm with (at least up to the level that it is needed for this game:P).

An svn repository would be cool. Not needed until there's at least a single player "move around" demo ready though. I think the basic system should be already coded before it first gets imported into the svn trunk. The final game will be hosted on my homepage and I'll of course also add it to the depot as I plan to write it in C++, using Allegro. Not sure what to use for the multiplayer code yet. Basically every player should have an arbitrary "controller" attachable, which could be anything from local keypresses to remote commands send by a different computer(player). If you'll be able to provide additional mirrors for the game download this will of course be appreciated. Goes without saying that the final version should come with sources and compile on various systems out of the box.

I'll probably also need help with the coding of the game as we are currently planning and later this year will be programming a quite huge monster of software at work which is going to suck up a lot of my energy. So I'll just have time to work on this project at the weekends and rarely in the evenings. (Because I think I couldn't code eight hours a day at work and then come home and continue coding.) In the end, I wouldn't mind writing all the code myself, it'll just take longer to complete it that way.8-)

I'll start writing/drawing the design document tomorrow and until thursday evening you can still contribute ideas and more brainstorming. On friday, as said before, there'll be feature-lock so any ideas posted after that, even if they're good, will not make it into the first version. (This is to increase the chances that there will be a first version someday and that it will not continue to grow and grow and grow and never come out.)

I can't guarantee I'll help much But a port to the DS would be fun.

Yeah, my skills in that department are lacking

edit, Got an idea for a new "powerup", one that randomizes the bounce angle of the ball, and make it a possible combo with a super-speed "powerup" to make things extra fun.

So I guess adding certain powerups that can stack or not stack could be usefull. Maybe some powerups can cancel active poweups.

Oh, and another one, be able to store powerups as if they are ammo. So you can time the start of them, and when you use them. Some could be storeable, some may not be allowed to be stored, etc.

Maybe if you add some nice effect that will show the ball disappearing in non buggy way it'll work good.

Ball angle randomizer: Check.
Power-Up inventory and on demand power-up activation: Check.
Mirage ball disappear in non buggy way: Check. (it will still travel through players like a ghost ball and disappear only after some time, so that more than one player can enjoy not dieing when "hit" by that ball type)
Attached to this post is the wip version of the design document in PDF.

I see your point. Here's my thinking: the ball doesn't change immediately, so that the player using it has enough time to get away. The effect is short, and the ball moves very slowly. The scenario in my mind is that players will have to scram away as fast as possible, while still being alert, as the regular ball will shoot out randomly at a high speed. I think it would be a cool element to have in the game. Do as you see best, though.

Bumpy (elastic) collisions plus high inertia (I'm thinking hover boats) might be a fun game mode as well. Add slow acceleration of the player characters and it'll require some tactical skill from the players.

edit: Oh, and very nice idea! Likes!

Kauhiz:
I'll think about it again. If the effect only lasts two or three seconds and as you said the regular ball shoots out at high speed at a random angle after that, I can imagine this could indeed create a funny paniclike situation in the game. Alright, it will be in the game.

Indeterminatus:
Please elaborate what you mean by elastic collisions.
I like the high inertia thing but this would be playfield dependent. There will be slippery areas anyway, maybe there could be a flag to make every area slippery for that effect.

Me:
Oh dear, you haven't had any time today to continue working on the design document, so you'll probably need to do this on the weekend, which means that writing the code will start later also. You'll still declare feature-lock tomorrow evening though.8-)

Elastic collisions are ones in which kinetic energy is conserved, so the objects colliding would 'bounce'.

Yeah, "bounce" your opponents into the canyon! Reminds me of Micro Machines.

To discourage camping, I would make players slowly bloat over time, becoming larger targets.(the shield doesn't grow, mind you )
Running would make you slimmer, as would eating "slim" bonuses.

The glue would be a bit strong if you could run with the ball. It would be more balanced if you can't move while holding a ball, just keep sliding, aim, and shoot when you want.

Randomly appearing powerups (even small bonuses) are a must to keep players on the move.

Bonuses ideas: short trail of fire (deadly), of glue (slow opponents), of oil, of "wall" (ball and opponents bounce on it).
These would give a slightly Tron feel.

If you're talking about the sticky paddle, I disagree. IMO moving is key to using the power effectively. That said, it should be restricted, I think the best way would be to limit the time you can hold on to the ball.

Ah, so the balls will deform(compress) a bit on collision and then deform again(expand) and then shoot off? Nice idea. I'll see if I can somehow put that in.

This would be direct punishment by the game (which I dislike). Even if it would affect every player and not only those standing still, it still doesn't feel right. It could be a "mutator"(UT anyone?;D) to the standard rules though.

I don't like these, because they would affect players directly and not when they are hit by any of the different ball types who are supposed to be the main weapons in this game. These powerups would be too strong and probably would make players just use these instead of trying to use the balls to score and that would spoil the whole concept of the game.:-/

I never intended to disallow moving around with the sticky paddle and yes, it needs a time limit and if the player doesn't release the ball before the time runs up, the ball will auto-release from the paddle.

And now I declare feature-lock for this game. Anything that hasn't been brought up until now, will not be in the first version of the game.

Oh and thanks for all your thoughts and ideas everyone, cookie time!:)

Keep us updated!

Yep, I think that FatMan mutator worked like those with high number of frags were fatter than others - if speaking about that "bloating".

I've uploaded the latest wip version of the design document. (now with some images)
I know, I originally planned to have the design document finished this weekend but it's just going to take a little longer (maybe a week more:P)

Looks nice! Better than anything I have done...