Ball Plink

A little game made in a weekend for 2022's  TOJam 16 game jam. 

My goal for the jam was to make a little pinball-like game that could be played on a phone in a web browser. I was particularly interested in the idea of having a map that you could explore and having more free-form controls than just pinball flippers. I was particularly inspired by the old Pinball flash game Snowball, and I was curious whether the ideas there could be extended to build a narrative. Perhaps actual stories or management games could be represented in pinball form?

Unfortunately, the physics game framework that I was using--Phaser 3's Matter--was very temperamental. I ended up spending most of my time working around missing functionality in Phaser's tiled map support, working around bugs in Matter's handling of concave shapes, and working through a lot of under-documented interfacing APIs. As a result, I was only able to make a very basic and minimal prototype of my ideas. The unusual control scheme I had also brought up lots of game mechanics issues. Since the controls are different from normal pinball, some things are more difficult or more easier than normal pinball, so all the challenges and game design would have to adapted to the new controls. I hadn't expected that, but it might be an interesting avenue to explore in the future with a real game.

Source code for the game is available on github.