So addicted to this game!
Reviews for "Piñata Poppers"
I don't want to be mean since I did enjoy the game and I feel like you put effort into its charm, but if I'm being honest I have to award almost no points for originality. There have been a ton of suika games on Newgrounds lately and most of them have at least one thing that sets them apart. Your game might be the most generic of all. The only thing different about it is that there are fewer levels than usual, so I can get that happy feeling of making it to the end, but that's more like a missing thing than an extra thing. Also I guess there are multiple ways to handle getting to the end. I think Cthulhu Merge just prevents the top level animals from merging. Another approach would be to form higher levels automatically by doing something like making the balls a little bigger and changing the color a bit. Your approach is to allow two top-level pinatas to merge into one top-level pinata, effectively destroying one of them, so I guess that's something unexpected at least.
Also, I lost because an explosive merge sent a few smaller pinatas flying :P
Reply: Yeah Fit Cats has a mechanic that allows you to destroy cats, and Cthulhu Merge lets you devolve animals, so that kind of thing definitely can work. With pinatas you have a lot of possibilities. Pinatas are supposed to drop candy, right? Maybe you could get to break a pinata when you collect enough candy, though that would be kind of backwards. Maybe you could get a bat that you drop the same way you drop pinatas, so you could only break pinatas at the top. Maybe pinatas could have hit points requiring them to get hit multiple times. You could even get rid of the suika mechanic and just make a game about trying to bash pinatas against other pinatas hard enough to break them before they fill up to the top
UnitedFailures responds:
I appreciate the honest and well thought feedback :)
A mechanic we had like 50% working (and maybe I'll return back to it if I have a better vision for it) was to add the ability to break open pinatas. I wrote a shader and some custom code for the pinata breaking effect, and we were planning on you building up "charges" to activate "pinata breaker mode." In this mode, you'd move your mouse around on the pinatas and slightly hit them around and deal damage.
However, we realized this is hard to balance and disrupts the natural difficulty escalation of Suika game (think of the small pieces that get stuck and build up over time, now you can just essentially delete them) -- and could lead to seemingly endless playthroughs.
I would want to add some sort of "pinata breaking" mechanic to the game, and I think it would help give the game more of a unique flavor. If you have any suggestions or thoughts on that I'd be down to hear them :)
Aye, preety decent, the hitboxes are certantly something to note, sometimes merging through other piniatas and sometimes not merging at all; the final piniata also is very easy to get to, and it merging other copies of itself without evolving really makes this seem fit for longplay stuff, since you can get rid of piniatas easier sorta. And the point you lose at is really genrous too!
Also, lookie, I have 2nd place in the all time leaderboard! Yipee! :3
However the merging effect is achieved here, it's amazing. The sense of attraction/momentum and the character of it are bar none. Really like how straight forward the experience here is as well.
Really cool game. I got 22,116! God bless. Jesus loves you!