As you might have heard, we ran a competition over the last week to win $50 worth of iTunes vouchers.  The prize was to be awarded to whomever was top of the 5-Minute Game leaderboard at 10am on Tuesday 17th August.

In the end almost 3,000 people posted a score, but as every Highlander fan knows – there can be only one.  And I’m pleased to announce that the “one” in this case is long-time Juggle! fan Jimbot. Yay!

Jimbot and Stevakis were trading places in an exciting build-up to the final whistle, but in the end it was Jimbot who secured victory with the – frankly astonishing – score of 1,868,780.  A clear 200k more than his nearest rival.

Commenting on the game that saw him post his high-score he said, “Wahoo!!!!!  I just took this game to a new level!!  That was insane!! I applaud Denki again for such a great scoring system!!  I think 2+ million is possible but I am crippled from playing this game for many hours!! ”

Asked what his secret was Jimbot simply offered, “15 hours of practice!”

As an avid Juggle!-er myself, I can appreciate the magnitude of his achievement, and even our very own Paulverine Conry hasn’t been able to get near this despite repeated attempts.  But that wasn’t enough for Jimbot, oh no.  Not content with setting the bar on the 5-Minute Game he’s only gone and set the records for the 3-Minute and Endurance Games too!  785,850 for the 3-Minute Game and 4,444,741 for the Endurance Game if you’re interested.

And a score like that means he’s going to be top of the Greatest Hits leaderboard by default too.  In fact the only board he’s *not* top of as I type this is Oldest Ball.  And I just know he will be shortly after he reads this…

At last – some *real* scores for me to go after!

So, Jimbot, Denki hereby officially crowns you “The Ultimate Juggle!-er”.  Respect is due and paid in full – congratulations from the whole team.

We salute you!

Colin.

—

What’s this? More Denki releases? Yep – we submitted another two applications to Apple for review on Friday – an update of Juggle! and (drum roll please!) our very first iPad game, which as you might guess is:

Denki Blocks! iPad

As the name implies this is the iPhone version of Denki Blocks! repackaged exclusively for iPad. To be clear, there’s no new content in this release – so please don’t go buying it if you’ve already bought the iPhone version. You’ll have seen it all already, and unless you’re particularly wanting exactly the same game with larger graphics I’d recommend sticking with the version you have. If the App Store allowed us to gift the iPad version to existing iPhone users we would, but unfortunately that doesn’t appear to be accommodated at the moment – or if it is we haven’t figured out how yet.

However, if you haven’t bought it because you’ve been waiting for an iPad native version, well, it’s your lucky day!  And, even better, we’ve kept the price identical to the iPhone version. After all, it’s the same game with the same functionality so it doesn’t seem fair to raise the price just because we know anyone who owns an iPad probably sleeps on (king size) pillows stuffed full of money.

Juggle! v1.1

This is just a quick update to address a few niggles people had raised since the game launched – in particular adjusting bat sensitivity, switching the timer to the opposite side and providing an instant replay button after a game finishes. We also used the opportunity to fix some bugs we found after launch and make a few additional tidy ups. Nothing major, but an incremental improvement that proves we’re listening to feedback if nothing else!

We’ll let you know just as soon as they’re approved for launch by Apple.  Meanwhile, got to get back to work at Denki Towers – busy, busy, busy!

Colin.

—

SHOW YOURSELF
I love the fact that high score tables are back in fashion. Only better than they were before. Like, so retro.

When all this were green screens, my friends and I used to compete against each other to see who could get the best scores at home and on arcade machines – not just ever but within a single session and within constraints, like a time limit or playing one-handed. And then, when games could be completed, we’d see who could finish first and then perhaps fastest or with the best score or…

The competition’s compelling and the drama that unfolds through the rivalry is unique (although comparable perhaps to sporting events).

Then you’d get so good at a game and love it so much that you’d want to keep playing it OR you’d be so useless at a game but still want to play it that you and your friends would make up new ways to play, challenging each other to play in unusual ways. “I bet I can score most in a minute without shooting” and “I bet you can’t do that backwards. Or using only your feet. Or your mouth. Or your…”

Microsoft didn’t exactly invent Leaderboards and Achievements but they certainly brought them back in vogue and they enhanced them, mainly by maximising convenience but also by improving feel and drama with the use of points contributing to a shared Gamer Score and very visible lists.

As far as Juggle! is concerned, the four main areas of interest to us were:

• Leaderboards. Official high score tables so you can share and compare your awesome scores with your friends and the world. Or feel really sad that you can’t possibly compete.
• Challenges. Issue formal ordeals to other players.
• Sociability. The scope to share your key moments with the world.
• Achievements. Formally defined and acknowledged acts of accomplishment.

We’d already got the ball rolling with the last two ourselves but realised pretty quickly that we’d be better off using someone else’s repertoire for the first two. So we took the decision to use OpenFeint instead, with a view to supporting iOS 4.0 Game Center when that becomes more widespread.

OpenFeint’s pretty good. It’s certainly saved us having to build an appropriate system from scratch. My only real gripe with it is its inconsistency with the highly stylised Juggle! – it stands out as a layer rather than a seamless part of a whole experience. (There’s also the fact that it uses the third person for its Facebook posts and the first person for its Twitter tweets, which makes it hard to have fun with the messaging because it has to work with two mostly incompatible contrasts.)

LEADERBOARD, LEADERBOARD, WOULD YOU WORK FOR ME?
Juggle! supports five Leaderboards: one for the best score in each of the three modes of play; one for Greatest Hits (the most number of ball hits achieved in a single game) and another for Oldest Ball (the longest any one ball survives in a single game).

Leaderboards that didn’t make the grade included seeing who could reach the highest level (not as much precision as how long you can play) and who could juggle the most balls (that didn’t have enough scope for growth; seven, by the way, in case you were wondering, is the most I can manage but I reckon I’m on the cusp of eight).

YO-ACHIEVE-HO
When I’m designing I tend to use a three-tier challenge system: primary, secondary and tertiary. Primary challenges are critical to winning while secondary challenges aid success; tertiary challenges have no bearing on the game’s outcome and are nothing more than alternative ways to play, to enhance and deepen the experience. The latter for me are what Achievements should be all about.

Yes, Achievements act as more visible recognitions of the more important moments you experience during a game. Sure, completing a level or zone or game is undeniably an achievement and something to share with the world. But I get ceremonies for that anyway. I want Achievements to be special in some way; to make me play in a particular way – preferably a different way – rather than just go through the motions doing what I’d do anyway.

Completing a level or zone or game perfectly or without loss of life – that’s an Achievement. But, of course, once you start supporting those and all the other less remarkable Achievements along the way – that’s a lot of Achievements, which devalues them. I hate too many Achievements. I like each one to have real resonance.

Deciding where to pay attention was aided by the statistics tracked in play: score; time played; level reached; ball hits; most balls in play and balls lost – and combinations of those stats, such as keeping so many balls in play for so long. I also played and watched others play to see what springs to playful minds.

As a result there are six Achievements to earn in Juggle!, which feels right given the game’s scale. The aim was to ensure that each Achievement upheld The End as much as possible – primarily they’d be dramatic, make you feel good and embody a twist. I… mostly managed to achieve that.

• OBSESSION Keep the same ball in play for five minutes. This requires a different sort of focus; you have to ignore the noise of the other balls in play and do whatever it takes to keep that one ball alive.
• HOTSHOT Juggle the same three balls for 60 seconds. This is my favourite. Pursuing this definitely improves your skills.
• SIX-PACK Juggle six balls at once.
• TON-UP Lose 100 balls. There’s a surprising amount of skill required to do this.
• ZEN Play a single game for 10 minutes. I like the focus on survival for a good chunk of time here.
• HITMAN Achieve 1,000 hits. This replaced LEVEL BEST (reaching Level 30), which simply didn’t feel good, partly because the ceremony overlapped with levelling up.

I appreciate that these are tough to achieve; that’s my preference. But another reason for doing this was that I expected the essence of Juggle! to appeal more to a certain type of player – one in search of a certain type of classic challenge. Like me.

For a broader appeal, a better alternative would be three tiers of Achievement to suit different degrees of skill; sets of merit badges to collect and encourage improvement. For example:

• TRUE LOVE for keeping the same ball in play for only three minutes.
• JUGGLY for juggling three balls for 30 seconds.
• FIVE-STAR for juggling five balls at once.
• TUMBLY for losing 50 balls.
• CHILLED for surviving for six minutes.
• BIG HITTER for 500 hits.

CHALLENGE EVERYTHING
I had all these plans for challenging people at this, that and the other, like some kind of kerazy DIY Achievements system, but it was just starting to feel overly fragmented and complicated, which is a good sign to call it a day.

What we ended up with is one challenge for each of the three modes of play: a score to beat, which you tend to end up using to rub your new best into the faces of friends.

Simple but effective.

SOCIAL CLAMOUR
I’m interested in what friends are playing and how well, but I hate being spammed. Fortunately, there are OpenFeint options to take care of that.

For the Juggle! messages I wanted to add a little twist – more life via commentary on context and more drama through considered framing of moments to create more of a sense of a story. But that didn’t work out so well in the end, in part because the infrastructure wasn’t appropriate but mainly because there was way too much to be done to make it work. But, you know, one step at a time. What we have works fine and gets the ball rolling.

WHEN ALL’S SAID AND DONE AT THE END OF THE DAY
Juggle! has been played – and still is played – obsessively here. A great many knobs and dials were twiddled to get the perfect mix, to make sure Juggle! purrs like a well-tuned supercharged kitten engine and plays as lovely as possible. It’s been played and tweaked and tested to within an inch of its life and now it plays just how we like it – how we believe it should be played and enjoyed.

I like Juggle! Actually, if I’m honest I’m a little peeved that it’s functionally not as pure as a 1972 version ought to be – it features modes I was expecting to use in later versions – but I can live with that because overall it feels like a plausible historical artefact and captures the vibe of the time while being contemporary enough to feel timely.

It has an unusual feel in play. I like the contrast, the ebb and flow from chilled to frenzied, like a tennis player on the receiving end of a relentless ball machine. And I like the fact that you feel in control of that pace. I like the tension experienced, barely hanging in there during the crazy later levels, desperately keeping any single ball in play just to stay in play. Those tend to be the games that end with me sweating, hands shaking, heart pounding, eyes wide and leave me feeling invigorated and very much alive. That’s the old school buzz right there.

Juggle! is diverting – good for nibbling or taking a trip. It’s challenging, definitely – deliberately – but not insanely so. It feels like there’s plenty of scope to improve your performance; you have the tools to hand and you just need application on your part. The paddle motion takes a little getting used to, but when you do get used to it, you can pull off some funky play and appreciate some quality moments keeping four or more balls in the air.

Juggle on!

Previously: Juggle! in the Making (Part Four)

SETTLING OLD SCORES
Scoring’s a funny thing – red hat funny. It’s easy to measure: you play and check your score and trust your gut. If the score feels wrong – too small or even too big in relation to what you did – then the score is wrong.

Your score is a convenient summary of how well you played. The scores need to reflect how hard it is to play, so you score more for being more skilful. The scoring in Juggle! isn’t explained. I like the idea of feeling adequately rewarded without knowing exactly why; of wanting to know how the scoring works and trying to figure it out. Too much information in play proves confusing so specific scores are never revealed.

It was clear with a little thought and play what should contribute to the score:

• It’s harder to juggle more balls at once.
• It’s harder to juggle smaller balls.
• It’s harder to juggle faster balls.
• It’s harder to juggle balls at shallow angles – but necessary to successfully juggle multiple balls. (I didn’t bother with this in the end; it felt like too much detail.)
• A point per second of survival is also awarded to add some fragments to the mix.

One thing that became clear through playtesting was that you’d score more for focussing on a single ball rather than juggling, which wasn’t desirable. The reason was obvious: it’s because a straight multiplier for the number of balls in play doesn’t adequately reflect the skill involved in keeping balls in play. So that multiplier became the sum of the sizes of the balls in play – the combined ages of the balls. Result!

As Colin noted in his blog post, the scoring feels like it’s working so well; it feels right and you clearly score more for juggling more small balls for longer.

SIGNS OF THE TIMES
Ever dedicated to detail, we researched the period to get in the right frame of mind. Google threw up some real doozies for moments, food, fashion, toys and more. We also played some classic games by way of refresher. We even dressed and acted the part for a day, which was kinda freaky.

To make sure the title was authentic enough I took a look at arcade game names from the era (thanks, arcadeflyers.com) and noted obvious patterns, of which there were three:

• Ronseal names like Hockey; Rally; Soccer; Table Tennis.
• Quirky names such as Pong; Gotcha.
• Electronic names like TV Tennis.

Ronseal names included Juggle and Keep-Up while quirky names included Juggly and Batty and electronic names included TV Juggle and Video Juggle.

We all favoured Juggle! (although I do still have a soft spot for Juggly for some reason).

LOOK YOUR AGE
Andy and I explored many different forms throughout the five chosen years. Themes included juggling wild animals in the jungle; juggling people and vehicles in a city; juggling asteroids, meteorites and planets in space; on an island with sharks in the water below waiting to eat your balls; juggling in a volcano over a fiery pit… There were alternative paddles such as a trampoline, seesaw and hands; alternative balls such as fireballs, balloons, fruit, heads, happy fat people…

The suggested setting makes quite a difference. Space or underwater, for example, change expectations of how the toys behave.

Not that that mattered with the first version we chose to focus on: 1972. The aim here was to take the basic block look from the era and the prototype and to make it feel more than just clean pixel chunks – to give it some character.

We experimented with an assortment of screen effects such as a simulated screen flicker, emphasised scanlines, stippling, screenburn, LEDs (which was pretty groovy) – even static.

At one point there was a bubbling pit at the bottom of the playscape to reinforce the danger, but it just felt too invasive.

The inspiration for the final look came from pictures and video of old arcade machines in use. Everything seemed to have a suitably ghostly glow to it and a blue hue. Andy topped that off with a lovely stylised scanline effect and the overall look was complete.

During our investigations we found that too much visual detail proved too confusing, intrusive and distracting in action, so all that had to be minimised. That meant minimal playscape features (like backgrounds) but also restraint with visual effects such as distinctive impact flashes, particle sprays and ball trails. But there had to be a reaction to balls hitting the paddle, so what we have is a nice pulse effect: the paddle pulses when it hits a ball – just as the balls do when they hit the paddle or playscape sides – but they glow more when the hit is your doing.

MUSIC TO MY YEARS
I like a balance of the audio, visual and tactile as soon as possible, even when placeholders are used. Juggly started life with a classic BOP and BIP – a BOP for a ball hitting the paddle and a BIP as a higher-pitched echo when the ball hits the sides of the playscape.

But as the rules of play evolved, so did the audio requirements. The shrinking ball clearly needed to make smaller sounds – an increase in pitch for example. When multiple balls were juggled the noise was quite intense. To make this more pleasant I tried a staple: broken C major chords across a few octaves, with each size of ball making its own note and multiple balls typically creating chords as they hit the paddle and playscape sides.

Colin suggested trying a pentatonic scale to create a more melodic effect, which it did, but there was something about the C major chord that worked best. Juggle! ended up using broken G major chords over three octaves. The highest note starts to do your head in after a while, especially as you get better at playing and the smallest balls are in play for longer, so Colin used a softer chord rather than a single note, which works well.

Colin tried dozens of different sounds – percussion, vibraphones, xylophones, glockenspiels, a variety of basic waveforms: square, sine, triangle, etc. I was sure I wanted to build on basic sounds more fitting of the time, so stylised simple synthesis won out.

The best sounds were the punchiest – the ones that gave a real sense of solid objects impacting. A hearty echo was definitely the order of the day. It improves the sense of place and adds to the overall sense of substance – not to mention creates a certain trippy quality.

Colin and I are big fans of Spheres of Chaos, partly because you make your own music of sorts, and it was a consideration here because that sometimes happens in Juggle!

We couldn’t quite make ambient audio work in the form of a simple rhythm and some more abstract sounds – it tended to feel misplaced, never quite in sync enough with play; it also moved too far away from 1972 for my liking.

As cool as Colin’s audio is, I can also recommend playing Juggle! to different types of music, from punk (the pogo action seems appropriate) to rock, dance, trance, alternative (To Rococo Rot works for me) and classical.

Previously: Refining and iPhoning

And Finally… Juggle! Sociability

KICK IN THE I(PHONE)
SO, YES, THE PROTOTYPE in Multimedia Fusion 2 was very handy for testing out and refining all sorts of ideas. But when the time came to convert all that work to the iPhone, it turned out there were two tricky things to do with the seemingly simple Juggle!

1. Retain as much of the essence of the PC prototype as possible.
2. Make the overall experience as tight as possible.

Recreating the tactile interface was a problem; capturing the sensitivity of the prototype mouse control proved elusive. Sliding the paddle on iPhone was just too sluggish, like it is in all the other ball and paddle games, and play literally dragged.

I work with a strict “kill or cure” mentality. If I can’t see how to cure it, I kill it and move on. The player toy on iPhone did not feel good or make me feel good. FAIL.

I fiddled with all sort of variables and ideas. I tried a system akin to tapping the screen with your finger to hit the balls, but that was far too frustrating to use – too much like real juggling. I even considered a sort of snappy stretching effect akin to a diving tennis player or goalkeeper reaching for a ball but that only ever felt far too loose. I confess I was on the verge of calling it a day at this point.

YOOHOO!
Then Colin had a brainwave – obvious in hindsight, of course: amplify the finger motion so the paddle is more sensitive to your stroking. As it turned out, this was exactly the effect I was after. Aaron set up a special version so I could tinker with the numbers and, after some experimentation, the result is a paddle on just the right side of over-sensitive. It does take a little getting used to it, I grant you, but once you do, it more than meets your needs and it feels like an extension of your flesh. Any faster and it’s out of control; any slower and it’s not reactive enough.

I find it reminiscent of the Defender ship: way too fast at first, like a wild stallion to tame, but eventually pleasurable and essential for the insane later levels.

Two other necessary paddle revisions included i) moving it higher up the screen on iPhone (otherwise your finger obscured it too much) but not too high so as to adversely reduce the height of the playscape; and ii) stopping it from moving off the sides of the screen (a deliberate ‘feel choice’ in the prototype that felt misplaced on iPhone).

Making the experience as tight as possible concerned concentrating on the play and game rules and the overall flow of play. We could always just slap the concept on to the iPhone and throw it out there but that’s not how we roll. We have to play it and refine it and play it and refine it some more to make it sing.

As a result, many invisible minor rules are used to ensure play feels as good and fair as possible, but I’m not going into details because that’d spoil the overall effect.

ORDER! ORDER!
I was expecting a very simple game structure for the 1972 version – most likely a linear endurance test with negligible breaks. I toyed with the likes of 10 balls for 10 pence and a short fixed play time and even a ‘lives’ system of sorts (lose, say, 15 balls and yer out) but they felt inappropriate.

My obsession with focussing on the purest form first meant a minimal game structure: a single, simple beginning; a repetitive middle; a single, simple end – no more, no less. The qualities of the paddle and playscape remain constant throughout the game; the ball shape and sizes are fixed throughout the game but the speed of motion changes (well, to be specific, the effect of gravity on the balls and their speed increase, otherwise the balls’d fly off screen). There’s no cap on the ball speed and the later levels are just… WOAH (especially if you continue to survive the madness).

Super Breakout’s play has some punctuation as the bricks move into play, but that’s still potentially a road to nowhere with death the only ending. Arkanoid provided a far more considered feast with neatly arranged and varied portions further peppered with spices in the form of accessories (as ‘powerups’) rounded off with Doh for desert.

The purely endless experience feels right for the period but play’s less compelling when it’s not clearly apportioned and punctuated. So I ended up bleeding into 1978 and added a very basic level structure. It’s the difference between Mr Creosote being served everything mixed up in a bucket and a civilised dinner party; live jazz and pre-recorded pop. (I did try a ’song structure’ with play focussed on a metaphorical verse, chorus and bridge but couldn’t make that work, much to my disappointment.)

Each formal portion of play represents a comparable level of difficulty; a convenient measurement of play conditions so you know that play is consistent for as long as the level lasts. Distinctive levels provide focussed performance, like chapters in a book or scenes in a play. A portion of play in Juggle! is a guarantee that balls will be introduced at a consistent rate and will move at a consistent speed. That’s it. That’s enough.

LEVEL-UP LAW
I explored many different rules to trigger ‘level up’ such as:

• the number of balls introduced into play;
• the number of balls in play at once;
• the number of ball hits;
• the number of balls missed;
• the number of balls juggled over time;
• the number of balls not juggled (ie: keep so many balls on the go to keep the level down);
• the time survived;
• player score milestones and
• other, such as the completion of specific challenges.

I waivered with misses for a while but I liked hits advancing play. It takes skill to hit balls and feels right that you use skill to advance through the levels, to take on greater challenge. The challenge increasing when you miss balls, on the other hand, encourages you to keep balls in play, but advancing through the levels due to a lack of skill didn’t feel right; there was no scope to improve because you are punished so harshly for your failure. You also score more for faster balls (and should), so your potential for scoring increases by playing worse… I couldn’t square this circle, so I left it alone.

The ball speed and gravity are increased by a small percentage every level – and linearly. Larger and non-linear percentage increases in ball speed made play feel too pressured. To maximise fairness, the ball’s speed only increases when it’s hit by the paddle.

A new ball is introduced with every fourth ball hit (that’s any ball hit not four hits of the same ball). No idea why I went with four hits – it just felt right. I tried other methods of introducing balls, like timers, but there’s less of a sense of your involvement – no plausible cause and effect and not such a natural ebb and flow. In the final game, new balls are added as a result of four, three or two hits per level, in a wave pattern to give play an underlying undulation. I very much like the way this feels.

Previously: Gittin’ Jugglier Widdit (Part Two)

Next: The Juggle! Aesthetic

Another good end to the week - Juggle!, Denki’s new arcade game, launches on the App Store today, exactly one month after launching our first game, Denki Blocks!

If you haven’t heard about the game yet, Juggle! is Denki’s heartfelt tribute to the classic arcade games we grew up with. It’s a trip back in time to the origins of arcade games that captures the 1970’s vibe, but we’ve enriched the experience with some contemporary twists like friends leaderboards and achievements. Personally, I find the resulting blend absolutely intoxicating – the good kind of intoxicating – and at only £0.59/$0.99 it’s much cheaper than a bottle of beer!

Here it is in action:

[youtube]7wRw4AQEQCA[/youtube]

As Gary explained earlier in his “Getting Juggly With It” article we wanted to design a game that could have existed from the earliest days of video gaming, with the intention of evolving it through the decades later if it proved popular with players. The idea of iterating the game design and aesthetic “live” (so to speak) by delivering Super Juggle!, Jugglinoid! and finally Juggle! Evolved is exactly the sort of thing Gary and I have been excited about trying even before we started Denki. The infrastructure to deliver that in any sort of commercially appropriate way simply hasn’t existed until very recently, but now it’s here we can’t wait to see how people react to the approach.

I’ve always liked Bat and Ball based video games since I first played a clone of Pong on my family TV back in the late 70’s (I’m not *quite* old enough to have played it in the arcade!). We had one of those TV entertainment systems with four variations of Pong, called Tennis, Football, Hockey and Squash. However, my favourite was always the rather overlooked “5th Mode” – Practice. It was always a hassle trying to find someone to play with, so instead I spent most of my time inventing fun new games I could play on my own with the Practice mode. Of course, all that practice eventually made it even harder to find someone to play with!

When my brother bought a ZX Spectrum there was a Bat and Ball game called Thro’ The Wall included on the Horizons demo tape that came with it.  Needless to say it quickly became my favourite.  Thereafter I started tracking down Bat and Ball games wherever I could find them.  Arkanoid was a revelation for sure – the addition of power-ups made for an interesting twist, although I could have lived without the story to be honest…

I played many versions of Arkanoid and its sequels over the years, from the Spectrum in the 80’s through to the Commodore Amiga version in the early 90’s, but that was pretty much it.  No one else seemed to be doing much that connected with me after that.  From then on games became obsessed with 3D and anyone who’s tried to play a Bat and Ball game in 3D will know that’s one D too many. My fellow Denkians kept suggesting new Bat and Ball games for me whenever they found them, but none of them ever met my expectations.

It wasn’t until Reflexive released their amazing Ricochet game for PC during the early Casual Games revolution back in 2004 that I rediscovered a Bat and Ball game that met my requirements.  The elegant and subtle controls coupled with contemporary 2D styling and tastefully appropriate audio reinforcement was exactly what I was after.  I’ve lost count of the number of hours I’ve spent playing Ricochet and its sequels since then.  It’s right up there with the Diablo series for me.

So I think it’s fair to say I’ve become something of a Bat and Ball game connoisseur over the years.  Which makes Juggle! all the more exiting for me, because as well as being Denki’s first arcade game for the App Store, it also happens to be my perfect Bat and Ball game for iPhone – double win!

What do I like about it in particular?  Here’s a few things:

The Bat: So often it’s the bat that lets these types of games down, and it’s usually because the designer has tried to be too clever about how the ball bounces off it.  Anything too precise feels weird or unpredictable and that makes it unsatisfying to control – I need to be able to direct the ball reliably.  Pretty fundamental stuff, but all too common I find.  With touch interfaces, designers tend to implement a 1:1 ratio between finger movement and bat position.  That sucks.  The upside is that it feels immediately intuitive for new players, but it quickly becomes tiresome having to drag your finger from one side of the screen to the other all the time.  Juggle! amplifies finger movement so you can play for extended periods without finger ache.  It’s a little trickier for the first time player, but the trade off is a much better experience for long term players who are challenging for high scores – just like a classic arcade game.

No bricks: As much as I enjoy Breakout-style games I’m not particularly interested in removing bricks.  My primary enjoyment is simply keeping the ball in the air, but that gets boring quite quickly.  So when Gary came up with the idea of continually introducing balls in to play and reducing their size with each hit, that sounded like a great Twist.  A Bat and Ball game that didn’t need bricks to keep me challenged and interested?  I’m in!

The Time Limit: Although we have an endurance game that allows players to play as long as they like (assuming they can keep up with the increasing ball speed) it was the three and five minute time limited games that really appealed to me.  I often find myself with a few minutes to kill while waiting on a bus or standing in a line, and the thought of having a Denki Bat and Ball game that would fit neatly in to those odd moments really appealed.

The Scoring: The way Gary’s weighted the scoring (you basically score more for juggling more fast small balls for longer) means that there’s enormous scope for players to compete within very short time scales.  Even after weeks of internal testing we’re still beating each others scores in the 3-minute game, and at no point has someone sent me a score that I’ve thought I had no chance of beating.  Most importantly though it feels good – when you’re having a good game, juggling lots of small balls simultaneously, your score racks up really fast.  It always feels like it’s my fault when I get a crap score, but conversely when I get a great score I feel like it was entirely my l33t 5k1ll5 that delivered it.

The Way I Can Influence The Pace: As much as I enjoy playing short games for high-scores, I sometimes enjoy playing with the toy without worrying about the points I’m racking up in the game.  Endurance mode allows me to do just that.  It keeps spitting new balls at me every four hits or so, but I don’t *have* to hit them.  So long as I keep one ball in play the game continues.  If I want a relaxing game with a single ball I can have that, but when I get bored and fancy more pressure I simply start trying to juggle more balls.  And when it gets too much, I get rid of them and go back to hitting my single ball around the screen.  I can make the game match my mood.

Leaderboards and Challenges: Racking up a big score in Juggle! feels great, but dropping that score right on the front page of your friend’s iPhone by issuing a Challenge feels even better.

So, as you can see, there’s lots of things I like about Juggle!, and hopefully some of them might appeal to other players too.  To finish on though, I thought it might be worth pointing out what I don’t like – just to bring a little balance to proceedings:

Paddle: Despite what Gary, the rest of the team and Wikipedia tell me, it’s a bat.

No Options:  Gary’s a big fan of having no options in games.  I’m not.  I’d like to be able to switch the clock in the timed modes to the other side of the screen so I can see it better (I mostly play left thumbed).  I’d like to be able to adjust the sensitivity of the bat so I have to move my thumb even less to cross the screen with the bat.  I’d like to be able to turn off “Levelling Up” and “Ball Size Decreasing” so the game stayed easy for as long as I want if I’m not after a challenge.  And I’d like to have the option to use Bbmaj7(add9) as the chord the balls build into instead of G major, because I think it creates a more harmonious windchime effect.  But as Gary says, we could add all that, but it would take us more time – better to release it now and see whether anyone thinks it’s worth adding those options.  If it proves popular enough we can easily add them in a future update.

Hmmm… he has a point.  <grudgingly> I suppose </grudgingly>.  So if there’s anything else you’d like to see added or amended in future updates be sure to let us know and we’ll add it to the to-do list.  Right after mine, obviously

In the meantime I hope everyone has as much fun playing Juggle! as I have.  I’ll see you all on the leaderboards!

Colin.

—

THROWING IT TOGETHER
JUGGLE! STARTED LIFE as Juggly, a very basic Multimedia Fusion 2 prototype. I wanted to make a game right there and then using the fewest toys – familiar toys in a familiar context but with a twist. I had the likes of Breakout, Pong, Practice and the Higinbotham tennis in mind at the time.

The first ever version of Juggly was played on a landscape screen with just a block paddle at the bottom and block balls introduced from off the top of the screen every few seconds. The paddle was controlled by the mouse and highly responsive so you could cope with multiple balls at once. This crude play felt… interesting.

The balls were affected by gravity; they didn’t maintain a constant speed and direction until they bounced like in Pong or Breakout. The balls only bounced off the sides of the playscape, not the top, and were lost if they fell off the bottom. The balls got faster and harder to hit over time. That was it. It’s obvious enough and simple enough, sure, but there was something curiously compelling about this.

Colin picked up on it and we soon found ourselves competing to see who could play for longest and keep the most balls in play at once. It helps to have such direct contact with an audience. You have a kindred spirit to share with – a mirror for your game’s soul and an alternative fuel source for the fire. Having Colin to test out ideas was so useful – if not to confirm my design suspicions then to tip the balance or suggest alternative desires. It’s like the benefit of Pilot Not Flying.

From these humble beginnings my experimentation snowballed… Man, you wouldn’t believe how many different tests I tried. (Come to think of it, if you know me at all, you would believe it.)

PLAYSCAPE SCOPE
The screen orientation quickly changed from landscape to portrait, to give more room to juggle. I briefly toyed with the idea of different shapes of playscape but, after a disappointing test with obstacles (they – surprise – got in the way), I quickly settled for rectangular.

Bricks to bash just felt misplaced. At one point I had targets appearing at random positions on screen with the idea of hitting them before they disappeared but the game started to feel like some freakish fusion of Breakout and Space Invaders, which was not what I had in mind. Pinball table parts such as bumpers, ball locks, channels and hotspots to illuminate felt interesting but also a little too far ‘off-piste’ for my liking, so I went back to refining core play.

NOT ALL BALLS ARE CREATED EQUAL
Playing the prototype you’d find yourself getting quite attached to balls you’d managed to keep in play for a while and it soon became desirable to know which balls were oldest. Sticking rigidly to monochrome I used numbers to show how many times the balls’d been hit, which was OK but a bit too clinical. I broke my rules to add colour, but different shades and blatant rainbow contrasts just didn’t feel obvious enough.

The solution turned out to be size: the balls shrink (rather than grow) with every hit. Not only was this effective – it was dramatic. It takes a lot more skill to keep smaller balls in play and I liked the increase in tension. (Ultimately I found the smallest balls weren’t obvious enough and didn’t feel special enough, so now they flicker like fireflies, which is pretty funky.)

I tried different sizes of ball. The bigger the ball, the more confident you are of hitting it. However, a ball too big and too fast can be too intrusive or intimidating. I tried balls spinning but that started to get confusing. I tried balls with different properties: balls of different shapes (too unpredictable); balls with less bounce; balls that hung in the air longer; balls like golf balls and cannonballs and beach balls (which felt fine – until you play with different types of balls at the same time, like cool jugglers do… AAARGH!).

Balls rebounding according to the speed of the paddle or the direction in which it was moving made play far too tough. It made most sense to use a tried and tested system with the angle at which the ball bounces off the paddle determined by where it hits the paddle (some Breakout-style games have represented the paddle curved to accentuate this effect). For example, a ball hitting the paddle’s centre rebounds straight up, whereas a ball hitting the paddle’s outer edges rebounds at 45°.

The rebound angles deliberately don’t get too shallow and unpleasant, but I did find the balls felt too fast when they rebounded at the shallowest angle, so to compensate the gravity is reduced slightly, so the ball flies that little bit further and gives you a little more time to react.

PEDDLE PADDLE PIDDLE PUDDLE
Experimenting with different paddle sizes resulted in a preference. There’s a certain ratio of paddle to screen coverage that feels best – that gives you confidence. Too small and it’s too scary; too big and it’s too comfortable. Emotionally there’s a different feeling to a paddle that’s around a fifth of the screen wide (which is what it ended up as) compared to one almost the width of the screen. A thinner paddle didn’t feel substantial enough while a deeper one felt… inelegant and inappropriate.

The position of the paddle in the playscape also makes a difference. Too close to the bottom of the screen feels uncomfortable – as does too high, not just because it reduces how much playscape is available.

(This picture shows Juggly with balls too big and a paddle too thin, too small and too close to the bottom of the screen for comfort.)

The paddle bouncing slightly in reaction to ball hits made play feel too soft. Balls and paddles with their physical presence (‘collision areas’) slightly larger than their visible presence also made play feel too soggy. The paddle and balls have to feel solid, so I settled on ‘what you see is what you hit’ approach instead.

I love feeling lucky in games. Near misses – close shaves – improve the drama. In Juggle!, the ball is always hit back into play as long as it touches the paddle. This means you can whizz the paddle across the screen so its side rams a ball just about to fall into the abyss and it rebounds as if it’d hit the top extreme edge of the paddle, which feels good and makes you feel good.

Multiple paddles side by side (like in Revenge of Doh) or stacked (like in Avalanche) didn’t work. One paddle for each hand was horrible, even when both paddles were controlled through one device, because you’d end up getting confused about which paddle was best to use and drop the balls.

Inspired by the intense Japanese Breakout-style game Block I tried to deepen play with a pinging action to toss the balls higher. Then I tried a timely click to straighten the balls rebounding from the paddle. Neither feature added anything to the experience (if anything they made play less fun because there was too much more to think about).

I fiddled with many other features such as accessories to enlarge the paddle and to only rebound balls straight up but I couldn’t figure out decent rules for triggering these and, trickier still, why they’d obviously stop.

Previously: Getting Juggly With It (Part One)

Next: Refining and iPhoning Juggle!

MAKING HISTORY
LET ME TAKE YOU BACK to a time before we were blessed by the existence of mobile phones, MP3 players, home computers, the Internet and more than three TV channels operating for longer than a few hours a day in the UK.

A time not that long ago when handheld calculators were introduced, the first digital watch was sold for $2,100 and the world’s first video game console was released to make the future a reality; the year in which Led Zeppelin released Stairway to Heaven, The Godfather won the ‘Best Picture’ Oscar and man returned to the moon twice (and for the last time); the year in which the US Senate got its act together and passed the Equal Rights Amendment to give legal equality to women.

It’s 1972. The landmark “video skill game” Pong is released. But arcade classic Juggle! is not… Why?

The reason’s simple: despite what Andy’s awesome flyers might lead you to believe, Juggle! isn’t real.

But what if it was, hmm, eh?

THE PAST PRESENT
For the past 20 years I’ve had this urge to make a series of games that never were – mainly to suggest lost archives now discovered; to create an emotional resonance akin to that experienced by, say, new-found Beatles demo tapes – but also the idea of recreating contemporary games and themes in an old style to suggest an alternative past and present.

Of course, I wasn’t alone with that desire and there are plenty of examples of that sort of thing around today. So here I am fashionably late to the party. At long last, after creating all sorts of unreleased olde skool oddities in prototype form, I give you Juggle! for the iPhone…

Juggle! also fulfils a desire to create smaller, simpler, minimalist games – microgames or even nanogames; amuse-touche, if you will. It satisfies the need to just pick up and play a quick game of something unapologetically pure and simple and challenging – a uniquely virtual toy-centric experience to get the adrenaline flowing, send your heart-rate rising and leave you glistening with sweat and feeling exhilarated in a very special way.

Moreover, as a team we constantly strive to expand our repertoire and this gave us the ideal opportunity to do something more sociable – something that connected with the real world outside the artificial: leaderboards, achievements, the means to issue challenges and the scope to share your exploits with friends and the world via Facebook and Twitter.

So, with all that in mind, the Juggle! Guiding Lights were established:

• Create the sense of a previously undiscovered arcade classic.
• Create the feeling of juggling for people who can’t juggle.
• This is a game about keeping objects in the air, no more, no less.
• The skill is in seeing how many objects you can keep in the air and for how long.
• Allow people to conveniently share and compare their performances.

These provide a constellation of considerations to help us stay true to our destination; reminders of our intentions should we ever face uncertainties or obstacles.

NEW BALLS, PLEASE
So what exactly is the game? Well, in keeping with the period, the “How to Play” is nice and terse:

But this isn’t intended to be a perfect simulation of a blast from the past or even the old made new. The aim here is to capture a sense of the time – a sincere artistic interpretation working within deliberate limitations and intended to evoke the era; taking that basic but distinctive style and embellishing it to enrich the essence.

The core constraints were as follows:

• The minimum building block is four pixels (but movement can be smooth).
• No diagonals or ‘loose’ pixels.
• No more than two colours: black and white.
• Keep the toyset to a bare minimum: a paddle; balls; playscape boundaries.
• Simple audio synthesis, preferably a square wave.
• Simple analogue input akin to a potentiometer.

These rules provide a grounding – and were made to be broken.

FROM TIME TO TIME
To further improve the sense of an historical find, I also wanted to extrapolate the concept through the years, in much the same way as, say, Breakout has evolved. Five key years from the previous four decades were identified:

1972
The time of Pong and the like. Juggle! exists in its purest form.

1978
Super Breakout is released; plastic overlays are used to create the illusion of – gasp – colour. Super Juggle! exists in an updated form.

1986
Breakout evolved into Arkanoid and gained style, structure, a story and accessories. Juggloid! follows suit.

1997
Arkanoid effectively evolved into the likes of Puchi Carat and the (quite dreary) Arkanoid Returns; big, bold, colourful Neo Geo styling is the focus here, with characters to jolly along proceedings. Juggle! 2000 sports new playscape features more like pinball and a split-screen multiplayer mode.

2010
I couldn’t find an appropriate reference here but ‘contemporetro’ is ‘the thing’ these days and the likes of Rez and Geometry Wars have been influential in that style. Juggle! Evolved or Juggle! Generations features multiple modes of play, special challenges, achievements, leaderboards, etc, plus the scope to not only play along to your own music but to mix your own.

The intention was to start with the most basic version, make that as good as it can be and then extrapolate through time with subsequent versions, either in the form of updates or whole new releases depending on the scale of the changes. After all, if you can’t get the foundations right, there’s no point in building up…

Next: Making Juggle!