Reaching that level is a great achievement, to be honest the game is tough and unforgiving.
The bat’s speed is intentionally designed to be slightly slower than the ball. The idea was to try something different from the usual Breakout-style clones. Rather than a “hit and hope” bounce, we wanted the gameplay to focus more on ball control and planning the bat’s angle so you can influence how the ball rebounds.
When the timer reaches 0 it starts to deduct score with a ticking timer putting further pressure on the player.
I played this one a lot today and really enjoyed it, the power ups are really clever.
Sometimes it was frustrating when a ball deflected off a brick near the bottom & the paddle moved too slowly to reach it, would it be possible to be able to give the player the opportunity to press fire for a short burst of speed?
We did consider making the bat faster, but kept it slightly slower than the ball to emphasize skill. The focus was on tight bat-and-ball control along the bottom, keeping the bat cantered, and predicting the bounce rather than relying on “hit and hope” gameplay.
We noticed that in many Breakout clones the ball moves so fast that there’s little real skill in choosing the rebound angle. It often comes down to simply making sure the bat collides with the ball. After experimenting, we found that our approach resulted in better overall movement and a more deliberate play style.
If there had been enough memory available, we would have liked to include a power boost as you said, but unfortunately we eventually ran out of memory.
Thanks so much for playing it and letting us know.
Thanks so much for the reply, that makes total sense.
It's a great game, it plays well & brings some really good ideas to the Breakout genre. I'll just have to get better at anticipating where the ball is heading! 😄
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A fantastic platformer. The game I would have loved to program for the C64.
Thanks so much indeed. really appreciate that, thankyou.
Great fun! :)
Thankyou very much.
Very nice game, I added it to the video of other Spectrum games released in December.
Thankyou very much indeed we appreciate that.
Regarding the music update… it looks as though you've updated the devlog but forgotten to update the .tap file itself…!
Ah Yes there was a last-minute change, so we have not uploaded it yet. We plan to upload it alongside the WAV file and the other formats
Aha! Thanks for the explanation.
Thank you for this, here is my tribute...
Thank you for the brilliant video.
Reaching that level is a great achievement, to be honest the game is tough and unforgiving.
The bat’s speed is intentionally designed to be slightly slower than the ball. The idea was to try something different from the usual Breakout-style clones. Rather than a “hit and hope” bounce, we wanted the gameplay to focus more on ball control and planning the bat’s angle so you can influence how the ball rebounds.
When the timer reaches 0 it starts to deduct score with a ticking timer putting further pressure on the player.
Thanks again for the video, I really loved it.
I played this one a lot today and really enjoyed it, the power ups are really clever.
Sometimes it was frustrating when a ball deflected off a brick near the bottom & the paddle moved too slowly to reach it, would it be possible to be able to give the player the opportunity to press fire for a short burst of speed?
Thanks for the comment, Sloanysoft.
We did consider making the bat faster, but kept it slightly slower than the ball to emphasize skill. The focus was on tight bat-and-ball control along the bottom, keeping the bat cantered, and predicting the bounce rather than relying on “hit and hope” gameplay.
We noticed that in many Breakout clones the ball moves so fast that there’s little real skill in choosing the rebound angle. It often comes down to simply making sure the bat collides with the ball. After experimenting, we found that our approach resulted in better overall movement and a more deliberate play style.
If there had been enough memory available, we would have liked to include a power boost as you said, but unfortunately we eventually ran out of memory.
Thanks so much for playing it and letting us know.
Thanks so much for the reply, that makes total sense.
It's a great game, it plays well & brings some really good ideas to the Breakout genre. I'll just have to get better at anticipating where the ball is heading! 😄
Great game, thanks.
Thanks for the video demonstrating it, much appreciated.
Very nice game!
Thankyou for the video, appreciate that.
Great game with brilliant music
Starball - New ZX-Spectrum Game 2025
Thanks for downloading and taking time to play it on YouTube.
Appreciate it.