Balloon Trip
Balloon Fight on the NES is one of my favorite games of all time. I decided to remake the Balloon Trip mode from the game in Unity!
This is an arcade style mode, so go for the high score! Collect balloons to increase your score, and the higher combo you get the more points those balloons will be worth! You will also get 10 points for every half second you survive!
Try to avoid the purple stars!
Green Balloons: 300 points
Yellow Balloons: 500 points
Red Balloons: 700 points
If you survive for over 2 minutes, the background will stop spawning and I'm not sure why. If you survive even longer it will come back. This doesn't affect gameplay at all, but it's worth noting.
I hope to also implement the Balloon Fight mode later on, but I didn't have enough time to figure out how the enemy AI would work.
This is also my first time working with the animator so I went with one static animation. With more time, I want to make it only animate when you pump and change to a different sprite when you hit a star.
Be sure to click the screen to get audio! Have fun!
Comments
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The sound effects are a really nice touch, especially since it keeps track of how high you are too. The sprites for the spikes/stars are a little dark, and the balloons don't really have much design to them, making them fit the 8/16 bit art style would help them fit in more. I personally like the control you have over the movement, because I'm really bad at the original balloon fight because of how much momentum carries when you stop moving.
The game tracking your combo and score is a really nice touch, and the different sound effects for losing and losing with a high score is impressive. Some of the collisions feel a little weird, since I think I missed the obstacle but in reality my run ends.
It's really really fun!!
Feedback
Very faithful feeling recreation, I especially like the sound effects, it makes the game feel really responsive. I'm mainly just going to echo Josh - I think the hitboxes are a bit too unfair. Generally, you want the hitbox on on dangerous obstacles to be a little smaller than their onscreen representation, and for collectables/pickups (things the player wants to hit) to have slightly larger hitboxes than their onscreen representation. As is, I feel like you hit the diamonds well before you should.
Thanks! I didn't think about making the colliders smaller, but that's a great idea! I made the colliers larger for the collectables in my last, so I'm not sure why this didn't cross my mind for this one. The colliders right now are pretty exact for the player, diamonds, and balloons. That's a great idea and I'll definitely fix that
Just goes to show you how player perception can often be "wrong". If you were going to push this further, I'd really dig into this question from the tester (me, but I'm trying to generalize). What made you feel like it wasn't your fault? This is also where it would be helpful to have players record themselves playing and to "play aloud" so that you have some insight into how they're feeling as they play.
I did some further testing with some of my friends and it seems that players don't feel like they hit a star whenever they are staying still and the star moves into them. It just feels off when the star moves into you rather than the player moving into the star.
Apparently I didn't survive for over two minutes! What I'd work on more are the controls (it's been a while since I played Balloon Fight, but I think the left-right movement isn't as fast/responsive) - controlling the game almost felt too easy.
Even with that, the collision felt unfair sometimes. It felt like a lot of the times that I lost were not my fault, and that I didn't *actually* quite collide with the diamond shapes. If the diamonds use box colliders, that might explain why.
Thanks for the feedback! The diamonds are polygon colliders so they are the same as the shape. I also spent a lot of time editing the player's collider to match his sprite. Perhaps making the diamond's collider a bit smaller than the object itself would help!