The contest was about making a game inspired by a retro classic, and we chose Breakout. Fabian added a lot of verve with the circus-retro style he created, Luigi created a suprisingly relaxed and original score, and we implemented an original and somehow “different” gameplay.
I’ve been playing around with Stackout since you gave me access to the super-secret-beta, and I have to say that I love the game! It both looks and sounds great (I’m especially jealous of the clean but sexy UI). I did have a little trouble at first getting used to judging where the ball was with the slightly odd perspective of the board, but as I played it more things got easier. Losing track of the ball on some of the levels with big ‘stacks’ was a little annoying, but I guess that’s just one of the challenging parts of the gameplay - it was never enough to discourage me from having another try!
My one criticism (and it’s a small one) is the way the launch direction works when firing the ball. If I remember correctly (and I might not be…) in games like Breakout, moving the paddle while firing the ball gave momentum in the direction you where moving (e.g. moving left while firing shoots the ball to the left), but in Stackout it’s the other way around. This felt a little counter-intuitive to me, especially considering that once the ball is in motion the behaviour changes back to left for left again. But it’s a minor thing, and probably me being picky (It’s often a good sign when someone has to get picky to find a flaw in your work)
Having looked at the other entries on the contest page, I don’t see anything that looks or feels as polishes as Stackout - and I’d be shocked if you didn’t win!
Thanks DexRobinson The skewed perspective was tested a lot before we really decided to implement it, but in the end we like it a lot!
And thanks Phil! I’m glad you never felt discouraged We tried to make it relatively difficult, to keep the retro feeling (damn, those retro games gave me nightmares when I was a kid!). And you “kind of” remember correctly the launch system of Breakout, but we wanted to implement something different. Though we’ll definitely think about it and ponder it more, because I see your point.
Guuuys, this is awesome news for us. We actually did WIN this contest
We are so happy and proud and excited we managed to do this
The voting revelation was sooo tense, I did never push the refresh button that hard in my life
At the moment Daniele is working extrahard on getting a webbuild up to kongregate and gamejolt which we hope to have ready until the end of this very week.
The next step will be to take all the feedback and our own ideas into consideration for some of the more commercial releases
I was just wondering… with the disappointing play numbers on Kong - have you thought about exporting a flash version of the game? Then uploading that to Kong and other portals.
It would be great to get a comparison on how the play numbers compared, and of course would the flash export even work! I’ve been very tempted to buy the flash exporter but I’m not convinced anyone has had any success with it… the forums seem dead surrounding the subject…
That would indeed be an interesting comparison stuatk, if Unity Flash exporter was decent enough - which sadly it isn’t. It doesn’t support Reflection (weirdly, since Flash itself uses quite a lot of Reflection) and possibly a lot of other stuff, so we honestly have no intention to spend money on it until it becomes a little better
Our new target is mobile and tablets, and thanks for the good luck
(It’s often a good sign when someone has to get picky to find a flaw in your work)
