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Things like spaceships and windmills began to emerge, crowding the screen with obstacles that kept the player hoping that at least some of the bouncing balls would find their way to the jackpot bucket. "Each level was like designing an entirely new pinball table" Brian recalls. They wanted to pack every level with obstacles and many goals to achieve, which made the project very challenging.
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As with every other development project at PopCap, they added some basic graphics and sounds, ignored special effects for the time being, and tested and shared the results with coworkers in hopes of finding the perfect blend to fit the fun model of game play they envisioned. They needed a little more time.Īnd so began a four-month process of creating handfuls of prototypes using various game designs. They knew there was a game in there, but at the time they "just had a whole bunch of different ideas that mostly didn't work" says Sukhbir. "The main issue was finding the right balance of luck versus skill." It was "too random and luck-based" recalls Sukhbir. After testing it out, Brian and Sukhbir still really liked the concept - which, actually, was a big deal! - but the game was too difficult and too chaotic. The first version of the game was very much like Pachinko, with lots of balls falling at once and scoring that was based on the number of balls that landed in the jackpot bucket. Nothing is set in stone early on, so we never expect our first attempt to be perfect. Making a PopCap game can take many months just to get the right gaming concept: we create many prototypes to try out lots of different ideas, but we'll have to dump most of them along the way. At this early stage, they were only dealing with the simple art of pegs and balls, and experimenting with different peg patterns and drop speeds. He and producer Sukhbir Sidhu then designed some test levels to put the new code, dubbed the "physics engine" through its paces. To get things started on Peggle, Brian Rothstein (aka Ace) programmed a computerized world that would simulate gravity and make balls fall and bounce realistically through a field of pegs on screen. Balls that don't land in the jackpot drop into a tray which pays out more balls and a chance to win prizes.Īt PopCap, we begin creating a game using a bare-bones template - just a basic game functioning without any art or sound to see if an idea will fly. Then, you just hope the balls can survive a variety of pins and obstacles to fall into a jackpot-type bucket at the bottom. In Pachinko, you control the flow of balls that continuously fall from the top of a machine. The team wanted to make a game that would resemble Pachinko - a colorful, chaotic slot-machine-type game that's a big hit in Japan. Like most PopCap games, Peggle started with a simple thought.