A GMTK Jam 2018 game.

Not sure if it quite hits the genre part of the prompt, but this game ended up being a lot of fun to make and toy with. I hope you enjoy it, too!

When you start up, check what direction the ball will move, place your block by clicking with the mouse, and then the AI player will place one, too. Then "play" starts--but, well... you can't move. 

When you score, you'll get to aim the shot at your opponent's field. Click anywhere in the light blue to aim. The arrow moves to follow the cursor.

When the opponent scores, they'll take aim, then you'll have a chance to place a new block in any of the open spaces on the grid. Your blocks take up their space and also eliminate surrounding space for placement.

Play is scored on a differential, i.e. your lead is what counts, not your points. First to seven wins. Additionally, if a player has to place a block and there is no valid position for it, that player loses.

Some Things to Note: 

  1. I went with retro sound; I tried to keep it from being harsh as retro can sometimes be, but thought to warn you anyway.
  2. There's definitely some physics jank in here. The ultimate outcomes are usually close to the expected, but you might notice some odd looking bounces here and there. Chalk it up to time and my finite brain power. If you get any softlocks, I do apologize.
  3. Even if the physics are perfect, there's still some cases where the ball will end up in an infinite loop. I plan on adding a solution to do this in a patch, but it's currently not there. This is a soft lock. I do apologize.
  4. Thanks to Arne on LOSPEC for a solid, simple palette: https://lospec.com/palette-list/generic-8-color

Download

Download
pong-but-you-cant-move.zip 1 MB

Install instructions

Download the zip, extract the files, run the .exe!

Development log

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