- This is great to hear, I've put a huge amount of work into making ball guides that are fun but fair, and somehow correspond to tricky shots in real life also being tricky in the game. Yeah I think other games get this wrong a lot.
You totally nailed this aspect, I think it's my favourite aspect of the entire thing so well done at finding that sweet spot between real life angle ambiguity and video game explicitness.
- I know that other games get break physics wrong, but I think mine also feel wrong, especially for pool. I only have a few parameters to tweak, the ball friction and restitution, the table friction and the separation between the balls. I've noticed that some pool tutorial videos say "hit the balls here and this one might go in", and on my rack it doesn't ever go in. Hopefully with some minor tweaking I can make this feel better as I know it's very important.
So I just went into practice mode and spent about 5 minutes just trying all sorts of different angles and strengths (using 8-ball, Triangle, 9 ft table). Something I noticed is that if I aimed at the second or third row ball on either side on high power, some of the balls would stay in place and be spinning very fast? I can't even begin to assume what the cause of this is or whether it's related to my other feelings about the break feeling a bit weird, but I also had dozens of breaks that felt pretty perfect. Especially hitting the triangle head on at various powers felt just right. So I think there's possibly some interaction between balls that is contributing to the weird feeling, especially regards to spin.
- You mean to skip to the end of your shot? Or to skip the AI when it is taking a shot? Or skip/fast-forward all the AI shots?
I mean just any shot. e.g You make your shot (or watch the opponent make their shot), and then you enter some sort of input and it fast forwards to the final locations of the balls. Essentially just calculates the final position and moves the balls to those positions immediately. A few other games I know of do this.
- Yes you can't recentre the spin, that would be useful, will try and think of an intuitive way of doing this.
imo Double-Tap is the best way here. Just double tap on the cue ball and it auto-centres.
- Do you mean playing online against other people? Or playing against someone in the same room but on a different device? (e.g. via bluetooth). I've implemented the former in a previous snooker game using game center and google play game services. But it wasn't worth the upkeep effort since barely anyone used it. Of course at the moment with around 50 players per day in total it doesn't make much sense yet.
Naaah not online Totally not worth it, I agree. I meant the latter, someone else with their own device but same room via bluetooth or on the same wifi network or something. My housemate and I are itching for a comfortable, functional local pool game.
- That's interesting to hear, I think it probably is unintuitive, and I imagine a bunch of people have probably never made it past the title screen. I'm not sure what to do without reworking the whole menu system. I don't know if a different icon would help.
Two big things on this for me:
1. The button is always there and also functions as a "Select" button. So if I've swiped to an option and press the yellow button, that selects it in the same way that tapping the option itself. So it's not intuitive to then assume that it would start the match beyond that? I would just throw in a separate button on the Rule selection screen (where you choose triangle/table size etc) that says "Start Game"
2. Positioning! on a mobile device it's very likely that someone's hand is covering up that button and they don't even see it and can't figure out how to start a game.
Also, just looking at it again now. My phone's screen has curved corners, and the buttons themselves are cut off (Forward, Backward and Settings buttons)
Also, I wasn't able to recreate it but I got a weird defect where the forward/back buttons were like, 2cm to the left each after I changed the button size in the options. I'm a software tester by trade so me not being able to reproduce it is probably a good sign? But something to keep an eye on.
That's my main goal, elegance and simplicity, just the pool game you want to play if you like pool, I'm happy to hear some of that is coming through. As I'm more familiar with UK pool and snooker it's interesting to hear how all of this translates to American pool. Yeah any non dedicated pool or snooker game is probably going to suck, it takes a lot of effort to get the details right and you notice them very quickly if they aren't.
Anyway thanks again, keen to hear more thoughts.
Oh I should've mentioned that I'm Australian, not American. But probably many of the pool games I've played are american? And I would say you have absolutely succeeded with elegance/simplicity. I'm not blowing smoke up your butt when I say it's one of the nicest feeling pool games I've played.
Consider me highly invested in this project, feel free to message me here if you wanna talk more about it. Genuinely happy to help.
![[M]omo](/data/avatar/31623721585/92792-m.jpg){kind=avatar}
