Pachinko and Hard Modes

For the last few days I've been working on the third mini-game for my carnival pack. I'm particularly fond of this one. Its based on those horse racing carnival games where the player rolls a ball up a ramp and scores points when the ball falls through differently marked holes at the end of the ramp. The player's horse moves based on how many points the player scores, and somebody wins when their horse makes it to the finish line.

I've made a similar game. Instead of having the player roll a ball up a ramp, I have the player drop a puck in to a Pachinko type board. It bounces down through some pegs and a bumper that is moving back and forth. Eventually, the puck falls in to one of nine slots and the player gets points based on which slot. The points (ranging from 5 to 20) cause a rocket on the left of the screen to move up towards a finish line in a fashion very similar to that of one of the horses from the carnival games. In my game, the player plays against two computer opponents. They don't have their own Pachinko boards, but every once in a while, based on a stopwatch, the computer opponents are randomly awarded one of the same point values the player can get. So the player has to race the other two rockets to the finish line.

In addition to the new mini-game, I also added hard modes to the new and previous games. In the basket catch game I simply increased the gravity so the balls fall faster. In the juggling game I added two more balls for the player to juggle, making the total five. It gets really hard to keep them all from falling off the screen when they are all bouncing off each other. For the hard mode of the rocket race game, I made the computer opponents score at a slightly increased rate (something like 1 or 2 times more per minute). That alone didn't feel like enough so I also switch the probabilities of scoring 5 points or 10 points. Now, in hard mode, the computer opponents have a 4/9 chance of getting 10 points and a 2/9 chance of getting 5 points (instead of the other way around like in easy mode).

One more mini game left and I'll only have the finishing touches and settings pages to add. Right now I have instructional Toast messages popping up when a game is loaded that tell the player how to play, but I'll probably replace those with a "How To Play" type page where you get instructions on each game mode. I also need to get the scoring and stuff set up as I plan to add Scoreloop to the game.