Pixel Purge Extreme Testing

My effort for extreme testing was to add a number of ball (16) to the scene. I created and added new tags to the ball locked to the paddle and also the other 16 balls. Locked and Unlocked respectively. Back into the code, I added 2 if statements to the start method and the update method to only execute the "locking of the ball to the paddle only if the ball was tagged with lock.

Next step for me was to change the x push for balls on the left side to push them left rather than right. Last think I did was scale the x values for the paddle to make it bigger. The level was a blast to watch… not much playing but even trying to keep up with 17 balls was a blast.

On a side note, I am thinking I want another ball tag that will not launch the ball with the mouse click and wait for a collision to get it rolling. So… Three balls

  1. Balls locked to the paddle that launch with mouse.
  2. Balls placed in the game space but not locked to the paddle that launch with mouse
  3. Balls placed in the game space that will only move once another ball collides with them…

Happy Coding everyone,
I am replying to my own post to share some learnings. I thought I might gloss over the extreme testing phase of the process and did what I would consider the minimum work and I was surprised how many things that I learned and accomplished during the extreme testing process… Just sharing but based on the level above… I learned:

With 17 balls in play it is possible to hit a block with two balls at the same time… This created multiple decreases in the block count and ended the level early. I had to change the code to adapt for that. Not sure if I did it correctly but my changes seemed to work.

Balls could get trapped at the top of the screen. Our Random Vector shift only went in the positive direction which pushed balls higher on the screen and eventually could trap them across the top. I created a min and max vector change rather then using 0 on the lower end and it corrected the issue.

I didn’t like turning off the lose collider so I leveraged what we did with blocks and counted the number of balls in play on the level and modified the lose collider code to decrease that total. When the last ball hits the collider, then we lose the level.

All of these changes could be applied to the other levels so the game play so overall I believe I improved the game with these changes.

Thought others might be finding similar improvements…

Greg

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