Alpha 8, continue?

While the gameplay still changes a little, the development is more about polishing things than adding a lot of stuff. Thanks for the reviews and feedback from the previous alpha that mostly drove the development of this one.

Piece of cake (or not)

You weren't able to clear the game, weren't you? Lying is bad, there was a bug, you couldn't anyway. But now the hardcore scoring gameplay is not the only one anymore.

Continues are there at last! But if there is no need to insert a coin, continues still have their own cost. If you care about your score, using a continue will divide your score, and the more you use, the less points you earn. If you don't, well, have fun!

And if the game was still too difficult or frustrating, an easy mode is available, slowing the ball (and your score by the way). And for a quick adrenaline shot, a difficult and insane mode are there too.

Is that a bumper?

The ball trajectories were updated more or less. Some hit against mobs are more predictable and the back-hitting aiming was changed to the old-school block-breaker style, with the ball bouncing left or right depending on where it hits the bat. And just for testing, rotation can be done with PgUp/PgDown or the shoulder buttons of your gamepad.

For the front to be more distinguishable, the bat was changed, with lights! No, there is no "honk" button.

Less score but more score

The scoring system was almost completely reviewed, hopefully for the best (I suppose...).

Combo chains are still rewarding, but there's no reason to ragequit after breaking a 30+ combo chain, as the combo bonus is now capped to x2. That means all combos above 10 will grant you the same amount of points. You'll just have to rebuild a 10 hit combo chain to recover all the bonus. That still hurts in score attack...

To compensate all these potentially score reductions, blocks from world 2 and 3 give more points. By the way, you don't earn extra lives in score attack mode anymore.

And for not ragequitting when you missed that one block that could make a huge step after entering the warp gate, the destruction bonus is granted during the level instead of only at the end. So no more "If I clear the level I get an extra-life, but if I miss it's game over".

And some bugfixes

No bug funny enough to mention. These should be things you might not notice now that they are gone. There are still a lot of them. Not game-breaking bugs (well I hope), but a few that feel strange and that's why it's still in alpha.

Almost every level should be reviewed and updated. Level 1-1 seems fine, some tweaks on 2-2 should be fine, the other are more or less crappy. That will be enough for a dedicated update.