Near Miss Design Document

The game uses provides a single player challenge in which the player must navigate through a minefield with limited control of the ship. The ship's primary means of control are through bounces off a player-controlled paddle.

Gameplay

The basic layout of the game. The ball starts going rightward toward the paddle slowly. The player controls this paddle directly ( see The Paddle below). This allows for a good angle to be planned. The clustering and layout of the mines are randomly determined, as is the y coordinate of the target. Note that the width of the minefield is not final or to scale and will likely have to be tweaked.

Using the burners: When passing close by a mine (a near miss), one may activate the burners. These are on the top and bottom sides of the ship and only extend momentarily. These will destroy the mine and collect its resources. This allows
After using the burners: The mine has now been destroyed.

Using the shield: When a mine collision appears to be unavoidable, one can activate the shield. This will protect the ship from any damage and will teleport it back to the starting position if it hits a mine. Just like the burners, this is only activated for a moment and disables activating the burners for a while.
After using the shield and hitting a mine: The ship's position is reset, the target is downsized and moved, and the mine remains intact.

If the player manages to hit the target, the player has cleared that stage. Otherwise, the player bounces off all walls with conservation of momentum.

The idea is that the player is trying to clear an area in front of the target so they may hit it easily. Additionally, clearing more mines will increase score. However, hitting mines is obviously not desired. Teleporting away makes the game a little bit harder and hurts the progress you made on a certain section of the minefield. Also, it diminishes you score.

The player must use skill to ensure they activate the burners only when performing a near miss and do not teleport when it is not necessary. Futhermore, they must know how to use the paddle well to get good routes through the minefield.

The Paddle

The paddle is magical. This is very important. Instead of conserving momentum, the paddle always launches the ship away at predicatable angles. The image provided from http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/courses/15-466-f17/game0-design/ shows exactly how the paddle will launch the ship, no matter what angle the ship comes at it.

The magic paddle always launches the ship at angles like this, no matter the approach. The further from the center, the more obtuse the angle.

Win/Loss Conditions

The ship only has a finite amount of fuel. Activating the burners or the shields drains this. Successfully burning a mine does collect some more fuel for the ship. Fuel also is drained overtime as the ship is moving through space (although this is a very small amount compared to burner/shield activation).

The score of the player will be their fuel after hitting the target. If the player runs out of fuel, they lose.

I think difficulty is controlled well by three fronts:

I ignore (at least for now) any mine movement because that seems very hard for the player.

Different game modes or progressive difficulty could be constructed based on how tweaking these variables.

Controls