Features I know that people will want, and that I didn’t put in, and why.
Adjustable Ball Speed
The ball moves pretty fast. People are bound to want something in between full speed and “Slow Ball”... but I can’t do it. The ball’s speed is linked to the refresh rate of your monitor. Otherwise, the animation becomes jerky and the game becomes hard to look at and too difficult to play. (The reasoning is actually a bit more complicated than that, but never mind.)
Friendliness to Applications in the Background
You don’t get this one because letting a background process get control means not knowing when you’re going to get control back again. To provide smooth animation, Poing! must be able to draw and display a new image 60 times per second or more (depending on your monitor’s refresh rate). Giving time to background processes makes this impossible.
Handle Multiple Monitors Better
When you first start it up, Poing! will find a monitor with at least 256 colors and center its window there. You can drag the window to any other monitor; Poing! will adjust to the new monitor’s refresh rate but will not adjust to its color environment. This is deliberate. Poing! absolutely requires 256 or more colors, and will refuse to run on machines that don’t provide such a monitor.
Which leads to...
16 Color or Black and White Version
I wanted Poing! to look as great as possible, and that meant using a biggish palette of colors. Poing!’s graphics just don’t look good in fewer than 256 colors. I could add alternate image sets designed for fewer colors, but that would make Poing! pretty big. My guess is that most people who are enthusiastic about arcade games will have a Mac that can handle 256 colors.
If I’m wrong — If you really really really want this game in 16 colors or black and white, send me a note and let me know! Enough votes, and I’ll do it.
