Extreme Fever
When a game mechanic is finally set, you may think the team can simply start building levels and adding art, music and effects. That’s true to some extent, but at PopCap, we don’t want to make just decent games — we want to make extraordinarily fun games that everyone loves to play. So once the game mechanic is set, it’s time to refine and refine it with new features until there’s enough variety and challenge to keep people playing for hours.
More power to ya!
One of the first features to show up was power-ups — special shots triggered by hitting specially colored pegs. (The Magic Powers now famously known as Bjorn’s Super Guide and Jimmy’s Multiball were originally special shots that came out of this phase.)
The special pegs appeared on the board randomly, and sometimes all at once. People tossed in all kinds of ideas for special shots, but when they were all active at once, game play became nearly as chaotic as when you fired a hundred balls. Choosing just some special kinds of shots and throwing away the rest risked losing some of the most enjoyable parts of the game. Something had to give… but what?
The levels also had plenty of their own unique features competing for attention. One level in particular, which featured pinball-style flippers (now Claude’s Flippers), helped push the thinking in a different direction.
The team realized that things like the Flippers didn’t need to be attached to a level. Flippers, along with other special shots, could be the power-ups. And instead of each shot having its own colored peg, the green peg could trigger any kind of power-up, giving the player the choice of which power to use.
Of course, as you’ll read about later in The Art of Peggle, the power-ups still had room for evolution. But narrowing it all down to a single green peg was no small feat. In addition to cleaning up the levels, this new power-up direction gave the player a new layer of strategy to explore, and the game gained a new level of excitement.
