Overlapping zigzags quickly trap them. Since ‘trapped’ appears to be determined by the rate of bounces, you just need to divide the area as much as possible.
It's giving Qix, a little bit, although the critter's different and the lines are way more freeform.
Bug, I think: the critter definitely can cross some of the paint lines, which was a little unexpected. It slows down but then it's on the other side of it.
The collision detection seems to have the same problem as the yin yang game that was posted a while ago: The critters sometimes cross the lines. I wonder if the root cause is similar, having to do with this being a browser game?
Yes, this game is quite similar to JezzBall, or to a more modern example, Just Fillin’, which used to be available on the iPhone. I remember playing JezzBall back in the day on a floppy disk, and Just Fillin’ during the early days of the iPod Touch. It’s no longer available, but when I mentioned it, my 11-year-old son tried to recreate it, and honestly, I think he did a pretty great job.
This is so nostalgic. I remember feeling like I was so good at Jezzball. In later levels I'd start a wall near one corner of the screen, closer to one edge than the opposite edge, to ensure the shorter wall would connect, and sacrificing the longer wall. The surviving wall would create a "corridor" in which to trap balls with tiny horizontal walls, often such that they ended up completely stationary.
I encountered a version of this game sometime around 1990 and played the hell out of it. Since I don’t see any remakes from around that time, and I never had a Game Boy, I might have found it on a BBS, or a discount rack. There were a huge number of people briefly playing another game in this genre sometime around 2004, with lots of pretty colors. Everyone was playing it, and then they weren’t. I didn’t because I’d already played the original enough for one life. But I can’t find it in the list either.
