Survival Bowling

Description

In Survival Bowling, you use a limited supply of bowling balls to defeat waves of bowling pins. In each wave you will complete a typical game of ten-pin bowling. Typical, that is, except for the fact that the pins are coming to snatch up all your balls!

The pins are alive. They have arms, legs, and cruel intentions. They will advance down the lane towards your stash of bowling balls. If they make it all the way, they will steal a bunch and try to carry them back to the pit. But if you act fast, you can bowl them over as they retreat and get the balls back!

The game progresses as a series of waves with increasing difficulty. As you advance you will have more lanes to manage, the pins will get quicker, and they may start surprising you with some dirty tricks! At the end of each wave, you will receive reward balls for each spare, strike, and turkey you achieved. You will need to do well to earn enough balls to make it through the next wave. If you run out of balls, you will see the Game Over screen. You may use up to 3 continues to keep going, after which the game is truly over.

The game is free and by default, Ad supported. You may purchase UNLOCK under the STORE section of the Menu screen. This product provides three immediate benefits: 1) All advertising is removed, 2) more balls are provided at start, on continue, and at wave end, and 3) “Peaceful Pins” becomes available. Peaceful Pins appears as an option in SETTINGS of the Menu screen. When enabled, the pins will permanently remain at the end of the lane – sort of like regular bowling!

Survival Bowling is a great deal like regular bowling but has key differences:
* You must remove ALL the pins from the lane, even if it takes more than 1 or 2 balls.
* You can throw as many balls as you like at a given set of pins, but only the first two that hit will be used for scoring.
* You are not penalized if a ball goes into a gutter or otherwise completely misses pins. The ball is wasted but scoring is unaffected.
* Pins will escape if they are able to return to their starting position after reaching the foul line. This is indicated as a miss on the scoreboard.

History

The precursor to Survival Bowling was a prototype I called The Pumpkin Game.  In it, the player used touch controls to “throw” pumpkins at green monsters.  The monsters would spawn in the distance and move towards the unseen “player” behind the screen.  The idea was you destroyed all the monsters before they could overwhelm you.  It was a bare bones prototype of a horde survival game.

The inspiration came as I watched someone play The Pumpkin Game in a way I did not expect.  I intended for players to attempt distance shots at the monsters.  But this clever tester was intentionally allowing them to get close and form a large cluster around him.   Why?  He said that he wanted to throw a pumpkin at the cluster and have it cause a chain reaction, knocking out multiple monsters at one time.

I had not considered that.  Knocking many monsters out with one well aimed shot.  A chain reaction which caused them to topple into each other.  Hmm… sort of like… bowling pin action?  Should I mashup my little horde survival prototype with… bowling?

Survival Bowling began to take shape at this moment.  I changed my pumpkins into bowling balls and my generic green monsters into anthropomorphic bowling pins.  The setting became a bowling alley.  The art assets became retro-bowling themed.  Instead of inflicting damage to a player, the monsters would deplete a stash of bowling balls.  Everything from sounds to scoring was implemented along a bowling theme.