Plonko (Demo)

I played on a PC in browser.

On first attempt, during the tutorial, I clicked the score upgrade before it prompted me to do so. When the prompt came up, I was unable to afford the next upgrade and was softlocked.

I refreshed the browser page and ran the game again, and it let me start over.

Tiny bug, game worked after that.

I like the sound effects, and imagine it'll get pretty beepy down the line!

Very strange issues on my initial playthrough of the browser version. For some reason, the game started me with $100k. It wasn't clear if this was intentional. Additionally, the settings button simply doesn't work and when clicked, seems to present a text overlay meant for the "shop" button instead, except it only displays the portion of that text which overlaps with the settings button (I hope this explanation makes sense so that you can better troubleshoot this). When I click and hold on the shop button, it displays the same message, except it similarly only displays the portion overlapping with the shop button (the full text being "Prestige up!!! Prestige points: 2").

I tried to refresh the browser to reset my progress,and doing so showed a few screens at the beginning for a split second each, one referencing a tutorial (it was too fast to read). When I entered into the game proper following the developer logo splash screen, it gave me an achievement for completing the tutorial... even though there was no tutorial for me!

Additionally, the "achievements" page has invisible achievement icons. The reason I say they're invisible instead of "there's no achievement icons" is because when I move my cursor around, there's little text highlights which pop up when I'm presumably hovering over them.

I decided to still play around a little more and bought some upgrades from the shop with the seemingly unintentional initial influx of cash. The multi-ball is a bit weird; it randomly spawns extra balls when mine hits the plonks in the bottom two rows (not counting the moving plonk). It's pretty startling for there to suddenly be a bunch of extra balls. I went back to the shop and noticed the greyed out "Moving plonk" option, which I had already purchased, turns back into the lighter non-grey state as if I could purchase it again. This seems to happen when my cash reaches a certain threshold, as it goes back to greyed out when I spend down my money on other upgrades, but I didn't catch what dollar amount triggers this (somewhere around $10k or so).

That all aside, I did like the spawner for the balls which would speed up and slow down. Considering how little visual activity there is in a game like this, any details like that tend to stand out. I also really liked how if the ball got caught up somewhere that it'd shake a little to keep it from staying there.

This is both too barebones in terms of concept and execution, and has a not-insignificant amount of issues at the moment. Needs more work. I played the browser version specifically.

What does the settings icon say on hover? All I can see is "Pre...".  I thought maybe it said something like "Press and hold to prestige".  So, I held down on it (and maybe dragged off to the left) the this screen changed to a different color set: red bumpers, purple bottom bar. Glitch?  Prestige beta?  Also, I'm playing in web browser on PC.