Better scoring system

It probably depends on the genre, but in my experience, balancing a game is one of the hardest parts of making a game.

With BubbleCade, I had these major objectives in mind with the scoring system

1. It should encourage great shots and good aiming.
2. It should reward efficient play, with a minimum amount of shots.
3. It should not be possible to grind score by repetitive game play.

To achieve this, I made some fundamental changes to the scoring system:

1. Breaking lose balls will be rewarded with 500 points per falling ball, which is much more than for simply popping bubbles. Bombs work a bit different to how they worked before, which results in slightly less score compared to breaking lose bubbles with a color match. Bombs have an explosion radius of 2 and thus are easier to use.

2. At the end of each level, you get a chance to earn an efficiency bonus. You’ll get those when you used (fairly) few shots to solve a level, and the amount of points depends on the score made in that particular level. You’ll get several thousand points from time to time, but if you really did a great game with 10k+ of score with only a few shots, you’ll end up with 20-30 thousand efficiency bonus, which will really make a difference in your Final Score.

3. Repetitive gameplay is possible in the end of a level when only a few colors are left and you just start popping the same balls all over again. The measure to counter that is that you won’t get any points for bubbles you placed yourself on the board. Freshly pushed bubbles will count towards the score, but only the first 7 pushes. Later they won’t bring any score. This should prevent grinding any substantial score in the end of each level. You’ll gain much higher score by efficient game play.