A pinball game in a browser? It’s the nice little experience that Google offers. If you find that it’s slow, don’t panic: your connection isn’t lagging. This is the game that is hardly nervous.
On the sidelines of the annual Google I/O conference, a small browser game was released by the Mountain View company. Her name ? I/O Pinball. It is a pinball machine that is played on Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Safari or whatever solution you are using. A way for Google to illustrate the power of certain web technologies.
Thus, I/O Pinball mobilizes the Flutter framework, designed by Google, but also the 2D game engine called Flame, which is used to manage animations, physics (in order to make the behavior of the ball consistent according to its trajectory and shocks with the decor) and the detection of collisions – in this case, between the ball and the various elements of the pinball machine.
It was going so slowly that we wondered if our connection was slowing down
A technological demonstration, therefore, in the absence of a realistic pinball simulation. Because for anyone who has ever teased this kind of machine, the ball spins at full speed and the action is nervous. But with I/O Pinball, it might be the slowest pinball we’ve ever played. If it’s to pass the time, it’s successful: we could make ourselves a coffee while the ball comes down.
We are certainly a little bad language, but we could have legitimately expected a much more dynamic title. It is certainly a nice demonstration of what the web offers as resources to offer rich experiences, without having to go through a dedicated application, but a little frustrating. But at least the game is free and is also available on mobile.