I've been making a ton of progress in a relatively short time, it's really motivating and feels closer to the pace of the first couple of months. While there's still a lot of work and polish to do, it feels like the end is in sight now!
First up, I 'finished' the Factory level set, bringing me to 35 levels across 3 worlds so far. I started timing a full playthrough (which I'm expecting will take most people quite a while to build up to), and playing reasonably well it's about 29 mins or so. I've decided on definitely adding another 10 levels with an additional world/mechanic, and hopefully the additional level difficulty will bring that up to 38-40 mins for a full playthrough.
Score overhaul
One thing I had been struggling with was how to go about making the scoring fun. For a game primarily about trying to score-chase, I wanted there to be the ability to have scores much higher than I personally could likely ever achieve, and plenty of room in between a good run and a great run.
My previous implementation of score multipliers, I'd increase the multiplier for picking up a coin with between each paddle hit, and resetting it if you had a paddle hit where you didn't pick up any coins. I was trying to incentivise precision, however this became really complicated when levels started containing the ice brick types, where it took a couple of bounces to get a pickupable coin. So I scrapped it, replaced it with 10 points for a coin, and -1 for a paddle hit, to more subtly try and implement a push/pull. This was fine but led to low scores, and not much of a dynamic between good play and great play.
Ultimately, @Ebs had proposed the seed of the new system ages ago.
In the new system, if you pick up more than one coin between paddle hits, you get a multiplier increase (only one increase per paddle hit at the moment, max ×8), and multiplier resets on death, or in one other instance. To further highlight these and make them more satisfying, I've added score numbers on coin pickup, and a new multiplier graphic near the score. I also just increased the base scores, so the coins can be worth between 50 to 400 points each depending on multiplier.
This approach has worked way better than I thought it would. You can safely ignore it, play how you want, and have a great time, or think really strategically about which sand or ice blocks you need to break first, and the position you'd need to get in to get a straight shot at two coins in one go, AND incentivises using the magnet to curve the ball to collect multiple coins. Perfect. It's also surprisingly tricky in a way that I no longer expect to be able to hold a top score once this is released 
I'm now going to go back and iterate on the previous levels with this mechanic in mind. I also think there should probably be something else that resets your multiplier. Either time without picking up a coin, or number of paddle hits without picking up a coin (but more lenient, like 8 hits or something).
New block types
For the new world, I quickly prototyped and added two new block types:
Spikes
These reset your multiplier, and remove 50 points from your score when you hit them. I actually did these before refactoring the multiplier system, and then found they worked super well with it. I'm considering whether to introduce them earlier in the game actually, or possibly have a 'hard mode' in future which adds a bunch through the early levels. For now I'll probably leave them as is.
I didn't want to make them too punishing, so they have a much smaller hitbox than anything else in the game, a touch smaller than their visual size. A new visual effect highlights the hit, which I'm pretty happy with.
Doors
These open when you hit them, and close after 2 paddle hits. This is the easiest implementation dev wise, as I never need to worry about a door closing on the ball, and handling that complexity. That gives me flashbacks of my moving block experiments, so I'm designing around it! After a little testing, I'm thinking I might count hitting a second door as a hit that will close previously opened doors also. I'll see how the level design process goes.
Next up:
- Re-balance how the player earns extra lives
- Build up 10-15 levels around the new block mechanics
- Prototype cutscenes between levels
- Make future worlds locked until you play them
- Music!
