Bouncy Ball Game

Hi folks, I'm trying to create a game where a player has to keep a ball bouncing up and down while having control of a paddle. It's a little like BreakOut apart from the fact that I would like the player to have to play keepy-uppy with the ball and dodge falling objects.

As an example of how the game would start off; the ball will fall at a fairly slow pace of say, 1 (using gravity, but if you can think of a better way then please, let me know =]) and when the player hits the ball with the paddle, it bounces back up. Once again this would still be at a fairly slow pace but goes quite high (around 5 units on the Y).

As the game progresses I would like the gravity to be higher, so about 10 near the end and the force from the bounce to be smaller so the ball doesn't bounce as high so it can come down faster.

I've tried a few different way of doing it and each time something else goes wrong. using the bouncy physics isn't very good for this because it only increases the height of the ball as it bounces and I can see no way to make it the opposite...unless I have missed it somewhere.

Any help is most welcome and it can be written in C# or JS.

Regards,

Cas