I will be soon soliciting (ie begging) people for playtesting of The Balls! I'm putting the finishing touches for stability (framerate and plugging memory leaks), and I'm testing on my old devices to be sure! Stay tuned!
As one of your recruited victims, that, to be honest, entered into this only half interested, I was TOTALLY IMPRESSED! As the dev himself admitted it is another game in the Fruit Ninja vein (dealing with objects dropping onto the screen with the deadly grenades which must NOT be touched), but still very original! The gameplay consists of tapping various types of balls (only when descending with a blue aura) to destroy them. When a ball is successfully tapped it will be bounced up (thus juggling and keeping it from falling off the screen). The player must NOT tap the grenades and will lose one of their three lives for each ball that slips past them. Where the style point come in is with the ball juggling. Your points are based on how long you keep a ball going before you finally destroy it which means, ideally, you'll want to bump balls back into the air with other balls as that will ensure the ball bumped by the actual ball you tapped will stay on screen longer and net you more points once finally destroyed (assuming it doesn't slip past you). You also appear to score bonus points for each time balls bounce off each other (this indirect interaction has not been seen in any of the Fruit Ninja spin-offs and is a nice touch). So this continues until you finally let too many balls slip past or touch a grenade at which point you'll be shown your final score and told by the coach how pathetic you are. I'm not sure if these are just random insults or actually based on your score with some scale allowing one the possibility to actually gain his respect (but I doubt gaining his respect is possible). Damn cool overall and original enough with different mechanics to make it not feel like yet another Fruit Ninja Clone! 5/5 I only had a few minutes with it so far and played it on my iPod Touch 3G.
I hear good things! As a lurker (and a friend of the devs) I must admit I'm excited to play with their Balls! Err, that may not have sounded exactly right... Still I'm excited to see this game come together!
Wow thank you for the feedback! I can't deny this put a very big grin on my face As for the coach, his quotes are controller by 3 thresholds for the scores. Though that respect idea is pretty interesting....grinding for respect! I'm working on some new screenshots and a new trailer, since the ones at the top of this post are fairly old and the newer version looks a lot more colorful. Stay tuned!
Gameplay Video! Here's a really rough gameplay video of me playing. It's not a polished and shiny trailer since I'm still working on that. I wanted to show what it is like to play the game, and sometimes that's hard to display with a normal trailer. This is me playing "Balls Mode", which is a traditional time based game mode where you try to score as high as you can. So here goes! Oh and ignore my mutant fingers
I see you took my advice with gamecenter. Ps i was also joking about the logo to some guys lol i think ots good but maybe for good publicity you should change it.
So, last night I got to handle The Balls. And I have to say, it was awesome. Life changing, even. In all seriousness, it's a great little game, well polished and highly addictive. I'm seen a few comparisons to Fruit Ninja and while that is probably it's closest point of reference, The Balls really stands apart as it's own unique and thoroughly engaging game. Also, as a left-hander, it's sometimes frustrating playing games which require me to use my iPhone on it's side because my right hand, the one I'm holding it with, covers the speakers. It's nice to play a game where your iDevice is held erect (yes, I couldn't resist putting that one in here as well). More later as a play around further with the game but so far: more fun than you can have with a bag full of real balls.
Awesome! This is getting me all hyped up for sure I'm getting some good feedback and working on tweaks based on that. And also working on the new trailer yay!
I've been trying the game out for a bit now, and it's pretty awesome. The sounds fit the gameplay, and (though it sounds cheesy) it's easy to pick up, but hard to master. Because of the pacing of the game, it's very good for short bursts of gameplay, which is mainly the way I play games on my iPhone. The single con that I have to raise against it is, that the black edges around the balls seem too jagged. EDIT: I just tried pausing and restarting a game, but when counting down for the restart, the text says "Resuming."
Hi, thanks for the feedback! The "resuming" text is a bug I didn't have time to fix, but for sure I'm clobering that one, thanks for the headsup. Yeah the edges are jagged cause I don't do any anti-aliasing and I wanted to have the game run nicely on an iPhone 3G. But I will be making a graphically "beefed" up version for 3GS and iPhone 4 as an update for sure.
