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Development Diary: Balls of Steel

Name:	Martin Schultz
Date Posted:	Mar 27, 2008
Rating:	5.0 out of 5
Public:	YES
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Blog post

In Magnus and my last blogs we were showing a bit of our game Balls of Steel that Thomas, Magnus and I developed in roughly 1.5 months. The game is, except a few sounds, full developed and polished and is currently approaching a bunch of publishers to see if they like it or not.

As I personally always like to see screenshots and images of games during their development phase, I thought I share some photos and screenies of the development phase of Balls of Steel. Maybe you find it interesting/amusing too. :-)

We started the project on a weekend where Thomas, Magnus and I met at Thomas house in sweden. We decided that wanting to create an air-hockey style game like the old skool game Crossfire we all mostly know from our childhood. That was more or less all we knew at the beginning plus we wanted some nice extras in there like pinball walls and stuff.

Here the first hand-drawing of the game board how we wanted to have it:

Magnus did some hand-painting too of the guns we wanted to have in there.

Magnus prototyped the puck in the game in a few minutes in 3DS Max:

The first rendering of the game board - very barebone this time without any textures in the beginning:

Very detailed board with the ball feeder mechanics:

Top down view on the goal post:

Score display, alarm sirene and some (fake) wires:

Board first time with textures:

Game becomin' alive:

Evolution!

We needed also a GUI like main menu, about screen, instructions page etc.:

if I remember right Magnus told once something that some PSD files in Photoshop have more than 170 layers... :-)

The nearly final game menu:

The development IDE (Unity) - main view:

Anyway, that was a short photo and screenshot walkthrough through our 1.5 months time of developing BoS.

Have fun!
Martin :-)

Recent Blog Posts

List:	03/27/08 - Development Diary: Balls of Steel 03/05/08 - New Game Out - Have fun playing! 02/03/08 - Meeting Thomas and Magnus in Copenhagen (and in sweden) 12/10/07 - FGE 20% Christmas Discount 11/03/07 - New Reticle HUD resource / FGE Update 10/09/07 - Flight Game Example - post mortem 06/21/07 - Flight Game Example for TGE(A) - OUT NOW! 06/19/07 - SuperMaze now Freeware!

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Ben Acord (Mar 27, 2008 at 14:16 GMT)

I too enjoy lots of screenshots during design and development. How does Unity tie in with Torque?

Magnus Blikstad (Mar 27, 2008 at 14:21 GMT)

...actually, that photoshop file have about 340 layers... =)

Maxim Lyulyukin (Mar 27, 2008 at 14:34 GMT)

omg, another hit from those guys... hehe.. wil play, will play...

Gary Preston (Mar 27, 2008 at 16:16 GMT)

Looks pretty :)

Since I don't have a Mac, I've never really looked at Unity, although I've heard it mentioned quite often of late.
What is it that drew you to Unity over TGE?

I'm assuming somehow it fit your workflow better allowing you to prototype and get things done quicker, but is there anything specific that Unity did/does better than TGE?

What's the workflow like on the programming side with Unity? From what I've read it sounds plug-in based, did you have to do much coding to get to this point of development, or did you manage to leverage most of the things built in?

Russell Fincher (Mar 27, 2008 at 16:41 GMT)

Wow, looking great guys!

Martin Schultz (Mar 27, 2008 at 18:18 GMT)

Thanks for the comments.

@Ben:
Uhm, not sure what you mean exactly regarding Torque and Unity? Do you mean what the difference is? (sorry, non-native english speaker ;-)

@Gary:
Yes, the production time and the overall workflow plus that Unity can export games directly as webbrowser game. I found out that those are important issues for me and therefore switched. Also very important for me was that it requires no low-level coding (= C++) anymore to get things finished. For me and my very limited time I can spent on game dev this was important to be able to focus on the actual game, not the underlying technology.

You can basically code in C#, (compiled) JavaScript or in Boo. I tend to "program" all of my stuff in Javascript meanwhile because it simply is so easy to produce and as it gets compiled, it has nearly the speed of C#, so far enough for me.

Yes, you can extend the core engine of Unity via plugins because you don't get source code access to Unity as to Torque. For me not a drawback. For Balls of Steel we didn't code any plugin or so. The whole game is coded in pure JavaScript so yes, we were not required to code additional features, all we needed was built in. If you want, I can show you more stuff, send me a mail if you want (ms@decane.net).
Edited on Mar 27, 2008 18:19 GMT

Stephan (viKKing) Bondier (Mar 27, 2008 at 21:52 GMT)

@Ben: Unity and Torque are not tied.
As described by Martin in his reply to Gary, he switched from TGE to Unity for shorter development time (regarding his goals), and yes, Open GL support.

Leroy Frederick (Mar 28, 2008 at 12:59 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

Nice post Martin! I like the 'concept to production' post's, good stuff! :) It's a shame unity doesn't have a windows version, as until TGE is more like TGB, it seems unity is simpler and more flexible in some aspects :(
Edited on Mar 28, 2008 13:01 GMT

Stefan Lundmark (Mar 28, 2008 at 13:20 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

Awesome as usual.

Joshua Dallman (Mar 28, 2008 at 17:51 GMT)

Great write-up and way to get a great looking game done in under 60 days. Keep building your portfolio.

Martin Schultz (Mar 28, 2008 at 19:46 GMT)

Thanks for all the nice comments, guys. :-)

dienasty (Mar 29, 2008 at 00:56 GMT)

it looks sweet! couple questions/comments.

1) do you have a single player version? (A.I) ?

2) you may have legal trouble, if you try to sell it. Due to it being an almost exact copy of crossfire. You may need to do some modifying so that it can be considered a "clone" (inspired by) instead of a copy.

Martin Schultz (Mar 29, 2008 at 18:13 GMT)

@Dienasty:
1) Yes, it's single player only. So you against the AI.

2) Thanks for the hint and yes, there are some differences to Crossfire. When you play it you will immediately see the differences. I hope soon we can publish the link to the playable online version of the game.

Jeramy79 (Mar 31, 2008 at 21:11 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

Looks really good!

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