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Balls of Steel

Name:	Magnus Blikstad
Date Posted:	Mar 12, 2008
Rating:	3.8 out of 5
Public:	YES
Comments:	YES
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Profile Page:	View profile page for Magnus Blikstad

Blog post

Working with Martin and Thomas...
Some of you may have read Martins blog about our little get together just a short month ago. The plan was basically to have something done in roughly two months, well, let's just say we're ahead of schedule!

While using unity have it's annoyances, it does allow you to very rapidly get your game up and running and very rapidly start fleshing out the gameplay (we had the first prototype of the game done within the first 24 hours).

Balls of Steel!
So, what is the game then? The game itself is a pretty simple concept. You have a puck, you have a gun... shoot your gun to move the puck over to the goal. Of course things are never quite that simple, now are they? There's of course an opponent on the other side trying to do the exact same thing!

Without further ado, some screens for you;

menu

Goal!

uh-oh

What's left to do...
Still some bug fixing left before the game is ready, but it's very rapidly approaching being done. We're looking into distribution options at the moment so stay tuned.

Recent Blog Posts

List:	03/12/08 - Balls of Steel 10/16/07 - IGC photos, Band Jam and The Procrastinators. 10/02/07 - When Orcs Attack artist post-mortem 09/05/07 - When Orcs Attack... 04/10/07 - TGB particles, and such... 10/12/06 - Back from Eugene, back to work... 05/03/06 - Website host moved. 02/12/06 - Minions of Mirth load test.

Submit your own resources!

James Laker (BurNinG) (Mar 12, 2008 at 11:20 GMT)

Wow guys... This really looks very cool.

Are you going to have more than one "table" to play on?

Ramen-sama (Mar 12, 2008 at 11:45 GMT)

you are aware of the very cool pinball game with that exact name right? even had a duke nukem pinball machine with him talking an stuff...

Chris \"C2\" Byars (Mar 12, 2008 at 12:02 GMT)

Remember the reallife game Crossfire? This is exactly how it was played, you shot steel ball bearings at "pucks" which slid across the table into the other's goal. It was pretty sweet.

Edited on Mar 12, 2008 12:03 GMT

Martin Schultz (Mar 12, 2008 at 12:06 GMT) Resource Rating: 4

Hehe, yeah, crossfire. Our first "guns" looked like ramps like in crossfire... :-)

Magnus Blikstad (Mar 12, 2008 at 12:46 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

James; the first version will have one board, it's definitely on the "things to do eventually" list to add other boards.

Ramen-sama; yes, we're aware of it... and we decided to simply not quite care... ehm. =)

Chris; heh, yep. The original ideas more or less spawned out of strange memories of crossfire. (at the time neither of us could actually remember the name of the game though, but we ran across it at some later point).
Edited on Mar 12, 2008 13:03 GMT

James Laker (BurNinG) (Mar 12, 2008 at 13:16 GMT)

Sweeet.. The graphics already look pretty solid.

I guess someone has to ask eventually:

Quote:

While using unity have it's annoyances...

Would this have been easier to create in TGEA than in Unity or not?

Magnus Blikstad (Mar 12, 2008 at 13:33 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

Let's put it this way; it would not have been (nearly) done already had it been done in TGEA. (and with TGEA it wouldn't have ran on both windows, osx, and in a web browser... on more or less all graphics cards created in the last 5, or more, years).

TGEA (and most definitely TGE) have it's uses, extremely short development times isn't quite a situation where it shines though. =)

Martin Schultz (Mar 12, 2008 at 13:35 GMT) Resource Rating: 4

@James:
A little story for the answer: While I was driving home from the meeting in Copenhagen with Magnus and Thomas, they already started working on the prototype. Driving back from CPH to Hamburg by car took 4 hours. At home I openend my Macbook, fetched mails and got mail from Thomas and Magnus with the URL where to test the fully functional prototype...

From my point of view (without wanting to hijack Magnus answer): No, way easier in Unity. The annoyances from my perspective is the asset server (AS) that has some flaws. You can't really use SVN with Unity when you work in a team so you need the AS. For example the scenes in Unity are monolithic, so only one can change a time. And no update notification mails. Thomas has setup his SVN server that after each commit all team members get an update notification mail with the last checkin comments. I _really_ miss that in Unity although I heard from some guys that got it working (source is available!). Other than that I encountered for me no other annoyances in working with Unity.

Update: P.S. Found the link: See there the video of the guys that connected their asset server commit logs with a scrolling LED... :-)
Edited on Mar 12, 2008 13:37 GMT

David Blake (Mar 12, 2008 at 13:40 GMT)

Very sweet game, guys!

Russell Fincher (Mar 12, 2008 at 16:49 GMT)

Excellent work, Magnus and team! Looks amazing.

Thomas "Man of Ice" Lund (Mar 12, 2008 at 17:13 GMT)

The physics part alone would not have been possible as fast in TGEA as in Unity. That was one major reason to use Unity as it had physics build in from the start.

Torque has its uses and strengths and Unity same, but different ones. Was fun to try a different engine after so many years of Torque.

I guess we will post a link to the game itself later for everyone to test drive. But there are some things we need to fix first :-) Want it to be "done" without known bugs.

Affectworks (Mar 12, 2008 at 18:58 GMT)

Really cool, guys. Best of luck!

Fredrik S

Phil Carlisle (Mar 12, 2008 at 21:29 GMT)

Nice one guys.
I remember me and my brother playing crossfire, whats next, KOJAK? :)

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