Oui la la mon petit joujou!  Blazin Balls is making substantial progress towards peer review standard now, so it's time to lay out the full description and feature set for the game.

Game description: "Pick your ball's path along the cosmic causeway avoiding the gaps, collecting coins and trying to beat the par time for each level."
Game features:  One or two player local gameplay, with persistent local high-scores
In-depth description:
Blazin' Balls sets you along a dangerous path along the cosmic causeway.  Use your skill and judgement to pick the safest and fastest route, avoiding the gaps in the road.  The various coloured tiles in the road have different effects on your ball - blue will cause your ball to jump, green will speed you up for a short time, red will slow you down*, cyan reverses your controls, and yellow disrupts your view of the road.  Beat the par time and collect coins to earn points, and get an extra life every 25000 points, up to a maximum of 4 lives.
(* Red and green tiles are differently textured to assist colourblind players)
Screenshots:

The main menu.  2 player mode is enabled when a second player presses START on their controller.  You can play with a gold, silver, local and no profile.  The gamertag you play with is what will appear on the high-score table (if you're good enough!).  If you're using an un-signed-in controller, the name will appear as "Player".


Blue tiles force a jump.  The faster you cover the course the more points you get when you finish the level.




The course winds is way through empty space.  It's just you, your ball and the road.  Steer a course so you collect as many coins as possible, boosting your lives every 25000 points.

The yellow squares pose a particular problem - the screen ripples and wiggles!  Can you keep your head and keep on the road?



Red squares dramatically slow you down.  You can use red squares to regain control after hitting green warp squares, or to pick your way through complex sections.

The terrifying and disorientating cyan squares!  These reverse your left and right controls - keep on your toes to keep rolling!

So what's so great about rolling a ball along a road with some holes in it?  Well, during testing we've seen people sit and play for about an hour without wanting a break.  That's the best kind of indication that it's a good game!  20 testing levels are there for the conquering - some short, some long.  The first 5 introduce you to the different tile types and their effects, and then it's on to the really testing stuff.

One of the most amazing things is that we've squeezed all this gameplay in to just over 2 meg.  Yep, 2 meg for a complete 3D game including music, models, and textures.  Blazin Balls will be our first 80 point title, and is designed as a real fast casual game.  It's only taken the equivilent of 3 weeks dev time to get this far, and we have 5 levels left to tweak and some time in playtest and we'll be ready to go.  In the whole of the development cycle so far, we've not had a single crash and that bodes very well for the stability of the game as we move towards release!