It's really very early doors for Blazin' Balls, but I'm making some insanely fast progress.  Today I've got a lot of work done, with the scoring system, level start countdown, coin collection and nicer heads-up coded and the blocks for the music written.  I've knocked a mixdown together in .WMA format if you want a listen.  I'm really happy with this early sound.  As I've said before I adore the Euro-synth sound a la Kraftwerk, Tangerene Dream and (early) Jean-Michel Jarre.  This trck sounds like a cross between Trans Europe Express and Magnetic Fields Part 1.  Still needs little more work but it's one hell of a start.

But on to the game it's self.  It's a short, sweet kiss-on-the-lips of a game, rather than the 25 years of marriage which Space Pirates became, both in terms of gameplay and code complexity - the main engine is about 400 lines of code.  Peanuts, and it means there's less to go wrong this time, hurrah! 

Some of you old 8-bit freaks may be looking at the screenshots and thinking "hey I recognise that!  It's TrailBlazer!" and indeed it more or less is.  I played a bit of Trailblazer on my trusty Commodore Plus/4 and 64, and I played it again about 9 months ago.  I have to say it didn't play as well as I remember it - the controls were mushy and while the visuals were amazingly smooth for such a wimpy computer, I thought the "true" 3D touch with some nice lighting and particle effects would make for a great casual game.  The basic premise of the game is very very simple.  You control a ball which moves along a causeway made of various coloured blocks.  The blocks have different effects on the ball depending on their colour.  For example green blocks give you a big speed boost while blue blocks bounce you up in the air.  You have to avoid the holes in the causeway and make it to the end of the level, collecting coins on the way.  If you make it to the end before the "par" time you get more bonus points.  You get extra lives for beating score targets, and unlock new ball models for total scores.   Anyway pictures are worth a thousand words, so here are some screenshots, freshly pulled from the dev xbox which has been moved out of the code dungeon for a couple of days in to the living room.


Here's the provisional title screen and menu.  Needless to say this will be replaced very soon with something much more fun.  Nice bit of alpha masking going on though, and yes that's the hyperspace effect from Space Pirates in the background.


You get a 3-second countdown at the start of each level.  So far I have 5 levels in place, but they need adjustment and the "par" time tweaked to get the challenge level just right.  So this is right at the start of the level.  The white/grey blocks have no effect on your ball.

Here we go, hurtling down the road collecting coins and generally bouncing about.  Looks like I had just been boosted in to the air on a blue block to me.  The game is smooth and not so fast that it's nausiating or too disorientating - you can see what's coming, but not always do something about it.  If you fall down a hole you start the level again.  I am not a forgiving master.

The start of the second level.  Just thought I'd give a general view of the game.  The lighting and render engine is absolutely tiny teeny, and adding a bloom post-process covers a multitude of sins.  I'll be adding some background graphics (some kind of skybox I expect, using the renderer I made for Space Pirates).  It looks pretty cool when you fall through a hole because your ball explodes and the sides of the blocks around you get illuminated just nicely.

A touch more action going down here.  Cyan blocks reverse your left/right controls.  A real jolly laugh when you're going full pelt and there's an open trench in front of you.  It should take one or two runs through a level to get to know it - at least for the early levels - so getting in to the game is a breeze.

So the list of things to do on the game is already quite short - LIVE profile support and scoreboard, skybox and GXF polish, more levels and the music engine, which I'm going to write tomorrow, and main menu and gameplay instructions and maybe network games.  I recon we'll be at the point of just working on the levels (I want about 50 of them) by the middle of next week.  Lovely job!  Blazin' Balls will cost the princely sum of 80 Microsoft Points.  We'll be doing 2 or 3 more of these small games between now and the end of the summer, and then we'll think about Space Pirates 2 (which, to be honest, is never far from my mind).  It will support up to 4 local players, and I haven't decided about LIVE! game support yet.  It'll only be a matter of passing the Vector3 of the player's ball position to the local session so it shouldn't be too hard, and I've seperated out the player class so that I can just plumb the network in and turn on the taps ;)

To me, games like this were an example of really simple, inventive ideas coming to life.  There's no other game quite like it, and it's stunningly simple - very basic physics and level maps coupled with a simple render engine and scoring system.  The aim is compelling and addictive and the controls so simple that there are only about 8 lines of code for them in the main game loop.  If I can get it finished within (let's say) 3 weeks from today I'll be a very very happy man!