BALL LOGIC

Atmospheric marble playground. Relax and lose your marbles for 30 minutes across unique physics puzzles with custom ambient tracks. Enjoy!

---

Game Overview & Controls

• Controls: Use your mouse, touch or track-pad. Left-click to spawn balls.
• Objective: Get any marble to touch the green "win" bar.
• Level Selection: Choose anywhere from Level 1 to 5. Good luck!

---

Background & Inspiration

I went down a serious rabbit hole with this game. The project was born from a fascination with old penny arcades. At one point, I actually tried to build the whole affair in real life as a classic physical "5 win" game. Unfortunately, I failed on both counts with the physical version, I got stuck on the striking mechanism, and the gameplay itself just lacked interest.

I even tried my hand at a Godot 3D version, which was equally uninspiring. However, during that entire process, I stumbled across a unique spawn effect using box2d. That effect became the foundation for Ball Logic. I built upon the suite of love.physics and other physical elements that Love2D offers to really make the game play interesting.

---

The Development Process

I sort of set myself a challenge by creating the title menu first. I set up slots for 5 levels, which gave me a real sense of commitment to finish it. Once I had one level created, it naturally led to the next.

To speed things up, I used AI tools to help code a custom level editor. From there, I manually placed the items around to play-test what worked best. Once I was happy with a layout, I exported the coordinates and saved them to lock in the level design.

---

Aesthetics & Sound Design

In terms of visuals, I had a few influences in mind, but my main philosophy was that ball games don’t need heavy instructions. Like snooker or pinball, you just let the ball do its thing and watch the result. Because of that, I decided to completely remove any UI clutter. I’ve used high-contrast black and vibrant, colourful neon aesthetics in the past and always loved that look.

I wanted the game to feel a bit alien, especially the spawn triangle and the strange winning sequence. I wanted the player to feel immersed.

For the audio, I played around with recording actual marble rolling sounds, but found it way too distracting, so I opted for subtle sound effects instead. The final piece of the puzzle was the music, which was something I was really looking forward to. Over a few evenings, I created custom tracks for each level using Ableton Live Suite to achieve a deep ambient feel.

Note: Audio asset packs will be available soon on itch.io and opengameart.org!

Since I didn’t want to use timers, I used the music to dictate the pacing and mood:

• Level 4: Features an urgent, pulsing track to indicate the need to get the level completed, adding a lot of midway tension.
• Level 5: Releases that tension with a much more relaxed, ambient atmosphere.

---

Known Issues & Debugging

Unfortunately, my grand vision for Level 5 didn't quite pan out perfectly on the web. While the level is totally playable, it features a smooth double loop that works flawlessly on the desktop version, but struggles slightly on the Love.js web build.

Hope you enjoy it!