Dec 4th 1-2-3: Work With What You Got - Ball X Pit
Welcome back to the compendium!
For today’s entry I'll be covering a little indie title that came out recently that, until the credits rolled, had consumed all my mental faculties.
So what’s the story behind Ball X Pit?
1: The Story Behind The Story ( 3 minute read )
Ball X Pit is a rather simple game.
It’s a roguelike, brick breaker, townbuilder.
Sounds like a rather peculiar mixture of gameplay right?
Well as odd as that might sound on paper it only takes a glance to see how it all works together, and it works very, very well.
What starts out as a rather typical roguelike experience, quickly becomes this addictive cycle of mixing different ‘special ball’ combinations just to find the most deadly mix to watch all those little bricks… well… break.
Even as I write this there’s this slight flicker of humor in the way the mundanity of what I’m describing contrasts how serious I’m being when I say this game was ‘addicting’.
The longterm blessing being the fact that one can basically see all this game has to offer in about 10 hours or so, and then move on with their life, but this game captures a really particular type of ‘dopamine hit’ if you will.
It’s like learning about gambling, then learning theres a certain amount of ‘random’ that your always up against……
Then learning how you can also play that ‘random’ into your favor, and then you just watch as the numbers grow, and grow.
You learn about ball combinations, then you learn about evolutions…. then you begin combining evolutions, and then….. well I think you get the point.
As you learn to master shooting balls both within your town for those building upgrades and resource stacks, as well as within an actual run; you’ll find yourself in the loop of town upgrading, doing a run through one of the biomes, and learning how you can output even more ridiculous amounts of damage.
And believe me when I say to prepare to hold your screens ass with how many balls are going to be flying around it.
It is truly ludicrous how fast you can get your balls to shoot.
It’s a wild ride that is still standing strong within my mind even being about a month out from finishing my playthrough.
From Inspiration to Realization
The lead developer Kenny Sun was initially inspired back in late 2021 with a mobile game called ‘Punball’ that he had discovered.
He had really liked the overall concept and got the idea to fuse those ideas with a city building system, and some persistent progression to work in between the two sides of this game.
As Kenny had explained with ‘The Escapist’, Ball X Pit was not the result of critical design but rather it was basically “99% happy accident,”.
You see Kenny didn’t really have much planned past the initial idea.
He just got the idea, and went on to make it.
“I don’t think anything really was nailed down when I started,” he says. “I usually design by intuition, constantly playing and adjusting based on feel. Even the characters were designed on the fly, just when ideas came to me.” -Kenny Sun, with The Escapist
The game was slowly put together brick by brick, and when Kenny got an idea he wasn’t afraid to test it out.
Hell there was even a whole pet system that was scrapped that Kenny described as simply “pretty extensive”.
Ultimately Ball X Pit turned out to be this little experience that keeps you right on the precipice of feeling like you’ve truly learned how to play it the ‘best’, and then learning that theres a much more effective way to approach a certain level.
It really is this overarching endless cycle of doing runs to get a big number, to go level your buildings up, so you can go do more runs and get even bigger numbers and so forth.
And this cycle feeds into Kenny Sun’s only real goal of “serving the rhythm of the experience”.
The rhythm of Ball X Pit being “somewhere between mastery and mayhem” as Kenny put it with ‘The Escapist’.
As Kenny got his first ideas for a game he began to put them together, and as he slowly sculpted these ideas into something, the parts that would later become Ball X Pit began to show; and once those parts began to show, he also began to lean into allowing the game to be what it needed to be.
A very interesting approach indeed.
He worked with what pieces he had at every given time, until one day he had all the pieces for Ball X Pit.
A Will to Work With What You’ve Got
I think as creatives it’s very easy to get acclimated to a certain standard for our given arts as consumers, and then use that standard as a reason to not release or ‘put out’ our own works.
It’s easy to look at what we have for ourselves now as artists, and say that it’s not enough or that it’s not good enough.
But that cannot, and should not be a reason to wait on making art.
Nor should it be reason to put yourself into an endless cycle of ‘once I master [insert any art skill] then I’ll be ready’, and i think Kenny Sun’s story here is a pretty prime example of that.
So long as you have your ideas and your creativity, work with what you’ve got.
To create great art you must consume a lot of art, create a lot of art, and throw away a lot of art.
Now go with what you have, grab your ideas and your creativity, and go make some art!
2: Creative Prompts From Us (ex. Write a short story, a poem, a song, or draw a quick illustration of these! Let your imagination run free.)
I. Focus on moving forward with your current ideas, because in working on those you’ll surely find new ideas.
II. We as artists require consistent Output, for there to be any creative Input.
3: Quotes From Kenny Sun
I. “There was a pretty extensive pet system I cut,” Sun admits, “but I don’t think it’ll make a comeback.” The ideas that do make it in tend to serve the rhythm of the experience— the hypnotic feedback loop that keeps players glued to the screen, somewhere between mastery and mayhem and I am not sure which is closer.
II. “Generally, I don’t care about spoiling people on the game,” he says. “For this kind of game, especially, I don’t think there’s anything really worth hiding.” It’s all about discovery, chaos, and the joy of watching systems collide.”
III. “I think there is a bit of a skill curve, but I do think it plateaus pretty quickly. Once you get it, there’s not much you can do to improve your play. So, it is very much a game about pretending that you’re getting better by getting better stats, actually.”
Thank you so much for reading!