Postmortem: aBallAnche

Since XNA is no longer a viable option, I am going to talk about the game I developed for XNA: aBallAnche.

The game got completed around 90%

It was a silly little game, I did all the work from art to music.

Music can be found here by the way: https://soundcloud.com/dcproven/puzzle

This is the main screen:

It's based on one of the examples that came with XNA, so it's no that original. You need to drop balls to make groupings of the same color, the original part is that I added physics (Box2D) to it and the balls change in size, there are more colors too. So this means, the balls actually bounce and fall (thus the name, is easy to create an avalanche).

The game is nothing special, was fun to make and is fun to play, your goal is to clear the screen and as you progress in the game, you need to put more balls of the same color together, you start with 2 balls, then 3 and so on, it becomes really difficult to create groups of 4 or 5 balls with the same color when you have some left over balls.

Another thing I added to make things easier, is white balls, they change the color when they hit another ball and make it its own.

I also created adaptive music, since it's my thing anyway, and the different loops get different mixes as the game advances, the more unused balls you have the music is more intense. The sound in soundcloud goes through all the loops in order.

When you advance level, say level 3, you need to put 3 balls together, so the game will highlight when 2 of them are together with a flashing ring:

If you fill the whole container up, game is over and the scores would be kept.

A video of some game play is here, note the game is intended to be played with controller, but my girls were playing Minecraft and I couldn't steal the controller from them, so I used the keyboard, thus the slow movement of the ball:

What went right:

- I learned a lot about XNA, XACT and Box2D

- I learned more about adapting music to video-game.

- I had the pleasure to show my game to my daughters and friends so they can play it

What went wrong:

- XNA is kind of gone

- I didn't finish it up completely, you can spot some bugs in the game play, like gaps too big between balls (physical model and graphic model didn't match up 100%) and some other stuff.

I don't have an installer for it, but if you want to try it at one point and want to figure it out, drop me an email, we'll work it out.

Thanks for reading.