Lucy recommends: Ballgame

Hey folks, and welcome to the weekend!

I've got a really fun one for you today: Ballgame. It's a physics platformer where you've gotta get the ball in the hole under par. Easy, right? Ballgame very quickly ramps up the challenge with tricky courses, hazards, and even bullet time, and thanks to its instant retee feature, it's absolutely irresistible to those of us who succumb easily to just one more go-itis*.

Hope you enjoy the demo, more on Ballgame after the jump!

*Not yet a recognized medical term.

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What is it?

Ballgame is a physics platformer where you play as a sentient golf ball. Curve shots, use bullet time, and master your angles to get under par, and find out just why you're a golf ball at all.

Why it caught my eye

When I was a kid, we paid £5 per month for 12 hours of dial-up internet. These days, that's a weekend of screen time (touch grass, etc.), but back then, it felt like a lifetime. 12 hours a month of truly terrible dial-up wasn't exactly conducive for a burgeoning gamer, I count it a major reason I was never able to play things like World of Warcraft, but I did manage to spend a lot of that time playing one thing in particular: mini golf flash games.

Yes, they were one of the few things that I could actually get to load, but they were simple and fun. I enjoyed the methodical approach to perfecting angles and swing power, and the satisfaction of getting under par was unbeatable. Each hole felt like a puzzle to solve, and I was good at it.

Ballgame intrigued me by being a golf game, but it won me over by being much more than that. Not only do angles and swing power really matter, but curving shots and using bullet time at the exact right time do too. Ideas that I had just... worked, and sometimes worked better than I ever could have hoped. Ballgame really rewards skill and encourages experimentation, all the while surrounding its solid mechanics with lively visuals. I came second in my leaderboard in tournament mode, and I'm itching to go back to perfect each hole, it's that good.

After the slow and methodical approach comes the reckless one: the heist. Repeat the same holes, but this time, it doesn't matter how many shots you take, just get to the hole as soon as possible. You might think this would be the easier part of the game, but with hazards aplenty and careless clicks abound comes a fiendish time trial that served as a nice chaser to taking my shots on the course.

I may not be as good at Ballgame as I was at those flash games, but I'm certainly going to be giving it my best try when the full game comes out later this year.

For fans of

Peggle, What The Golf, 00s mini golf flash games

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But enough from me, try it for yourself!

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From the developer

Ballgame appeared on my radar thanks to Next Fest, but it turns out that my old GameSpot colleague Joey Yee now works at its developer, Human Computer! The studio's Co-Founder Alex graciously answered my questions about the game, and he has some great insights on running and maintaining an indie studio. I also added a special one for Joey to find out more about how the transition from working in games media to being in a studio has gone.

LFG: Could you give a little background on Human Computer? What were the studio's origins, and those of the folks who work there?

Alex Schleifer (Creative Director and Co-Founder): We're an indie studio based in San Rafael, CA. My cofounder Eliot and I have worked together across technology and media companies for over 15 years. A few years ago I decided to leave my old career and start making video games. This was a promise I gave my 7-year-old self. Better late than never. I was lucky enough to quickly get some experience and got to work on amazing projects like Blaseball and Call of Duty, but the dream was always to open a studio. That became a reality when Eliot left his fancy job and we started looking at prototypes at what our studio would be about. Games allow us to do all the things we love: art, music, video, gameplay, storytelling. It's really unique as an art form because it's a little bit of everything. And we're both lifelong gamers, so this is really a dream come true.

But making games is also hard, and we saw an opportunity to take what we learned in our careers to find better, more healthy ways to succeed as an indie studio. Smaller teams, shorter cycles, bigger risks, supported by great tools and a team of talented people. So we're hiring accordingly. Our team of around 11 people is really multidisciplinary. People wear different hats, the organization is flat, everyone manages their own workload.

I've managed teams of hundreds of people and know how quickly you go from spending your time making stuff to managing a bureaucracy. It’s not fun and makes you slower and less creative. So we've been working on building our debut game, but also build our studio. That meant focusing on our tools, our processes, how we make decisions, to try to get to a point where there's little to no time spent on the usual office bureaucracy and more time on being creative and making stuff. Because that's what makes a better game, preferably faster and cheaper too.

Where did the idea for Ballgame come from, and what influenced the game's mechanics, design, art, and music?

Alex Schleifer: We had a lot of exciting ideas and prototypes early on, but we knew we wanted to build something around a really great mechanical feel first. We built a prototype originally called Tower of Golf that ran on an iPhone. Shooting this little ball around just felt so good, and early testers responded really well to it.

We're big fans of physics-based games as well as precision platformers like Celeste, so this felt like a good way to test ourselves as a studio. It hit a few key things we cared about: great mechanical feel, easy to pick up, high ceiling for mastery, real physics.

Art, narrative, and sound design developed alongside the mechanics. We used classic synth music by Mort Garson as a reference point, paired with very natural, very real sound effects that make you feel like you're a tiny ball in a strange world.

We always knew we wanted to tell this story inside a bigger universe we're building for all our games: a strange cosmic bureaucracy. That's how we landed on a hotel for lost objects. The art is mixed medium on purpose: detailed pixel art, 3D, video, traditional animation. We don't want to lean on nostalgia, we want to capture what it felt like being a kid playing games. We call it the “Saturday morning” feeling.

From a design perspective, what's been the hardest thing to implement/get right?

Alex Schleifer: It's really hard to make a precision platformer that's also physics-based. Most platformers fake or bake their physics because they need to be predictable. We wanted to play with chaos while making sure players never feel cheated. That's exceptionally hard, but I think we've done a pretty good job. It's deeply satisfying when you get a shot just right.

We also struggle with what every studio struggles with: scope. There are so many ideas like gameplay modes we could build off these mechanics that it's tempting to add ten more. But at its heart, this is a golf game, and we want to get that right first. The upside is we now have a ton of ideas for post-launch content.

Where did the name Dolf come from?

Alex Schleifer: Dolf as a character was one of the first things that got locked in, even before the studio existed. He uses the exact same 16x16 pixel sprite we designed day one, over three years ago, more than a year before we even considered this our debut game. It hasn't changed since.

I thought it was funny for our golf ball to have a real name that was just slightly off, in the same way the whole game is golf but just off. So Dolf was born. At one point, we considered calling the game Dungeon Golf, which would have made the name make more sense, but that's not where we landed. Dolf, both name and design, was a pretty instant creation.

What's the most unexpected thing you've seen someone do in the game so far?

Alex Schleifer: It's a physics playground with a really high skill ceiling, so we always expected people to get weird with it, but some things still blow my mind. One player pushed a level object onto a bounce pad so it would get caught in a loop bouncing up and down, then slingshotted themselves at exactly the right moment to ricochet off it and finish a level in far fewer shots than we ever thought possible.

I've played this game for thousands of hours and never would have come up with that. Even knowing it can be done, I'm not sure I could land that shot myself. Watching someone break past constraints we thought we'd put in place was exhilarating. A real highlight for me.

With so many games releasing on PC each year, what do you think helps Ballgame stand out?

Alex Schleifer: Outside of the really pretty world, visuals, and sound design, I think we're building something that just feels different to play. People compare it to a lot of games we love, from Worms to Sonic to Celeste, which is a great sign.

But I think the thing that really helps it stand out today is that it's fun to watch other people play. Some of the best games do this. You get stressed and exhilarated by proxy, watching someone succeed gloriously or fail miserably. Physics and chaos are just naturally fun to watch, and when someone's truly skilled, you can really appreciate it. Our show floor demos tend to pack an audience, which is a blast to see.

The current games industry is massively in flux right now. Do you think that indies will save the industry in the wake of AAA gaming's struggles?

Alex Schleifer: I hope it doesn't entirely rely on us, it's already hard enough making games. But honestly, I think yes. At least a little.

Most of AAA's struggles come from the fact that gaming is a hit-driven business, and you need to take risks to make new hits. At a certain scale, the economics just don't allow for that kind of risk anymore. So it's a catch 22 where it's too expensive to take risks but you won't succeed if you don't. And this is where indies come in.

Indies are inventing new genres, mechanics, pricing, and monetization models that you'd never risk at AAA budgets. Many of these ideas get validated in indie projects and AAA studios with the right mindset can adopt and learn.

Indies are creating new stories, worlds, and IP that would never get made in a traditional AAA setting, but ironically have a better shot at becoming hits because they're brand new. They're building tomorrow's IP. The next Star Wars, Harry Potter, or Call of Duty is more likely to come out of the indie space than a giant studio. The same way Backrooms became a phenomenon on YouTube before becoming a hit movie I expect some indie IP to make a transition to bigger budgets and larger audiences. That's not always the right path but it's an opportunity for the right project.

Indies are innovating how games get made. It's hard to change course with huge teams and low risk tolerance. When you're small and constrained, you have to find new ways to build what you want to build. A lot of tools and processes are being invented by tiny teams that just need to do things differently to survive showing these larger studios that you can do things differently.

Joey, we worked together at GameSpot. What's the biggest thing you've learned since joining a games studio?

Joey Yee (Content Lead): That game developers are way more capable and skilled than people give them credit for.

Video games are not magic. They don’t just appear out of thin air and onto a Summer Game Fest livestream. Coming from the media side, where you’re usually focused on how a game will resonate with your audience (and therefore how much content you can wring from it), it’s easy to forget that humans were involved in making it.

I guess that’s understandable, since there isn’t enough time to track development on everything that comes out each year, and the media’s job is (mostly) to critique and have opinions on a final product, not the process behind it.

But transitioning to the development side has opened my eyes to exactly how much work is involved, and the sheer level of effort each and every person puts forth. I will never not be impressed by this team’s ability to navigate such complex systems and pull off the Herculean task that is making a video game.

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Thanks so much for reading this week's issue, and thanks so much to the team at Human Computer for taking the time to answer my questions! Next week we'll have an LFG exclusive that I'm so excited for you to check out. Catch you then!