My name is Oliver Gam and I’m a student of Medicine from Vienna, Austria. I worked on the game as a concept and texture artist. I was involved in the creation of almost all of the enemies, either texturing them (mummy, worm), or concepting them (mummy, bird, bug). I also did the German translation.

Hm, the first thing I did for the game was re-texturing the original “King” model, which a friend of mine had made. That was about two years ago. Some time later I started doing more work for the mod and I became a member of the team.

Well, as a child I started drawing, like practically everyone, but the difference is that I never stopped. I started texturing when I worked on an unreleased mod for Doom 3, out of boredom.

I have to say, the translation. Some parts of the secret stories were really difficult to understand, and much harder to translate than I anticipated. In the end, I’m quite happy with it though.
In texturing, most problems can be solved by trial and error. You just need to know how you want it to look, and you’ll get there eventually. Concepting is mostly about meeting expectations. If you know the purpose of the design and how people want it to look, it’s easy. The hard part is communication I guess- you have to find out what people want. Sometimes this could come quite unexpected- while doing my first job for the mod, I also designed a lance for the king. My first design was quite simple, a balanced lance with two crossed guards. They didn’t like it because it was overdesigned and looked like it had unnecessary details. I then did the most horrendous design possible, an unbalanced lance/club hybrid with a skull and a glowing crystal on it. And it was taken. I’m really glad they replaced it for the commercial release now.

The puzzles and atmosphere. Usually puzzles become boring after you have sold them once, but some of the puzzles in the game really have a replay value because their design is so good. My favourite has to be either the second puzzle in Teotl II or the marble like puzzle with the rails later on in the same map, although I liked the harder version from the Teotl beta more.

Hello, my name is Kevin Cytatzky, I’m an 18 years old student from Germany and a Level Designer for The Ball.

I joined the team at the end of 2008, after playing a very early version of the game and being really excited about making levels for it. I made a couple of small test rooms and sent them to Hourences, and after some further talks with him I was invited to join the team.

Ever since I can remember I have been very enthusiastic about video games, and during 2006 I somehow became really eager to do some levels for Unreal Tournament. I started using the Unreal Editor and never got away from it again.

Nothing in particular caused me difficulties, but in general it can be very challenging sometimes to work with deadlines when you have to reconcile The Ball and school, for example. It was tricky in some cases to find enough time for both things.

I absolutely love how the The Ball got that retro feeling and still offers all the things a modern game needs.

My name is Will, and I wrote all the in-game stories you will get to read in The Ball. I also wrote some of the promotional story material and some sections for the website.

I’ve known Sjoerd since the early days of UT. We met on a deathmatch server, playing one of his maps (DM-Sion). We hit it off and I joined a mapping team he was already a part of at the time. We worked on the popular singleplayer mod Xidia together and maintained a friendship since. I helped The Ball earlier on as a non-team member, helping to clarify some level descriptions and things like that. When the mod won second place in MSUC and Sjoerd declared the project was moving on to UDK (and then retail), I joined as an official member of the team to write all the in-game logs and to articulate the story.

I’m a writer in my private life. I do not remember when I started doing it.

It’s always a challenge when you’re telling someone else’s story. By the time I joined the team officially, The Ball was already released as a mod and had been played by a lot of people. Sjoerd already had his game. He had all these really talented people, but there was really no one to pen the storytelling. I had the general “plot” that encompasses the game already laid out for me. I just had to expand the outline, give it life and all that fun stuff. I enjoyed the writing I did, especially the in-game logs because that was pretty much where I was given the most freedom to “do my thing.” But it’s different writing for someone else. Different still to write for a product. I’d write a 700 word section and Sjoerd would tell me, “this is really great man, but can we have it down to 360 words?” It was a learning experience.

I haven’t actually played it yet! I probably won’t get a chance until it hits the shelves. But I’ve seen a great deal of content; both the videos available to the public and the behind-the-scenes development stuff. I love the look of the game. It’s very distinct. There’s a refreshing atmosphere to it beyond the obligatory Indie gameplay hook, but Sjoerd was always great at that sort of thing so it’s no surprise that the end product is so rich with detail.

My name is Robert Nagy. I have mostly been doing user-interface programming such as the settings menu and hint system, and I implemented save games and achievements. I work part-time as a System Developer for the Swedish Television, with a specialization towards graphics and real-time systems. At the same time I’m also studying for my masters degree in Software Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology. In my spare time I work on “The Ball”.

I joined the team in February 2010. I knew of of the developers and he recommended me to join the team. After a few mails, some face-to-face discussions, and a couple of small programming tasks I was able to join the team for real.

I got into programming during my first year in high school and I had as goal to create a graphics engine for my graduation project. I worked on it during pretty much all my spare time for three years long, and I learned a lot about graphics and programming. My project became a success and because of it I was offered a job right after graduation. I believe it is also thanks to my project that I was given the chance to join “The Ball”.

The settings system. Most of the settings functionality of the UDK is not very well documented and some of the things that we wanted to implement weren’t well support. We would not have been satisfied with limited user configuration, so we wanted a settings system that had all the features one would expect of a high quality game. It took a lot of reading through the UDK code and experimenting to figure out how all the different settings and required functionality could be implemented.

The graphics! The modelling, effects, lighting etc. are great and as a graphics developer at heart it is something that hooked me up right at the beginning when I first saw “The Ball”.

My name is Theodore Wohng, I am the composer and sound designer of the game.

I joint the team in September 2008, the game was still at its initial stage, it has changed a lot since then. Sjoerd and I exchanged some correspondence in regard to the art direction and the overall atmosphere of the game, armed with some screenshots and concept drawings, I set to work.

The most challenging thing was creating the sound of our game, Aztec music that you hear in present day simply would not suit the game; ancient Aztecs did not have a notation system that could be written down, their music was handed down through generations and next to nothing survived after the Spanish conquest. Nowadays their instruments are locked behind museum glass, with more of an archaeological value rather than a musicological one. It was certainly a challenge to do the research with no music to look at and listen to. So I redirected my focus on the symbolic nature of Nahuatl language and the artworks that they produced, trying to imagine what would the painted scenes in the pictographs sound like as if I had a scope looking through time. Then I realised that if I go back far enough in time, there are universalities that all ancient cultures share, as various civilizations have their very own musical interoperations and textures to describe earth and desert, yet they shared some resemblance, same as the cave paintings around the world, so I started studying those musical similarities, they became the building blocks of the music, based upon that I constructed with those elements for our game, the result is quite symbolic and shamanistic, which suited the game’s mysterious atmosphere.

I enjoyed working with the team, although we did not work in the same building, their works are very inspiring in every way. I like the world we created in every detail, as you venture through the game, it almost feels like you have a different measurement of time where clocks tick differently, it is a very unique and instinctive adventure.

Hey, I’m Hongman Leung, 28, from the United States, and have been an animator in the game industry for about 6 years now. I’ve contributed some free time outside of work to help out the team with rigging and animations.

Early January of ‘09, I begged and pleaded to Hourences to see if I could join the team when I saw a posting on BeyondUnreal that he was looking for an animator.

Back in high school, I thought I was going to be a game programmer. I tried teaching myself C, C++, Basic, UnrealScript, etc for a while… but the programmy concepts never stuck with me. So when it was time to choose a college, I said eff it, and went to an art school to pursue the art side of gaming.

Indirectly on the game, I found rigging and animating in Max challenging. When animating in Maya for so long, it’s hard to switch back to Max!

The animations
More seriously, I love the art direction. Just look at the screenshots! The game looks fantabulous.