Two new screenshots for your delight!

Here comes two new screenshots of the area we showed in the last news post.

As have been said before, these areas are part of a redesigned Oztoc I. We are working hard to add new content and to improve many of the old areas, so stay tuned for future updates!

New Oztoc Screenshots and Press Kit!

We have two all new screenshots of Oztoc for you. These show the little train station where you begin your journey by train, and "the village". A big cavern with an abandoned (or is it?) village, surrounded by grain fields. A big unfinished pyramid looms in the distance. That pyramid is the entrance to Oztoc II.


Two more screenshots coming up in about a week, showing these areas from different angles.

We also released a Press Kit. The Press Kit contains three high resolution logos, and a presentation that is meant to introduce the game to the reader in under two minutes. This will allow us to contact magazines and websites, and quickly explain what our game is about. It is basically about making it as easy as possible for the press to talk about us.


Also on our schedule are some wallpapers, a community kit with some images that can be used for forum signatures and such, and we still have a trailer coming up. We decided to push back the trailer a little, so we can get some new footage of for example Cahua II in. The trailer should be out somewhere in February. February in general is going to be a very exciting month for us. We are awaiting the outcome of the MSU Grand Finals, the ModDB MOTY 2009 awards, and soon after those two we will begin pitching the game to distributors.

Best FPS Mod in Phase 4 of MSU

For the fifth time in the competition, The Ball has secured a first place. In this last public round of the contest we have won Best FPS Mod, and also a fourth place Best Art In Mod. We now hold nine top-5 positions, and five first places. On to the grand finals!


We also have half a page large screenshot in the last edition of Game Developer Magazine, as part of their award for Unreal Engine 3. And the largest Swedish gaming magazine, PC Gamer, as given us a page in their January edition, pictured below.

If you come across anything related to our game please tell us! Be it on a website or in a magazine, we would love to find out about it.

Changes were made to our website as well. We moved the news to the front page, and our newsposts are now handled through Blogger, allowing us to post news faster and easier, which in turn will lead to more frequent updates!

A train and voting!

As an early Christmas present, we have released a new screenshot, displaying the Oztoc Mine that is currently being build. The player will travel through these mines using a small train. The Ball is transported in the back on the train, the player takes position in front of it. The ride starts easy, and then picks up the speed. Think Indiana Jones II. Along the way the player will come across a rural village, and a pyramid that never got completed.



The Oztoc Mine has been added to give our Oztoc level a bit more soul and identity. While Hueca, Cahua, and Teotl all have a very specific look and theme, Oztoc has always been a bit generic in looks and feeling. We are hoping to fix that with this addition. We will be revealing more of this new area as it shapes up.

Another thing we are currently working on is the "Tractor Ball". The Ball is able to attach itself to certain objects, and pull those around. Practical example: to gain entrance to a building you use the Tractor Ball and hook it up to big tree trunks blocking the entrance, and slowly pull those away. This feature also allows us to explain how the buildings in the world have been constructed, the Ball being their tool to move these massive blocks and trunks around. For example the under-construction pyramid mentioned above, is added exactly for that reason. We are working on adding extra depth and logic to our world.

Also, we have been nominated for the Fileplanet Best of 2009 Awards - Best Mod. Vote for us if you enjoyed our work!



And ModDB is holding their annual MOTY awards. Give us a vote ModDB as well!

Survey

We are doing a small survey about our puzzles and other areas in the game - We would like to find out which puzzles/areas people like or dislike. We will be using the results of this little survey to improve our game. We will remove areas many people dislike, and replace them with something new and cool.

It is primarily meant for those who have played through the latest Cahua release, but others are also free to join in and give their thoughts!


Take The Survey - Only Three Questions


Also, we update our Facebook page every few days with short explanations of what we are currently working on. A major thing for us right now are "Combat Improvements". We realized that things like the landmines and the electricity we had in the last release work out really well, so we are going to extend that kind of gameplay. More flashy combat, more varied, more spectacular. While we really like our subtle atmosphere and style, it may be too subtle for some. We need a few stronger and more obvious elements here and there to add the necessary variation.

We have given ourselves an internal deadline of December 31 to have the final level largely finished, our brand new train ride section entirely finished, to have half of our planned combat improvements implemented, and get dozens of small new features and tweaks into the game. We will be telling you all about those in the future!

The Ball - Cahua - Final Mod Release!

We have released Cahua! This final mod release features a good set of new features and content. We were on a tight schedule for Cahua. We had only two and a half months to create everything, and we also had to work on the UDK demo in the mean time. So the level is a bit smaller than what you are used to from our previous releases, but it has a new style and new types of gameplay to compensate for that.
This is not the last level of the mod. There will be a commercial release later that contains the actual last level, among other new content and areas. Cahua level I takes you through a big cave near the heart of the volcano and have you fight a number of Tlaloc's. The guardians of Cahua. At the end of this level the player arrives at the "factory", the last level and home to "them". This release is more combat focused than previous releases. There is not that much puzzling.

What's new?

Cahua I - An entire new level set in the depths of the volcano. The second last level!

Tlaloc - A fierce new enemy. The guardian of the factory.

Electricity and Mines - New gameplay. Charge the ball with electricity or attach mines to it.

Survival Changes - A combo system and a brand new awesome level.

And Much More - Ball control improved. New effects. Perfomance improvements. Skippable cutscenes!

You do NOT need any previous The Ball episode to play this. This release includes ALL previous releases too. You only require UT3 with patch 2.1. Also make sure to completely remove any old The Ball install you may have first or it will not work.

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The Ball UDK Demo Released

Over the past few months we have been working on porting The Ball over to Epic Games' Unreal Development Kit. That means a stand alone build of The Ball, running on the very latest version of the Unreal Engine! We'd like to thank Epic Games for the great opportunity! We built a demo that contains two levels. One brand new and awesome survival level with dozens of traps (by Mario Marquardt). And 30 to 45 minutes long singleplay compilation level. It contains parts of Pehua, Oztoc, and Hueca and gives a good presentation of all the features found in our game. The demo is free and does not require a copy of UT3!

Minimum 3GHz single core CPU 1024MB System memory Geforce 6800 or similar 650 MB Diskspace Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7

Recommended Dual Core CPU 2048MB System memory Geforce 8800 or above 650 MB Diskspace Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7

That aside, we are working hard on our submission for the grand finals of the Make Something Unreal Contest. More info on our current state in this thread.




After the grand finals we will continue working on the project, and we will port over the entire mod to the UDK, with an expectant commercial release somewhere in spring 2010. We are still working out some of the details, so everything is still subject to change of course. The bottom line is, we are becoming a game!
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