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!

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?

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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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!

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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Labels: UDK Demo